The Ties That Bind

The Guardian, Monday March 21, 2005

The last Chinese women with bound feet are now over 80.
Fraser Newham talks to them about their extraordinary lives

am one of the last left, you know," Madame Han tells onlookers. Madame Han is 84 years old, and has tiny bound feet. We are in a shoemaker's in Shanghai and Madame Han waits patiently as the shoe-maker's assistant takes her measurements. "Strange to think it was an erotic thing," the boss Li Wanhong says to me as we watch. "To us, the smell of rotting flesh would be unbearable. But back then men wrote poems about the rich smell."

Li Wanhong is the 45-year-old owner of the last workshop in China producing tiny cloth shoes for elderly women whose feet were bound before the practice finally died out in the 1920s. The youngest of her customers is 80 years old, the oldest 101.

The Guardian, Monday March 21, 2005

Li's staff of five work from a front room in an apartment in a residential area of Shanghai's Pudong district, sitting among piles of boxes ready to ship. Mainly, the workshop produces handmade slippers in adult sizes - but these former employees of the state-owned Shanghai shoemaking factory are also accidental heirs of a 1,000-year-old tradition. "We don't really aim to make money from the miniature shoes," Li says. "But somebody has to do it."

The origins of footbinding are controversial. Tradition places the birth of the practice in the imperial court of the late 10th century - aristocratic women, the story goes, envied the graceful small feet of a particularly beautiful palace dancer, giving rise to a fad which spread to towns and villages across the country. This was the story mothers passed on to their daughters as they tightened the bandages.

Modern scholars point out however that a small foot featured in the Chinese conception of beauty long before the 10th century. The final process probably evolved from less vicious techniques, as families experimented with ever tighter binds in the quest for the smallest foot in town. And there may still have been an element of royal endorsement; the practice may have been adopted at the imperial court to prevent concubines escaping the harem. The castration of the palace eunuchs certainly demonstrates an acceptance of bodily mutilation to serve imperial ends...........

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1442208,00.html

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