Foot Binding Notes For Kids
Argimiro Krishnamoorthy
Foot binding (simplified Chinese: 缠足; traditional Chinese: 纏足; pinyin: chnz), or footbinding, was the Chinese custom of breaking and tightly binding the feet of young girls to change their shape and size. Feet altered by footbinding were known as lotus feet and the shoes made for them were known as lotus shoes. In late imperial China, bound feet were considered a status symbol and a mark of feminine beauty. However, footbinding was a painful practice that limited the mobility of women and resulted in lifelong disabilities.
In the late 19th century, Christian missionaries and Chinese reformers challenged the practice but it was not until the early 20th century that the practice began to die out, following the efforts of anti-footbinding campaigns. Additionally, upper-class and urban women dropped the practice of footbinding sooner than poorer rural women.[4] By 2007, only a small handful of elderly Chinese women whose feet had been bound were still alive.[3]
There are a number of stories about the origin of footbinding before its establishment during the Song dynasty. One of these involves the story of Pan Yunu, a favourite consort of the Southern Qi Emperor Xiao Baojuan. In the story Pan Yunu, renowned for having delicate feet, performed a dance barefoot on a floor decorated with the design of a golden lotus, after which the Emperor, expressing admiration, said that "lotus springs from her every step!" (b b shēng lin 歩歩生蓮), a reference to the Buddhist legend of Padmavati, under whose feet lotus springs forth. This story may have given rise to the terms 'golden lotus' or 'lotus feet' used to describe bound feet; there is no evidence, however, that Consort Pan ever bound her feet.[5]
The general view is that the practice is likely to have originated in the time of the 10th-century Emperor Li Yu of the Southern Tang, just before the Song dynasty.[2] Li Yu created a 1.8-meter-tall (6 ft) golden lotus decorated with precious stones and pearls and asked his concubine Yao Niang (窅娘) to bind her feet in white silk into the shape of the crescent moon and perform a dance on the points of her feet on the lotus.[2] Yao Niang's dance was said to be so graceful that others sought to imitate her.[6] The binding of feet was then replicated by other upper-class women and the practice spread.[7]
Some of the earliest possible references to footbinding appear around 1100, when a couple of poems seemed to allude to the practice.[8][9][10][11] Soon after 1148,[11] in the earliest extant discourse on the practice of footbinding, scholar Zhang Bangji [zh] wrote that a bound foot should be arch shaped and small.[12][13] He observed that "women's footbinding began in recent times; it was not mentioned in any books from previous eras."[11] In the 13th century, scholar Che Ruoshui [zh] wrote the first known criticism of the practice: "Little girls not yet four or five years old, who have done nothing wrong, nevertheless are made to suffer unlimited pain to bind [their feet] small. I do not know what use this is."[11][14][15]
At the end of the Song dynasty men would drink from a special shoe the heel of which contained a small cup. During the Yuan dynasty some would also drink directly from the shoe itself. This practice was called 'toast to the golden lotus' and lasted until the late Qing dynasty.[18]
The first European to mention footbinding was the Italian missionary Odoric of Pordenone in the 14th century, during the Yuan dynasty.[19] However no other foreign visitors to Yuan China mentioned the practice, including Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo (who nevertheless noted the dainty walk of Chinese women, who took very small steps), perhaps an indication that it was not a widespread or extreme practice at that time.[20] The practice was encouraged by Mongol rulers on their Chinese subjects.[7] The practice became increasingly common among the gentry families, later spreading to the general populace, as commoners and theatre actors alike adopted footbinding. By the Ming period the practice was no longer the preserve of the gentry and had instead become considered a status symbol.[21][22][23] As footbinding restricted the movement of a woman, one side effect of its rising popularity was the corresponding decline of the art of women's dance in China, and it became increasingly rare to hear about beauties and courtesans who were also great dancers after the Song era.[24][25]
In the 19th and early 20th century there were dancers with bound feet as well as circus performers who stood on prancing or running horses. Women with bound feet in one village in Yunnan Province formed a regional dance troupe to perform for tourists in the late 20th century, though age has since forced the group to retire.[32] In other areas, women in their 70s and 80s assisted in the rice fields (albeit in a limited capacity) even into the early 21st century.[3]
Opposition to footbinding had been raised by some Chinese writers in the 18th century. In the mid-19th century, many of the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion were men of Hakka background whose women did not bind their feet, and they outlawed footbinding in areas under their control.[33][34] However the rebellion failed and Christian missionaries, who had provided education for girls and actively discouraged what they considered a barbaric practice that had deleterious social effect on women,[35] then played a part in changing elite opinion on footbinding through education, pamphleteering and lobbying of the Qing court,[36][37] placing emphasis on the fact that no other culture in the world practised the custom of footbinding.[38]
Reform-minded Chinese intellectuals began to consider footbinding to be an aspect of their culture that needed to be eliminated.[47] In 1883, Kang Youwei founded the Anti-Footbinding Society near Canton to combat the practice, and anti-footbinding societies appeared across the country, with membership for the movement claimed to reach 300,000.[48][49] The anti-footbinding movement stressed pragmatic and patriotic reasons rather than feminist ones, arguing that abolition of footbinding would lead to better health and more efficient labour. Kang Youwei submitted a petition to the throne commenting on the fact that China had become a joke to foreigners and that "footbinding was the primary object of such ridicule."[50]
Reformers such as Liang Qichao, influenced by Social Darwinism, also argued that it weakened the nation, since enfeebled women supposedly produced weak sons.[51] In his "On Women's Education", Liang Qichao asserts that the root cause of national weakness inevitably lies the lack of education for women. Qichao connected education for women and footbinding: "As long as foot binding remains in practice, women's education can never flourish."[52] Qichao was also disappointed that foreigners had opened the first schools as he thought that the Chinese should be teaching Chinese women.[50] At the turn of the 20th century, early feminists, such as Qiu Jin, called for the end of footbinding.[53][54] In 1906, Zhao Zhiqian wrote in Beijing Women's News to blame women with bound feet for being a national weakness in the eyes of other nations.[55] Many members of anti-footbinding groups pledged to not bind their daughters' feet nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet.[40][56] In 1902, Empress Dowager Cixi issued an anti-footbinding edict, but it was soon rescinded.[citation needed]
In 1912 the new Republic of China government banned footbinding, though the ban was not actively implemented,[57] and leading intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement saw footbinding as a major symbol of China's backwardness.[58] Provincial leaders, such as Yan Xishan in Shanxi, engaged in their own sustained campaign against footbinding with foot inspectors and fines for those who continued the practice,[57] while regional governments of the later Nanjing regime also enforced the ban.[36] The campaign against footbinding was successful in some regions. In one province, a 1929 survey showed that, while only 2.3% of girls born before 1910 had unbound feet, 95% of those born after were not bound.[59] In a region south of Beijing, Dingxian, where over 99% of women once had bound feet, no new cases were found among those born after 1919.[60][61] In Taiwan, the practice was also discouraged by the ruling Japanese from the beginning of Japanese rule, and from 1911 to 1915 it was gradually made illegal.[62] The practice lingered on in some regions in China. In 1928, a census in rural Shanxi found that 18% of women had bound feet,[32] while in some remote rural areas, such as Yunnan Province, it continued to be practised until the 1950s.[63][64] In most parts of China the practice had virtually disappeared by 1949.[59] The practice was also stigmatized in Communist China, and the last vestiges of footbinding were stamped out, with the last new case of footbinding reported in 1957.[65][66] By the 21st century, only a few elderly women in China still had bound feet.[67][68] In 1999, the last shoe factory making lotus shoes, the Zhiqian Shoe Factory in Harbin, closed.[69]
The Hakka people were unusual among Han Chinese in not practising footbinding.[80][81] Most non-Han Chinese people, such as the Manchus, Mongols and Tibetans, did not bind their feet. Some non-Han ethnic groups did. Footbinding was practised by the Hui Muslims in Gansu Province.[82] The Dungan Muslims, descendants of Hui from northwestern China who fled to central Asia, were also practising footbinding up to 1948.[83] In southern China, in Canton (Guangzhou), 19th-century Scottish scholar James Legge noted a mosque that had a placard denouncing footbinding, saying Islam did not allow it since it constituted violating the creation of God.[84]
The process was started before the arch of the foot had a chance to develop fully, usually between the ages of four and nine. Binding usually started during the winter months since the feet were more likely to be numb and the pain would not be as extreme.[85]
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