Freakiness
Feet binding was a custom practiced on females for approximately one thousand years in China, beginning in the 10th century and ending in the early 20th century. In Chinese foot binding, young girls’ feet, usually at age 6 but often earlier, were wrapped in tight bandages so that they could not grow and develop normally; they would, instead, break and become highly deformed, not growing past 4-6 inches.
Such a painful and crippling tradition could not be completely due the popularity and fashion it had at the time. There were many reasons mothers made the decision to bind their daughters’ feet. Men in China in that era would not marry a woman who did not have bound feet. The man’s mother was always responsible for making sure the woman he was to marry did not have “clown feet”.
In the mid-1600s the Manchus took over the Yuan dynasty to create the Qing Empire. The Manchus were strongly against foot binding. The Qing Empire began to charge people for having daughters with bound feet and prohibiting it in areas they could control. The practiced nevertheless continued. It had become so much part of the Chinese culture and famiy traditions, that the government could not stop it. The Chinese continued to see foot binding as a beautiful act although it was illegal.
The nationalist revolution sparked the flame that was to destroy foot binding for good. The practice slowed down considerably from there. In 1911 after the revolution of Sun Yat-Sen, foot binding officially ended aside from a handful of women living in the countryside.
I wonder how clownish my 10++ inches feet would have been considered for a 1000 years in China.
[Source]
(59)
jameed
March 23, 2007 @ 4:51 pm
Did you know that the number one cause of death in China among females aged 6-24 was ingrown toenails?
Hal
March 23, 2007 @ 6:24 pm
Wleeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
omar
March 23, 2007 @ 6:41 pm
I remember a while ago, I complained to Amino that I’m going to have nightmares about girls with bound feet! Man it’s super scary! I knew about it last year, and I still think it’s scary as HELL!
What’s interesting, is that when you look at those super high stilettos, where they leave the feet extremely bent and they’d be positioning the foot in a somehow similar manner to binding, with the toes being closer to the bottom of the back of the heel.
freaky 3anjadd…
Tcherryn
March 23, 2007 @ 8:03 pm
That is carzy and are you serious about the ingrowing toenail i used to, think i suffer
from my small ingrowing nail, it kills outch.
which now i am free off
Muhammad Arrabi
March 23, 2007 @ 9:02 pm
This habit is scary and crazy. But I still want to know more.
If people kept doing it for 1000 years, there must have been a very compelling reason.
Just like the habit of pulling hair - women endure a lot of pain doing it, mainly because they do look better at the end.
Did the feet really look better (on average) due to binding? Are the horrific images shown in that article the worst they could find?
I can imagine that bare bound feet look ugly, but clothed, they might just ‘fit’ with the whole petite asian style they were trying to keep.
People’s traditions don’t come from vacuum. Understanding the reasons, even when they’re wrong, is always very interesting.
Firas
March 23, 2007 @ 9:35 pm
Wow, it’s the first time I ever hear about this. What the….
I’ve just finished reading the Wikipedia entry about this thing. Why would they leave them crippled?
Anyways, the Wikipedia article says that it was rather a status symbol, and that men usually didn’t see the women feet, and it was desired by few men, so I guess Chinese men were not only responsible of this madness for over 1000 years. It was the parents doing it to their daughters trying to impress the emperor or something (must have been some twisted perv).
Though I’m confused, how did they manage to do stuff (you know, cultivation, building homes,raising the kids) while having half of their population crippled?
Foot locker? What a poor choice for a name
Shy
March 24, 2007 @ 12:26 am
I saw the actual size of these shoes in a museum, freakishly small
Rebecca
March 24, 2007 @ 9:40 am
I was reading an article on this last week and for the first time I heard that it wasn’t the bandages that broke the women’s feet and made them small– they actually would break their daughter’s bones by hand, then bind them so that they would heal incorrectly. Once they healed, they would break them again to make them even smaller and smaller!
laura
March 29, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
I saw a couple of pairs of such ’shoes’ when I was in China last year. They were smaller than I pictured that they would be. I remember seeing a documentary on foot binding several years. They showed an x-ray of one woman’s bound feet. Truly disturbing.
lucrecia
April 26, 2007 @ 10:45 pm
what!
zac efron is so hot
April 26, 2007 @ 10:46 pm
wow that’s disgusting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!