Foot binding in China: tales from Yunnan women who underwent the practice
Foot binding may seem abhorrent today but the resulting deformity once conveyed privilege and status, say some of the women who experienced the pain firsthand.
Bundled up against the spring chill in a man’s voluminous jacket and knitted woollen hat, Yang Zhaoshi perches on a rattan chair in the courtyard of her family’s ramshackle ancestral home. Hunched and increasingly deaf with her advancing years, she leans forward unsteadily to hear a question that is never easy to ask of a lady.
“I can’t really remember how old I am,” Yang responds slowly. “But I know I was born in the Year of the Ox.”
“Mother will be 100 in a week or two, I think,” says Yang’s ruddy, weather-beaten eldest son, who is a none-too-sprightly 83 himself.
It is not Yang’s longevity that is surprising, however. What makes the nonagenarian unusual is her tiny feet, which measure just over 10cm in length. Yang is one of the few remaining women left in China with bound feet.
Yang’s mother began tightly binding her feet with strips of cloth when she was just six years old, forcibly folding the youngster’s four smallest toes under the soles and deliberately, over time, breaking delicate bones to mould each foot into the shape of a so-called “golden lotus”, revered for centuries as the epitome of feminine beauty, refinement, even sexual attractiveness. Further squeezed and sculpted by hand to create a high arch and a hoof-like appearance, Yang’s shattered feet would set that way, and remain deformed for life.
“It was so painful, but my mother said that if I didn’t do it I would never find a husband, nobody would have me,” says the widowed mother of four, and grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother of more descendants than she can immediately recall.
