Painful, perhaps, would be an understatement. What it essentially did to the bones of the feet was something like this, thereby making it unusable: Look at the image below and you will get it (I got the image from a forum thread.

The Manchu Emperor Kangxi tried to ban foot binding in 1664 but failed. In the 1800s (19th century), Chinese reformers challenged the practice but it was not until the early 20th century that foot binding began to die out, partly from changing social conditions and partly as a result of anti-foot binding campaigns. Foot-binding resulted in lifelong disabilities for most of its subjects, and some elderly Chinese women still survive today with disabilities related to their bound feet Foot binding became popular as a means of displaying status (women from wealthy families who did not need them to work could afford to have their feet bound) and was correspondingly adopted as a symbol of beauty in Chinese culture. The practice possibly originated among upper-class court dancers during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period in Imperial China (10th or 11th century), but spread in the Song Dynasty and eventually became common among all but the lowest of classes. First let’s talk about the foot binding though, for I don’t want you to have a bad after taste post reading this.įoot binding (also known as “Lotus feet”) is the custom of applying painfully tight binding to the feet of young girls to prevent further growth. I knew of the latter and what a horrible practice it was, and still is, but I had no idea about the former. He was talking of the absolute control of the state and the society on an individual’s life and he gave the example of Chinese hairstyles during the Qing dynasty and the practice of foot binding. I was listening to the lecture by Philip Zelikow, the professor of ‘The Modern World: Global History since 1760’ course and he mentioned something really interesting as well as quite scary.

Story on chinese queue