Suffering for beauty is a concept familiar to most women, who have dyed, plucked or shaved their hair, squeezed their feet into uncomfortable high heels or even surgically enhanced parts of their anatomy. Millions of Chinese women went even further — binding their feet to turn them into the prized “three-inch golden lotuses.” These “golden lotuses” were proof of a foot fetish on a national scale, with hobbled feet acting as another erogenous zone, the most forbidden of them all.
Binding usually began somewhere between the ages of four and seven. Possibly even later if the family was poor and needed their daughter to do work around the house or farm. A bandage, ten feet long and two inches wide was wrapped tightly around the foot, forcing the four small toes under the sole of the foot. This made the feet narrower but at the same time it made the feet shorter because it also forced the big toe and the heel closer together by bowing the arch of the foot. The bandage was tightened each day and the girl was put into progressively smaller and smaller sized shoes.
The entire process usually took about two years at the end of which the feet were essentially dead and utterly useless. Binding the feet was the easy part, being bent so out of shape the feet required lots of core. The feet had to be washed and manicured on a daily basis. If they weren’t manicured properly the toe nails could cut into the instep and infection could set in.
If the bindings were too tight they could cut off circulation which could lead to gangrene and blood poisoning. The feet had to be massaged and given hot and cold compresses to help relieve the pain and help improve circulation. If all this isn’t bad enough, corns would develop on the toes that were bent under and would have to be cut off with a knife. But wait! It gets worse! With the lack of circulation flesh would rot and fall off and sometimes the toes would ooze pus. The pain was said to have been excruciating especially if this process was begun at a later age. The ideal foot would fit into a shoe only three to four inches long. A Chinese saying says, “Every pair of small feet costs a bath (kang) of tears”. It is difficult to imagine the suffering that these women had to endure.
Foot binding began late in the T’ang Dynasty (618-906) and it gradually spread through the upper class during the Song Dynasty (960-1297). During the Ming period (1368-1644) and the Ching Dynasty (1644-1911) the custom of foot binding spread through the overwhelming majority of the Chinese population until it was finally outlawed in the 1911 Revolution of Sun Yat-Sen. In fact, the only peoples to avoid this custom were the Manchu conquerors, The Hakka Chinese migrant groups in south China and the mean people, the lowest class of people in China who were below the social norms. The practice of foot binding lasted for approximately one thousand years. During this time, approximately one billion women had their feet bound.
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Filed under: Bizarre | 49 Comments
I’d read about this before but dear sweet mother of Buddha!… It looks painful. I wore 6 inch heels to my cousin’s wedding the other day and considering I never wear heels – it was super painful. I don’t even want to consider what pain these women went through….
P.S. – Really loving the new site JFrater! Consider me a regular reader!
Thanks Zenayda
I also can’t imagine the pain. It shows how strong social mores are though that parents would willingly put their children through that.
I, too, had read about foot-binding… but I had never had a visual. What a horrific experience it must have been for these women.
The images certainly are disturbing – especially the barefoot ones!
i’m from hong kong, china, and my grandmother had bound feet. too bad i never got to see them… my mom said she hated looking at them.
i like the new site too, jfrater! looking forward to other new interesting stuff. (:
and roughly what happened was that the emperor had dancers that danced and walked on tip-toes. he liked it so much, he thought all the other women should have small feet so they’d all walk like that.. having bound feet became a sign of wealth and social power – in other words, if you didn’t have bound feet, it meant that you probably weren’t that wealthy or powerful… it’s common for farmer girls to have unbound feet because they needed to work in the field.
The story about the emperor is a cute cover for the ugly truth: foot binding was merely a technique for keeping women “docile,” subservient, and less likely to stray sexually (which, of course, stems from the belief that women’s bodies belong to men).
The upper classes were more affected because of simple economics. A wealthier family would be more likely to rid themselves of (an otherwise burdensome) daughter to a man who could support a wife who would be unable to perform hard domestic labor. Female children were, and still often are, viewed in terms of their economic value to the family unit.
Thankfully, the misogynistic practice of foot binding died early in the 20th century, but millions of girls and women today in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America are living without some or all of their external genitalia because of the continuing horror of female genital mutilation. Google it, it’s one of the greatest human rights violations of our time.
Wow that is so horrible!! How could they put them through such excruciating pain like that,there feet took the shape of the shoe(Pic 7)…i can hardly walk in high heels myself!!
Yuck…
I guess different societies have different concepts of beauty but I just never understood this one… Even with the shoes on it looks incredibly weird (there is a big “bump” where the ankles should be) and then picture getting into bed to do the nasty and you get an eyeful of broken, twisted, gangrenous, rotting foot. Not pleasant.
Eeek!
I thought I had small feet…
Omg. When I read the part about the toes being cut off, rotting flesh, and pus oozing out…
That’s just awful.
I feel so bad for those poor women..
But these people actually are attracted to broken, pus encrusted feet?
I wonder if they think our standards of what’s beautiful is weird?
Lol.
I gave a detailed speech about this in high school and everyone though I was totally crazy. Loving the new site! I’ve been enraptured for hours.
Ick…
So wrong on so many levels….
My feet wanted to cramp just looking at the photos!
Yeah – mine too. Mind you – I actually quite like the little shoes – but not enough to think it was worth crushing their feet!
this is not the first time i’ve read somethign about foot-binding…but the first with so many pictures!
i believe i read somewhere that an emporer’s daughter was born with deformed feet, and that was how the foot-binding thing got associated with wealth & power. plus, wealthy women didn’t have to walk much. the ideal foot was to be small enough that a man could place his beloved’s entire foot within his mouth.
what facinates me is that the foot was used as an accesory for intercourse.
culturally different…but fascinatingly barbaric.
rtr
p.s. happy JayDay!
I read about the Emperor’s daughter too but I couldn’t find anything that verified it – it seems the origins really are lost in the mists of time.
Im a Singaporean Chinese and dispite being removed from the mainland for 4 generations I still heard rather vivid stories regarding “three-inch golden lotuses” (or in my mother tongue “San Chun Jin Lian”) from my elders.
Now from what I gather, this tradition can be linked to many East Asian Chinese and even Southeast Asian Chinese “mindsets” or attitudes towards classifications of social classes.
For example, some of you have mentioned that “foot-binding thing got associated with wealth & power. plus, wealthy women didn’t have to walk much.” (ringtailroxy) which is true in many cases back when the rich got carried around in sedans, the more carriers your sedan, the richer and more prominant you are.
It is also very true that having tiny, practically non-functional feet would also tell folks that there is no way in hell that the owner will be found in a field thus will never be mistaken for a peasant. This is similar to a traditional perception among some older chinese folk that Proper Gentlemen should always have fair complexion because only labourers and low classed workers will be in the sun long enough to get tanned.
As for the sexual attraction, well, I would venture a guess and say that considering the extreme status consciousness of the average Chinese male of the time, being able to..ahem..lay claim to a “real lady” is some what like scoring a prized trophy of sorts.
Great article Jfrater, just like to say that I came over to this site from listverse and your lists over there re-ignited my interest in History, inspiring me to hit the books once again to take a B.A in History after years of resigning myself to academic oblivion. I want you to know that you made a difference. Thank you.
Thanks for that interesting comment Adrian – it is a definite enhancement to the original article! I am also pleased that you have been re-inspired to study.
wow…im speechless…
thats it…this is the last time im gonna read this article…the images are too disturbing…
I can understand why any woman would prefer dainty feet, but if I had to be carried around all day every day, I’d probably feel quite useless to be honest!
I don’t even like looking at my own feet. Those pictures are genuinely disturbing, how anyone can associate it with beauty is beyond me. But I suppose like someone else commented, maybe they’d find our concepts of beauty strange.
Wow, that process most be really painful. this reminds me something i saw, i think in africa, where the womens put rings around their neck to make them larger.
they keep adding rings until their necks get really long and the muscles of the neck get weak and cannot suport the weight of the head, so they always hace to wear the rings. Sad i think.
Wow, Jamie, I’ve read about bound feet, but I’ve never before seen such pictures! First of all, it boggles my mind how much women will suffer to be perceived as beautiful. And second, how could any man find the outcome of this process anything other than repugnant? The shoes are cute on their own, but when worn, they give the effect of very thick, unattractive ankles. Do you know if very many children died as a result of foot binding, from gangrene or other infections? It would seem it would be inevitable. I am so relieved that someone in power finally put a stop to this. It is just horrible, in every way.
oh yeah small deformed feet? that certainly turns ME on. ugh.
it’s amazing how each group of people perceives beauty. when i read about things like foot binding, i automatically think, “yuck, mutilation, yuck.” i have the same reaction towards ear piercing (with babies) and circumcision. i suppose beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.
Ugh I HATE it when people pierce their infants ears. You should have a say in whether holes are punched in your body.
yeah! same here! little 3 moth olds with pierced ears. just awfull..
It seems like they didn’t even consider how ugly the feet were outside of the shoe… And how the heck are dead feet considered an erogenous zone? :/…?
It’s also interesting to note that binding the foot this way caused the women to walk with a shuffle that was considred very erotic to men.
I’m Chinese Canadian so I have a bit of popular chinese knowledge… as with any other culture the Chinese had many “status symbols.” Another that comes to mind is that rich women would grow their fingernails very long (several inches) and cover it with a bejewelled, enamelled metal hook. If anyone has ever seen those dragon/skull finger covers that metalheads wear, it’s similar to that I believe.
Of course the idea behind it is “I’m so rich I don’t have to be practical.” Hell, long nails being a sign of “I don’t do work” is prevalent even today. It’s nice to see no one being totally western-ethnocentric in the comments quite yet, one only has to look at the 14-inch-waist tightlacing corset obsession in europe/north america within the last 100 years to know that stupid vain barbaric trends happen everywhere.
I agree with miss w, mutilation is never a good idea in retrospect!
They pretty much made their feet into hooves.
Here’s one up for the men with foot fetishes! lol
ouch!
oohhhh my god!!! after reading this i want to wear socks for the rest of my life!!!! my feet are like…in PAIN right now just from reading that! poor women…crazy crazy woman. must not have had a low pain tolerance
from what i undestand they didnt really have a choice in the matter.. and they were brought up that way.. so they thought its was normal. personally i think its awfull
No one brings the creepiness like the Chinese….
u need to stop being mean and realize the importance of this and thank God
this is just gross i don’t even kno why they would do this to people i bet it hurts and i am glad that i wasn’t or any of my family and friends were born at the time of foot binding if i saw people with their feet like that i would probably puke, and run just hearing about them makes me feel sorry for them and make me realize that they gone way through more then what i’ve been through
Hi jfrater
I like this blog a lot and the articles are really interesting.
But I think you should give credit to your sources. I found part of the text above on another page (including typing errors), when I was researching more informations about food binding. I think it’s way better style to link the sources.
Apart from that: keep up with the good work!
Nicole
the woman was supposed to keep her feet hidden from men.. she wore special shoes to bed.
give me a low class, farmer girl anyday!
so sad.
this is gross
im doing a research project on it and this website is very helpful
I also read in many articles that the foot binding was suppose to cause the inner leg muscles and up ( vaginal muscles) to become very strong (overcompensating for the lack now of prominant foot muscles and bones) making for a “tight” – well…hooter, if you get my drift. If your foot was not bound, men would think you were “loose,” in turn leaving an unbound foot of a woman, less of a chance to marry if any chance at all. Those poor women, damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Soooooo sad.
I just cannot imagine sending your own daughter trough that kind of pain. rCusom or not, its just hard to believe…
I’m a man and I am appalled by these photos. Women in 6 inch heels is one thing, they do that by choice. These women over 1 billion of them had none.
I’ve always heard of foot binding as bad, but these pictures are so horrific. I couldn’t imagine dating anyone with feet like that. How could chinese men find that attractive? I do not find weak women attractive and this is certianly what foot binding made them. It is little better than amputation or worse.
This is pretty sexy actually.
the idea of these hoes being rammed into tight shoes is giving me a hard on even now.
why not let them have small feet if they want to?
to many western women look like elephants with there fat asses and huge catermeran feet.
these chines gals are a bigger turn on than any obese white woman ever coult be.
Know what’s really hot??
Good grammar and proper spelling!
this stuff is so discusting. i read a book about the chinese in this era and how they had to do this and like.. it said that when the girl had to do it, wen she first started it (she started at an older age than 4 to 7.) she said it was extremely painful and she cried all the time for hours. and also she said she cud feel her toe break.. and then another.. and another, till all were broken. and the pain nvr stopped. even wen she was not walking on them the pain never stopped..
it is just discusting. it is so demeaning to women i think men never had to go through this pain so they had no idea what it felt like yet they made women go through it .. idk i know it was their culture but it amazes me that someone wud really go to these great lengths to make women “perfect” or what ever.
Thank you for you post, lots of useful information.
that is so disgusting men really have it easy back then jeez that is not attracted