Relics of the Qing Dynasty: Bound feet

The New York Times talks about living relics of a past age: Two elderly Chinese women whose feet were bound when they were children.

AT ages 84 and 83, Wang Zaiban and Wu Xiuzhen are old women, and their feet are historical artifacts. They are among the dwindling number of women in China from the era when bound feet were considered a prerequisite for landing a husband.

No available man, custom held, could resist the picture of vulnerability presented by a young girl tottering atop tiny, pointed feet. But Mrs. Wang and Mrs. Wu have tottered past vulnerability. They have outlived their husbands and also outlived civil war, mass starvation and the disastrous ideological experiments by Mao that almost killed China itself.

I saw an old woman with bound feet during one of my visits to Western China in the 1990s, and a friend in Taiwan, who was an ethnic Chinese immigrant from Burma, had a nonagenarian grandmother who also had bound feet. I believe that the practice was quite common in Qing times, but was slow to die out in the early Republican era. The New York Times article describes Wang's and Wu's recollection of the Communists forcibly ending the practice in areas that they occupied in what would have been the 1920s or 1930s.