On my drive to work today, I was listening to NPR (as I do) and they had a surprisingly long piece on footbinding and China's last surviving footbound women.

Fascinating stuff (if old ladies talking about how easy it is to break your own bones as a child can be called that).

Footbinding was first banned in 1912, but some continued binding their feet in secret. Some of the last survivors of this barbaric practice are still living in Liuyicun, a village in Southern China's Yunnan province.

Wang Lifen was just 7 years old when her mother started binding her feet: breaking her toes and binding them underneath the sole of the foot with bandages. After her mother died, Wang carried on, breaking the arch of her own foot to force her toes and heel ever closer.

Zhou Guizhen, 86, says she regrets binding her feet. "But at the time, if you didn't bind your feet, no one would marry you," she says.

There are photographs at the link, as well as a brief history of the subject.

It was a custom that started in the mid-900s and lasted until it was outlawed in 1912 (and a few illegal holdovers after that, like Wang Tai-tai and Zhou Tai-tai above).

It was considered kinda sexy, you know. At least as long as the ladies kept the shoes (and bandages) on their feet. Apparently, since the bandages were ten feet long each, they only cleaned them every two weeks or so. I can imagine the feet themselves were kind of... well, best kept in cute little shoes.

Because they looked like this, otherwise.

Wikipedia also offers this tidbit -- apparently, the practice wasn't unremarked throughout the nearly 1,000 years it went on.

The earliest recorded opponent to footbinding was a writer from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) called Ch'e Jo-shui. The Manchus who conquered China in the 17th century tried without success to abolish the practice. Manchu women were forbidden from binding their feet or the feet of their daughters. Instead they wore 'flower bowl' shoes which gave the illusion of tiny feet.