For 1,000 years, a tradition based on the fetish of a 10th-century emperor condemned many Chinese women to a life of pain and impaired mobility. Miriam Donohue, Asia Correspondent, talks to some elderly victims of foot-binding
Yuan Xiufen hobbles across her grey, spartan room in the Yi He old people's home in Beijing. Pain is etched on the 93-year-old great grandmother's wizened face as she shuffles from the armchair to the bed. With the help of two nurses, she tries to balance her bulky frame on a pair of cruelly deformed, diminutive feet.
For almost nine decades, "Granny" Yuan, as she is affectionately known, has waddled and limped. Her feet stopped growing when she was five, after being bound in accordance with an ancient feudal Chinese custom. Today they are clad in childlike, blue felt booties.
Granny Yuan has never been without pain since the morning, 88 years ago, when her mother started to wrap her small feet using long strips of rough cotton. "I was playing outside when she called me indoors and told me it was time to have my feet bound. I will never forget the pain on that first day. It was terrible," she says. Playtime was never to be the same again for Granny Yuan.
Wearing oversized men's padded trousers and a woollen cardigan over a blue Mao-style tunic, Granny Yuan's weather-beaten face breaks into a smile. She cackles as she recalls releasing her feet defiantly from their barbaric wrappings. Pushing strands of iron-grey hair behind her ears, she shouts loudly, a symptom of her near-deafness: "In bed at night, I would open the binds on my feet. I would try and wrap them up again in the morning so no one would notice. But my mother discovered what I was doing and she sowed the binds on to prevent it happening again."
Sometimes the pain was so intense that Granny Yuan would put her feet on the cold, stone bed surround for relief. "That used to help a little. But only a little," she said, as her mind rolled back to the early years of the last century to recall the harrowing experience.
Granny Yuan was not alone. Hundreds of millions of women across China had to bear excruciating pain in order to conform to the custom of foot-binding, a practice that lasted almost 1,000 years from the 10th century until the early 1900s. Isolated cases of foot-binding were reported until as late as 1949 when Mao Zedong enforced the 1911 law banning it.
Foot-binding was the act of wrapping a young girl's feet so as to bend the toes under the soles, breaking the bones and forcing the back and front of the underneath of the foot together. Its purpose was to produce a tiny foot, the "golden lotus", which was three inches long and thought to be lovely and alluring.
The golden lotus originated during the Southern Tang dynasty in around 920AD when the emperor, Li Yu, ordered his favourite concubine, Fragrant Girl, to bind her feet with silk bands and dance on a golden lotus platform encrusted with pearls and gems. Thereafter, women inside and outside the court began taking up strips of cloth and binding their feet, thinking them beautiful and distinguished, dainty and elegant.
It was not until the Q'ing Dynasty (1644-1911) that foot-binding became universal across China and the foot became regarded as the most private part of the body and for a husband's eyes only. During this era, binding a child's foot was regarded as a natural thing to do. A child with unbound feet was considered an outcast.
The bound foot came to represent the pinnacle of sexual gratification, and took on the allure of a sexual organ in its own right. The perfect foot was shaped like a tiny triangle with a high arch wedged into delicate, colourful shoes.
Over the centuries, the practice came to be supported by most women, who believed that it promoted health and fertility. The reality was that bound feet had no such benefits, were crippling, and resulted in complications such as ulceration, paralysis and gangrene. Some historians estimate that 10 per cent of girls did not even survive the "treatment".
For Chinese men, these golden lotuses had both an aesthetic and sexual appeal. Bound feet were associated with higher-status love and sex. They became a sexual fetish and were said to be conducive to better intercourse. Men who loved bound feet were known as "lotus lovers".
Granny Yuan achieved the so-called perfect foot. The process was excruciatingly painful. "My mother first massaged my feet to make them softer. She would then fold all my toes except my big toe back towards the sole of my feet," she explains. The big toe was left to form the lotus point.
The cotton bindings were used to wrap the four small toes, forcing the top of the foot to arch upwards. Granny Yuan was lucky that she did not suffer bleeding or infection. But she knew of cases where wrapped feet would ooze blood. Toes would fall off. Some of her friend's rotting feet stank.
When we visit, Granny Yuan allows a nurse to take off a sock to show us the result of the foot-binding. It's quite shocking to see. Her big toe forms an ugly point, while her four other toes are bent back and blended underneath into the back of her foot. Her heel is a clumsy, bulky stump. Many decades after binding, her skin still looks raw and chapped.
"The first two years were the most painful," she says. "All my toes, except my big toe, were broken and wrapped under my foot." After that it became more bearable and, when she was 10, Granny Yuan wrapped her feet herself. She stopped wrapping them when she was 12 and the process was complete.
Today in China, there are still thousands of foot-binding survivors. Elderly women bearing the marks of this near-barbaric practice can be found in Beijing's courtyard dwellings and in villages all over the country. Many are reluctant to talk about the vanished phenomenon. In 1995 film-maker Yang Yeuqing had great difficulty making a film about foot-binding as no one in China was keen to talk about it. She feared the Chinese authorities would attempt to block the project.
Chinese movies about pre-1911 China never depict women with bound feet and Chinese museums do not display the exquisitely embroidered three-inch-long shoes that women with bound feet were obliged to wear.
Of the 40 female patients here in the Yi He Old People's Home in Beijing, four bear the marks of bound feet. One is 107-year-old Han Jiao Shi from Chongwen District, the oldest resident here. She lies on her bed with her tiny white-slippered feet showing under the covers. She is too ill to talk.
Across the city in the north of Beijing, 85-year-old grandmother Zhaoxu Shi is resting in the courtyard home she shares with her son and daughter-in-law. Zhaoxu fell and broke her hip two years ago and has been virtually immobile ever since. She blames the foot-binding for the fall.
Zhaoxu came from a small village in Hueng County in Shandong Province. Her mother wrapped her feet every day with long strips of cloth approximately one metre long and 10 centimetres wide. "The cloth was tied tighter and tighter each day," she says. "Eventually, my bones fractured. Sometimes I would unwrap them secretly, but my mother would find out and would hit me. My biggest regret is that I was never able to run or walk quickly from the time my mother bound my feet when I was six. I always regretted that I could not race around in carefree fashion like my two brothers."
The smaller the foot, the more attractive Chinese women were to men. Zhaoxu recalls competition between girls in her village to see who had the smallest feet. She did well, as she married one of the most sought-after young men in her area when she was 17.
This ancient Chinese custom has caused severe lifelong disability for the many thousands of elderly women still alive in today's China. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health three years ago examined a sample of 193 women in Beijing, 93 aged 80 or older and 100 aged between 70 and 79. It found that 38 per cent of women in the 80s age group and 18 per cent of those in their 70s had bound-foot deformities.
The study shows that women in the 80-plus group with bound feet were more likely to have fallen during the previous year than women with normal feet, and were less able to rise from a chair without assistance. The study also found that women with deformed feet were far less able to squat, an ability that is particularly important to toileting and other daily activities in China.
Both Granny Yuan and Zhaoxu are happy that Chinese women today do not have to endure the torture of foot-binding. But they are not bitter about their experiences. "It was tough and painful, but we knew no better," says Zhaoxu.
According to Li Yinhe of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the ending of the practice of foot-binding represented in a small way the beginning of the liberation of Chinese women. Half a century ago, 90 per cent of Chinese women were illiterate, while today 99 per cent of Chinese girls are enrolled in school. No longer restricted by bound feet, Chinese women have stepped into the new century with self-confidence and independence. They are striding ahead at a faster rate than ever before, she says.
One clear sign that China is putting this custom well and truly behind it was the closure last year of the last known manufacturer of shoes for bound feet. The factory in Henan Province stopped production (except for special orders) because the victims of foot-binding were dying.
The imprint of foot-binding on Chinese society is finally fading but, unfortunately, change has come a century too late for thousands of elderly women like Granny Yuan and Zhaoxu.