I just finished ready a really good book about an elite chinese girl and her life before an after she dies based on chinese culture during the 1600's. It talks about her life and her "life" after her death. One thing that fascinates me in all these stories of chinese women is the process of foot binding. I wondered what it actually looked like. It was considered socially, aesthetically and erotically desirable. It usually began at age five. The desired outcome was feet that were no longer than 3-4 inches long on a full grown woman. They would take the toes and turn them under the foot and bind them thus breaking them.
The age when little girls started having their feet bound was between 5 and 7, when her prepubescent bones were still flexible. Chinese women described the experience as ‘burning, throbbing feet swallowing the body in fire–from severe traumas that created months, even years. of oozing sores, bandages stiff with dried pus adn blood, and sloughed-off gobs of flesh.’ They lost their appetites and sleep, running away , hiding, attempting to loosen their bandages, and enduring beatings while trying to comply with their mother’s demands. The bones broke and toes grew painfully inward, and the extended periods during which the feet were basically an open wound caused a high stink. By the age of 14 or so, when the body had more or less finished growing, the severe bouts with pain would subside and a girl could start bandaging her feet on her own without help from her mother. From then on she could concentrate on maintaining and refining the shape of her feet.
Interestingly, in traditional Chinese culture, two types of women had natural-sized feet: uncivilized, clumsy, and crude women, and extraordinarily powerful women, like legendary female warriors, goddesses, and Guan Yin, the Buddhist redeemer of humanity (from Answers.com)
The pictures below are not for the faint of heart.
1 comment:
That's really horrible. Surprisingly, I've never seen this before. Cyn
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