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Dorothy Ko - Cinderella's Sisters - A Revisionist History of Footbinding-University of California Press (2005)

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B O O K

The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint

honors special books
in commemoration of a man whose work
at the University of California Press from 1954 to 1979
was marked by dedication to young authors
and to high standards in the ﬁeld of Asian Studies.
Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together
endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables the Press
to publish under this imprint selected books
in a way that reﬂects the taste and judgment
of a great and beloved editor.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this

book provided by the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment
Fund of the University of California Press Foundation,
which is supported by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

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C I N D E R E L L A’ S S I S T E R S
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

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C I N D E R E L L A’ S
SISTERS
a revisionist history of footbinding
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

DOROTHY KO

university of california press

berkeley
los angeles
london

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University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2005 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ko, Dorothy.
Cinderella’s sisters : a revisionist history
of footbinding / Dorothy Ko.
p. cm.
“Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies imprint”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-520-21884-1 (alk. paper).
1. Footbinding—China. I. Title:
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Revisionist history of footbinding. II. Title.

gt498.f66k55 2005
391.4'13'0951—dc22 2005002626

Manufactured in the United States of America

14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the

minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–
1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
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to susan mann,
who blazes intellectual trails,
opens institutional doors,
and builds emotional shelters
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

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CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS / ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / xi

NOTES ON CONVENTIONS / xv

LIST OF DYNASTIES AND PERIODS / xvii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS / xix

Introduction / 1

PART ONE: THE BODY EXPOSED

1. Gigantic Histories of the Nation in the Globe:
The Rhetoric of Tianzu, 1880s–1910s / 9
2. The Body Inside Out:
The Practice of Fangzu, 1900s–1930s / 38

3. The Bound Foot as Antique:

Connoisseurship in an Age of Disavowal, 1930s–1941 / 69

PART TWO: THE BODY CONCEALED

4. From Ancient Texts to Current Customs:
In Search of Footbinding’s Origins / 1 0 9
5. The Erotics of Place:
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Male Desires and the Imaginary Geography of the Northwest / 145

6. Cinderella’s Dreams:
The Burden and Uses of the Female Body / 187

Epilogue / 227

NOTES / 231

GLOSSARY / 293

WORKS CITED / 301

INDEX / 321

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ILLUSTRATIONS

ILLUSTRATIONS FOLLOW PAGE 138

FIG. 1 These feet are for walking

FIG. 2 Imprint of a bound foot
FIG. 3 The bound foot exposed
FIG. 4 Pedagogy of the truncated foot
FIG. 5 Evolution of wooden soles, 1830s–1930s
FIG. 6 Northern-style Kun shoes, 1920s
FIG. 7 The making of Tianjin-style Kun booties, ca. 1904–11
FIG. 8 Styles of socks in the early twentieth century
FIG. 9 Playing with footwear fashion, ca. 1905–10
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

FIG. 10 The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Guanyin)

FIG. 1 1 Leg-binders and binding cloths from a Ming encyclopedia
FIG. 12 Tomb mural depicting the landowner Zhao and his wife,
resting their feet on footstools
FIG. 13 Feet-washing festival, Tonghai, Yunnan
FIG. 14 A Yunnan woman displaying her layered footwear fashion,
ca. 1919–20
FIG. 15 Early Ming footwear: shoes, socks, and binding cloth
FIG. 16 Flat-soled female shoes for bound feet, thirteenth to sixteenth
centuries
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ILLUSTRATIONS x
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FIG. 17 The curled-toed socks and shoes of Huang Sheng (1227–43)

FIG. 18 Empress Xiaojing’s shoes
FIG. 19 “If the shoes ﬁt, you must acquit”: court scenes from a Shandong
drama
FIG. 20 Patterns for children’s shoes in Precious Mirror of Feminine Virtues
FIG. 2 1 Embroidery designs for booties in Precious Mirror of Feminine
Virtues
FIG. 22 Fashion cycles of Tianjin-style footwear, 1894–1911

MAP The Northwest: Reported sites of feet exhibitions, the Pingsui

Railroad, and Wang Jingqi’s westward journey / 1 4 7
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are no compelling reasons why this book, as incomplete and frag-
mentary as it may still remain, could have taken so long. I can only take
comfort in the fact that the process—like any good adventure—has been
riveting, humbling, and life-changing.
Always the visionary, Hal Kahn was there in the front row during the ﬁrst
public presentation of my revisionist views on footbinding on May 20, 1994.
If he had not tapped me on my shoulder with excitement in his eyes as I
returned to my hot seat, I might not have gone ahead.
I have not been alone. Susan Mann has always been there with me, for
me, and ahead of me with her musings on sentiments and texts. Charlotte
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Furth has thought about the tricky business of knowing the history of bod-
ies from language frontally, backward, and upside down. Suzanne Cahill
brings poetics to the phenomenological bodies of Tang Daoist women; no-
body else I know has pondered gravity with more grace. Judith Zeitlin, in
evoking the ephemeral beauty of haunting and hankerings, brings us closer
to the truth. Bonnie Smith indulges us in fantastic and brilliant obsessions,
the stuª that history is made of. If they had not cleared the path, I would
still be in the bushes.
Footbinding is nowhere but everywhere. Every historian and, in partic-
ular, every anthropologist seems to have a hidden foot buried in her archives
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xii
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or ﬁeld notes. So when word got out that I was interested in the subject,
friends and strangers began to send bundles of materials. They include Ina
Asim, Mary Buck, Michael Chang, Ding Yizhuang, Madeleine Yue Dong,
Mark Elliott, Susan Fernsebner, Joshua Fogel, Po-shek Fu, Joshua Goldstein,
Marta Hansen, Clara Ho Wing-chung, Jackie Armijo-Huessin, Rebecca
Karl, Man-Bun Kwan, Nhi Lieu, Tobie Meyer-Fong, Qian Nanxiu, Evelyn
Rawski, Ruth Rogaski, Matthew Sommer, Reiko Suetsugu, Ann Waltner,
Wang Zheng, Xu Xueqing, Setsuko Yanagida, Judy Yung, and Zhang Enhua.
Chiu-min Lin and Sakamoto Hiroko, fellow-travelers in the history of foot-
binding, generously shared their own publications.
I have had many opportunities to discuss my work with engaged and engag-
ing audiences. I am grateful to my colleagues who invited me to workshops,
conferences, and talks at Yale University; the Institute of Modern History at
the Academia Sinica, National Taiwan University; the American Museum of
Natural History; Washington University, St. Louis; Haverford College; the
University of Pittsburgh; the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; Princeton Uni-
versity; the University of Chicago; the University of Washington; the Univer-
sity of California, Los Angeles; the University of Michigan; the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Uni-
versity of California, Davis; the University of Toronto; Franklin & Marshall
College; the Pembroke Center at Brown University; The China Institute;
Würzburg University; Peking University; Nanjing University; and others.
At each of these occasions I have met colleagues who are generous with
their time and insights. I have also met men and women who were visibly
oªended and distressed by my suggestion that condemnation of footbind-
ing need not be our only response. I was always challenged but never at-
tacked; for the forbearance and indulgence of my audiences I am most thank-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ful. They have pushed me to clarify my arguments and sometimes even

changed my mind. I hope that this book is better because of it. Students
in my seminars at the University of California, San Diego, Rutgers, and
Barnard have taught me a great deal about the body as a concrete but elu-
sive subject of history. Among others, Sean Hoªman, Stephen Sanger, and
Samantha Pinto have changed the way I look at the subject.
Generous fellowships from the President’s O‹ce of the University of Cali-
fornia, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute
for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities allowed me to take sustained time oª during the initial and con-
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
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cluding stages of this project. Executive Dean Richard Foley and Dean Barry
Qualls at Rutgers, as well as Provost Elizabeth Boylan at Barnard, have been
supportive of my work in numerous ways.
Appreciation is due to my respected colleagues and friends Rey Chow,
Hsiung Ping-chen, Benjamin Elman, Susan Naquin, Francesca Bray, and
Louisa Schein for their timely advice and unfailing support. Charlotte Furth
and William Rowe, first and last readers of the complete book manuscript,
have been incisive, honest, and kind. Their responses were invaluable to my
process of revision. I am grateful to Veronica Jerng, Nancy Norton Tomasko,
Zhao Feng, Gao Jianzhong, Régine Thiriez, and Lewis Stein for providing
some of the artwork and artifacts reproduced in this book, and again to Dr.
Thiriez for her expert help in dating photographs. It is also a pleasure to ac-
knowledge Ye Wa, Valerie Steele, Angela Leung, Ellen Widmer, Kang-i Sun
Chang, Hua Wei, Lin Wei-hung, Li Hsiao-t’i, Liu Ching-cheng, Lee Jender,
Hu Siao-chen, Kishimoto Mio, Oki Yasushi, Dieter Kuhn, Du Fangqin, Deng
Xiaonan, Zhang Hongsheng, He Yun’ao, and Xu Yiyi for gifts of inspiring
books and pleasurable company in disparate parts of the world.
My journey into the world of shoes and other objects was guided by the
exquisite tastes and fabulous collections of Dr. Chi-sheng Ko, Mrs. Sonja Bata
of the Bata Shoe Museum, Yang Shaorong, Glenn Roberts, Xie Yanfang,
Don J. Cohn, and Jonathan Hay. During the most productive periods of writ-
ing, I benefited from the research assistance of Lai Ying-yu in Taipei and Mei
Mei in Nanjing. Sheila Levine at the University of California Press has sup-
ported this project from its inception and guided it to the finish line.
Although my mother did not live to see this book, the unconditional sup-
port that she and my father have provided makes all the diªerence. To my
friends Lauren Lazin, Syou-ling Fu, and Cynthia Perry—powerful women
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

all, with a ﬁrm grip on reality—thank you for not letting go.

An abridged version of chapter 3 appeared in Chinese as “Dang’an, chan-

zushi, yuwang: youxi Caifeilu” (The archive; history of footbinding; desires:
playing with Picking Radishes), in Qingyu Ming-Qing, ed. Hsiung Ping-chen
and Yu An-bang (Taipei: Maitian chuban, 2004). An earlier and shorter
version of chapter 4 was published as “The Presence of Antiquity: Ming
Discourses on Footbinding’s Origins,” in Die Gegenwart des Altertums, ed.
Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl (Heidelberg: Edition Forum, 2001).

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NOTES ON CONVENTIONS

1. All ages are given in Chinese rendering, which assumes a person to be one
year old (sui) when born.
2. In China, as elsewhere, units of measurement were not consistent. One Chi-
nese inch (cun), for instance, may vary in length from dynasty to dynasty
or from one region to another during the same period. Diªerent scales could
also coexist in one locale simultaneously. Therefore, linear measurements
referred to in Chinese texts are simply translated without conversion.
Hence, 1 chi (Chinese foot) is rendered 1 foot; 3 cun, 3 inches. The subunit
fen is rendered 0.1 inch. An exception is made for li, which appears in ro-
manized form instead of “mile.” The span designated by one li varies con-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

siderably with time and locale; in 1929 it was standardized to 500 meters.
3. To avoid confusion, the contemporary measurement of, say, a shoe from
the Song dynasty is given ﬁrst in the metric system, followed by conversion
to the American inch in parentheses: 21 cm (8.4 inches).
4. Units of weight measurement are translated without conversion. Hence, 2
liang is rendered 2 ounces. Since there are 10 qian to 1 liang, 3 qian is ren-
dered 0.3 ounces.

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DYNASTIES AND PERIODS

Xia 21c.–16c. bce

Shang 16c.–ca. 1045 bce
Zhou ca. 1045–256 bce
Spring and Autumn period 721–481 bce
Warring States period 403–221 bce
Qin 221–206 bce
Former ( Western) Han 206 bce–8 ce
Later (Eastern) Han 25–220
Three Kingdoms period 220–80
Six Dynasties period 222–589
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Northern and Southern Dynasties period 317–589

Sui 581–618
Tang 618–907
Five Dynasties period 907–60
Northern Song 960–1127
Southern Song 1127–1279
Yuan 1279–1368
Ming 1368–1644
Qing 1644–1911
Republic of China 1912–1949
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ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations are used in the text and the notes:

CFJHL Yao Lingxi, comp. Caifei jinghualu, shang juan. Tianjin:

Tianjin shuju, 1941.
CFL Yao Lingxi, comp. Caifeilu [chubian]. Tianjin: Shidai gongsi,
1934.
CFL II Yao Lingxi, comp. Caifeilu xubian. Tianjin: Shidai gongsi, 1936.
CFL III Yao Lingxi, comp. Caifeilu sanbian. Tianjin: Tianjin shuju,
1936.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

CFL IV Yao Lingxi, comp. Caifeilu sibian. Tianjin: Tianjin shuju, 1938.
CFXB Yao Lingxi, comp. Caifei xinbian. Tianjin: Tianjin shuju, 1941.

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INTRODUCTION

Of footbinding, my colleague Stephen West has this to say, in his charac-

teristic deadpan manner: “It was.” 1 On a subject that has engendered lengthy
treatises, strong emotions, and endless fascination, I wish to emulate Pro-
fessor West’s lack of sentimentality in this book even though his economy
is beyond my reach.
I started with a simple goal: to write a history of footbinding, which has
never been attempted except in derision. All of the erudite books and articles
that bear titles to that eªect, I maintain, are histories of anti-footbinding.
They begin with the premise that footbinding is despicable and generally
end with the same conclusion.2 Many of these works focus on the heroic
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

achievements of the anti-footbinding movement, or they extrapolate from

the anti-footbinding polemics the pitiful ordeal premodern women suªered.
Condemnation seems the goal of writing history.
But “it was.” My premise is that footbinding was an embodied experi-
ence, a reality to a select group of women from the twelfth to twentieth cen-
turies. Instead of denouncing it, I seek to understand the powerful forces
that made binding feet a conventional practice for them. The reality of the
practice lies not only in the screams and tears (“they were”) on a girl’s ﬁrst
day of binding, but also in the assiduous maintenance and care she had to
lavish on her feet every day for the rest of her life.3 I seek to locate the woman’s
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INTRODUCTION 2
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agency and subjectivity not only in the world that the pain destroyed, but
also in the subsequent unfolding and creation of meanings: for each woman,
footbinding was an ongoing process, just as each body was located in a
speciﬁc time and place. Therein lies the possibility of a history.
The thesis of this book is that there is not one footbinding but many. In
the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, each region and often each village
featured its own way of binding, rituals, and shoe styles. Unfortunately we
do not have the data to document the development of this spatial diversity.
We will see, however, that people in successive historical periods from the
twelfth to the nineteenth centuries wrote about footbinding in vastly diªer-
ent ways, even as they remained faithful to a rich repertoire of classical allu-
sions and generic conventions. These textual fractures and developments,
not to mention the myriad ways to name the practice in Chinese, are sug-
gestive of the multiple and contested meanings of footbinding in each
period. Also evident is the extent to which the practice, its rationale, and
its reception changed over time during its almost millennium-long spread
across class and geographical boundaries.
Powerful minds have applied themselves to the explanation of footbind-
ing. Most inﬂuential is perhaps Freud’s psychological-sexual explanation.
Fetishism, Freud wrote in his 1927 essay, involves a man’s projection of his
castration anxieties onto the body of the woman. In searching futilely for
the mother’s penis, the boy invests substitute body parts—the foot, the shoe,
hair—with eroticized meanings. Footbinding is thus a symbol of the cas-
tration of woman.4
Equally notable is the sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s theory of so-called
“conspicuous consumption,” which traces the development of the Amer-
ican leisure class on an evolutionary scheme. The feminine ideal at the stage
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

of conspicuous leisure demanded that women of the leisure class be made

delicate, with “diminutive hands and feet and a slender waist.” As such “she
is useless and expensive, and she is consequently valuable as evidence of pe-
cuniary strength.” The practice of “constricted waist” in Western culture
and “the deformed foot of the Chinese” are salient examples. The appeal of
family wealth, which the wasted woman personiﬁed, was so powerful that
it inverted the aesthetic judgment of men, turning mutilation into beauty.5
More recently, the anthropologists Hill Gates and Laurel Bossen have fur-
nished a third explanation of footbinding, from a Marxist-feminist per-
spective, which I term “mystiﬁcation of female labor.” Having conducted
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INTRODUCTION 3
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extensive fieldwork in Sichuan and Fujian, Gates has developed the argu-
ment that in China’s “petty capitalist” mode of production, a woman made
important but unacknowledged contributions to the household economy.
The binding of feet, which made the women appear wasted, allowed the
patriarchs to mask the value of female labor. Peasant women with bound
feet routinely performed such tasks as spinning and weaving, oyster shuck-
ing, and tea picking, which required strength and skills in her hands but
not her feet. Footbinding lost its raison d’être when factory-based textile
production replaced home-based spinning and weaving.6
Following this line of inquiry that seeks to restore value and visibility to
female domestic labor, Bossen has provided a fascinating account of eco-
nomic change in a remote Yunnan village, where virtually every woman had
bound feet at the turn of the century. “If homemade cloth was no longer
economically competitive, the underlying reason for footbinding disap-
peared.” Hence the practice went into decline around 1925–35, when even
the last form of domestic textile production, specialized weaving, ceased to
be profitable, and women were drafted to perform such heavy labor as porter-
age, mining, road construction, and rice farming. Both Gates and Bossen
have argued that the decision to start and stop binding was made on eco-
nomic calculations alone; Gates has gone as far as to suggest that footbind-
ing in Sichuan was a “cultureless custom.” 7
Less theorized but perhaps most influential is a powerful ethnographic
voice derived from interviews with women with bound feet in the recent
past. Call it the “marrying-up” thesis. One of the earlier voices heard in this
regard is that of Ning Lao-t’ai-t’ai (b. 1867), the daughter of a cake-peddler
in Shandong, who told interviewer Ida Pruitt that “Match-makers were not
asked ‘Is she beautiful?’ but ‘How small are her feet?’ A plain face is given
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

by heaven but poorly bound feet are a sign of laziness.”8 Also couched in
terms of “only servants have big feet,” this explanation is built on the recog-
nition that marriage constituted the best if not the only avenue for female
self-advancement. Bound feet, a ticket to a brighter future for the bride and
her family, translated into “good destiny” or social prestige.
As illuminating as these economic, social, symbolic, and psychological
explanations are, in the end they fall short because they assume that foot-
binding is a uniform and timeless practice motivated by a single cause. But
footbinding is too enduring and widespread to be subsumed under one de-
scriptive or explanatory framework. Fetishism may explain how some Chi-
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INTRODUCTION 4
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nese men—and many modern Western men and women—have lodged their
sexual fantasies in the erotic paintings or small shoes they collect.9 But it
distorts the cosmology wrought of place, things, and flowery words that
structured elite male desires during footbinding’s heyday.
Veblen’s theory of conspicuous leisure, in turn, makes such intuitive sense
that few readers have questioned the validity of placing medieval China in
the same industrial developmental stage as Victorian England or America.
Nonetheless, it has explanatory power for the early history of footbinding,
when small feet remained a privilege reserved for entertainers and wives who
served the same class of elite men. In contrast, the mystification of labor
and marrying-up theses are applicable primarily for the modern period—
after footbinding had undergone a sea change in its social composition—
when the majority of practitioners were peasant women.10
The manufacturing of footbinding as a uniform subject by dismissing
contending points of view as “feudal” is the most enduring legacy of the
modern anti-footbinding movement. The di‹culties involved in writing a
bona fide history of footbinding stem in part from this modern bias: we are
accustomed to viewing footbinding only from an anti-footbinding per-
spective. If my quest for the submerged voices and an alternative history is
to succeed, it can only do so by resisting the totalizing impulse, the over-
simplification, and the moralistic tones that structure our present knowl-
edge of footbinding.
Joan Scott has cautioned that a historian needs “analytic distance” from
her subject, because “a feminist history that takes for granted the inevitabil-
ity of progress, [and] the autonomy of individual agents . . . reproduces
without interrogation the terms of the ideological discourse within which
feminism has operated.” 11 Situating myself outside the anti-footbinding en-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

lightenment discourse, I oªer in this book neither grand theories, compre-

hensive coverage, nor a linear progressive history. Instead, I have cobbled
together a history from partial perspectives, incongruous words, people who
were left out or left behind, and stories that often do not add up.
The working title of this book—“Footbinding Is History”—carries a dou-
ble meaning, each evoking a constellation of emotions. “Footbinding is his-
tory” conveys a sense of relief. The last reported case of girls’ binding came
to a halt in 1957. Although not all women with bound feet are dead, footbind-
ing as a customary practice is; there is no possibility for its revival. To a large
extent this book is written to explain this unequivocal death, which has
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INTRODUCTION 5
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created a space for an academic exercise such as this by aªording an analytic

distance.12 In other words, the ﬁnality frees me from the political imperative
of championing its demise, hence enabling me to approach the subject as
a historical instead of a polemical issue.13
“Footbinding is history,” in turn, speaks to the thrill and trepidation I
have felt in contemplating the possibilities of an alternative history and meth-
ods of writing history. A practice so central to the mechanisms of Chinese
society and gender relations requires a history, and the women who endured
the pain and inconvenience deserve it. However fragmentary and incom-
plete, here it is.

This book begins with the end of footbinding as a social practice and moves
backward in time, ending with the height of its cultural prestige and erotic
appeal. My reason for this inverted chronology is that our present knowl-
edge about footbinding is derived almost entirely from the perspectives and
literature of the anti-footbinding movement, as outlined in Part I. Begin-
ning with the end may help clear the ground for alternative ways of seeing
and knowing.
Chapter 1 focuses on the birth of the category of “natural feet” (tianzu).
Not only did it introduce a view of the body as a machine, it also facilitated
the visualization of a new global reality in the late nineteenth century. As
part of an enlightenment discourse, tianzu was instrumental to the imag-
ining of a nascent Chinese nation. Chapter 2 turns to examine the imple-
mentation of the tianzu message in local schools and village homes in the
Letting-feet-out ( fangzu) campaigns in the 1900s–1930s, where the abstract
doctrine encountered the resistance of stubborn bodies. Chapter 3 analyzes
the new knowledge and desires generated in an encyclopedic compilation,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Picking Radishes (Caifeilu), popular in the treaty ports in the 1930s. The un-
timely obsession of its editors and readers signaled the extinguishing of foot-
binding’s aura in modern China.
If Part I could not have been written without the explosion of textual
and visual documentation of footbinding in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, Part II examines the various strategies of concealment that con-
stituted and perpetuated its aura and mystique from the twelfth to early nine-
teenth centuries.
Chapter 4 seeks to map the discursive limits of a debate on the origins of
footbinding waged by philologists in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
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INTRODUCTION 6
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Although couched in an objective, empiricist tone, these treatises are often

thinly veiled attacks on the prevalent practice of binding feet. The anec-
dotes and poetic allusions the philologists cited and recycled, however, con-
tributed inadvertently to the perpetuation of footbinding’s aura. Instead of
fetish, Chapter 5 paints an alternative picture of male desires for small feet,
which were bound up with an imaginary geography of the northwest. At-
taching ephemeral pleasures to a place, I argue, allowed male travelers and
readers to concretize them, a function also served by writing about their fan-
tasies and experiences.
In contrast, female desires were concrete, lodged in a cosmology of quo-
tidian things that they made and that made them. Chapter 6 focuses on a key
item in women’s material culture—shoes—as craft, extensions of the body-
self, focal point of fashion regimes, and integuments of illusion. This chap-
ter concludes the main body of the book with a study of the rise and fall of
the cult of the golden lotus by way of the history of footwear fashion and
shoemaking.
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PART ONE
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES OF
THE NATION IN THE GLOBE

The Rhetoric of Tianzu, 1880s–1910s

The last assembly line of the last factory producing shoes for bound feet
ground to a halt in November 1999. Using eight pairs of wooden lasts, old
craftsmen in the Zhiqiang Shoe Factory in Harbin had been making three
hundred pairs of “lotus shoes” annually since 1991, but lately over half of
the inventory had languished in the warehouse. The customers were all more
than eighty years old and dwindling fast. In a solemn ceremony, the factory
donated the lasts to the Heilongjiang Museum of Ethnography. A curator
voiced a widely shared sentiment: “The ‘three-inch golden lotus’ is a his-
torical testament to the bodily and psychological damage that women suf-
fered in feudal society. The sad songs of small feet would never be sung
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

again; so much pain and tears are etched on the wooden lasts.” A reporter
echoed: “Something as tiny as the lasts stands as a testament to the progress
of Chinese women from being oppressed to being given a new life” (em-
phases mine).1
Both the tone and terminology of the article are familiar; condemnation
and pity are the only acceptable ways of discoursing on small feet in mod-
ern China. The sense of relief is palpable and heartfelt—as a remnant of a
feudal past, footbinding can ﬁnally be relegated to the museum. Yet under-
neath the disavowal there lurks a wistfulness, as evinced by the repeated use
of historical “testament.” The wooden lasts bear a contradictory witness, to
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THE BODY EXPOSED 10
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past oppression and present liberation. Let bygones be bygones, but we can-
not and should not forget. Footbinding as a haunting has been useful to the
project of envisioning a modern China. It had to be present, displayed, and
reiterated as modernity’s Other.
This disquiet continues to ignite the potency and relevance of the sub-
ject. The “Culture Fever” in the mid- to late-1980s that ensued from Deng
Xiaoping’s reforms prompted renewed interest in traditional culture, re-
sulting in a glut of books and articles on footbinding in the 1990s that are
cut from the same cloth. In these works, the bound foot remains a short-
hand for all that was wrong with traditional China: oppression of women,
insularity, despotism, and disregard for human rights.2 Such reﬂections on
the past are grounded in the present, aªording a progressive view of his-
tory: things are getting better; our lives are freer than theirs. One troubling
aspect of this view of history is encapsulated in the passive voice used by
the reporter: women were so oppressed that they could not save themselves.
Liberation depended on a bestowal of new life from a reformist state or the
educated elite.
This degrading view of women with bound feet, a hallmark of the mod-
ern nationalist discourse, has seldom been challenged by feminist or Marx-
ist scholars who share many of the nationalist’s modernist assumptions about
freedom and agency. Curiously, a subject as incendiary as footbinding has
thus been the most uncontroversial issue in and out of China. In troubling
this consensus, it is essential to ﬁrst examine the extent to which the imag-
inations of a modern Chinese nation were rooted in the rhetoric of “natu-
ral feet” and the social campaigns of the anti-footbinding movement in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century. We begin, therefore, with the end.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

THE END: TWO KINDS OF HISTORY;

THREE KINDS OF TIME; SECONDHAND VOICES

At ﬁrst glance, identifying the end of footbinding as a social practice in mod-

ern China seems an uncomplicated task. Successive regimes have issued
prohibition edicts with titles and dates; o‹cial and uno‹cial campaigns to
eradicate footbinding have also left a long and visible paper trail. Tracing
their incomplete and contested implementation, however, is a diªerent mat-
ter. The magnitude of local variations also deﬁes a generalized chronology
of national patterns.3
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 11
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Even more vexing is the problem of ontological ambiguity: in any given

locale, did footbinding end when the majority of young girls ceased to bind
or when adult women had to let their feet out? What do we make of the
women who hid themselves from government inspection teams or reapplied
the binders as soon as the inspectors left? Consider the tale of a defiant
woman who handed a donut twist to the foot inspector dispatched by the
state. She would let her feet out, she promised, if he could undo the frying
and untwist the pastry back into a piece of pliable dough. Unlike the cut-
ting of men’s queues, footbinding is an irrevocable bodily process once the
bones are bent and new muscular habits formed. “Liberated feet,” as they
were called, were harder to walk on and more deformed than bound feet.4
The end of a phenomenon as widespread and varied as footbinding is a
drawn-out process. The decades from the 1880s to the 1930s witnessed the
disintegration of the previously coherent subject of “footbinding” into three
components, or three kinds of time: on the level of cosmology or episteme,
the cultural prestige or justification of footbinding; on the level of customs
and conventions, footbinding as a social practice; and on the level of per-
sonal experience, footbinding as individual embodiment. The end did not
come in the form of a linear progression from bondage to liberation, in which
the old gave way to the new overnight. Instead, the end meant linguistic
and emotional confusion as the three kinds of time grew out of sync: in one
locale the old raison d’être became dated but mothers kept binding their
daughters’ feet; in another locale the age-old practice was outlawed, but
people clung to the customary thinking of small feet as desirable.
The end of footbinding is thus characterized not by a clean break or a
sense of finality but by its opposite: a lingering in-between-ness, a seesaw-
ing motion of time, sentiments, and fashion. By focusing on a cast of pre-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

viously ignored characters—Chinese women reformers, unrepentant con-

noisseurs, girl students, women who struggled to let their feet out, foot
inspectors, tabloid writers, and shopkeepers who collected picture postcards
as a hobby, for example—this and the next two chapters seek to present an
alternative picture of this transitional period. On the local if not visceral and
bodily level, the demise of footbinding appeared to be more problematic
than the story told from a linear enlightenment perspective penned by the
leading male thinkers in the twentieth century.
The stubbornness of women’s bodies stands out as the most visible yet
perplexing aspect of this alternative history. Time’s arrow traveled its course
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THE BODY EXPOSED 12
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steadily on the level of individual lives as national time and global time, his-
tories external to the women’s bodies, hurried ahead by leaps and bounds.
This simple fact dictates that no state decree or social movement can truly
end footbinding until the individual lives have expired one by one. The
“voice” of these women—not articulated voices but murmurs from within
their bodies—arose from an ambiguous space between individual and na-
tional histories. How do we hear them, in multiple tones and pitches, when
the language they speak is often a language not of words but of the body,
and is thus alien to us?
Anti-footbinding legislation and campaigns belong to the realm of “gigan-
tic history.” Since they are traceable through public documents and amenable
to the methods of political and social history, it is not surprising that they
have been widely analyzed. But Susan Stewart has reminded us that there are
two kinds of history: “We ﬁnd the miniature at the origin of private, indi-
vidual history, but we ﬁnd the gigantic at the origin of public and natural
history.” We know the miniature only as the contained, “a spatial whole or
temporal parts,” whereas the gigantic is the container.5 Likewise, there are
two rhythms of women’s history in China, one private-individual and the
other public-national. We have mistaken the latter as the only narrative be-
cause the voices in it are familiar to us and require little translation, con-
tained as they are by narratives of the nation with which we can identify.
We have heard the voice of the modern woman in Qiu Jin (1875–1907),
the knight-errant who denounced footbinding, left her marriage, traveled to
Japan, cross-dressed as Charlie Chaplin for the camera, and became a mar-
tyr for the republican revolution. We have also celebrated the career of Ding
Ling (1904–86), who took lovers, traveled to Yanan, and became the resi-
dent feminist writer of the communist revolution.6 Theirs were journeys of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the romantic hero in quest of personal and national salvation. In their pathos
of political activism, self-realization, and sexual yearnings, we have found
images of our cherished selves. We have thus succumbed to the seduction
of their rhetoric: they speak the language of individual freedom and self-
determination, but this individualism is in fact a reﬂected ideal that has no
life outside the nationalist discourse. Their female voices were contained by,
and were speaking in the terms of, the gigantic history of the nation.7
There are many other female speaking selves on the margins of or out-
side gigantic history. Those of the illiterate footbound women constitute
one example.8 Their voices, however, are not immediately audible to us. Two
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 13
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kinds of translation are necessary before these “miniaturized” or “contained”

histories are brought to light. The ﬁrst involves a translation from the silent
presence of the footbound woman’s body to her hidden inner world. The
second involves a translation from others’ writings quoting her utterances.
In this and the next two chapters, we will strain to hear these secondhand
voices, be they bodily murmurs, reasoned articulation, or screams of an-
guish. These are refracted instead of “authentic” voices, contained as they
are by male narratives, gigantic histories, and other exterior concerns. But
they are no less “real” because of that.
Even when we have, on occasion, transcripts of interviews with village
women describing their experience of binding feet, the linguistic terms they
used and political awareness they exhibited were acquired after the fact. For
example, when the ﬁlmmakers Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon inter-
viewed three footbound grannies from Long Bow Village for their acclaimed
documentary Small Happiness, one spoke of learning the word feng jian (feu-
dal) from the communists, who invented it. The word enabled her to name
the roots of her oppression (another invented word) in old China, but does
not convey her actual feelings when she had her feet bound as a young girl.9
Because of this inevitable intervention of time and the intrusion of new lin-
guistic categories that reorganize one’s memories, even female voices as seem-
ingly unmediated as in face-to-face interviews are in fact secondhand voices
that require translation. There is no “authentic” female voice.
Ironically, only by way of translation can we hope to be faithful to the
multiple tonalities of a confusing time. The period from the 1880s to the
1930s comprised a transitional stage when the rhythms beneath the woman’s
skin seem out of sync with the body politic at large. New visions of female
and social bodies had taken shape, but old values, embodied by women with
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

bound feet, remained concrete and visible. The footbound woman in mod-
ern China is thus a remnant; her presence demands attention and analysis,
not condemnation. For it is in the corporeality of her presence that we seek
her “agency,” in conjunction with what she purportedly wrote or said. In
focusing on the cerebral voices of women writers and activists, our current
picture of the range of experiences and subjectivities of women in modern
China is woefully incomplete and disembodied.
If eªorts to end footbinding were complicated by the stubbornness of in-
dividual bodies, the “end” should be seen not as an unequivocal moment
but a confusing period of bind-unbind-bind-unbind. Somehow during the
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THE BODY EXPOSED 14
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tug-of-war footbinding shrank in stature. It was not so much outlawed as

outmoded; footbinding came to a virtual death when its cultural prestige
extinguished. To put it another way, the end came when the practice ex-
hausted all justiﬁcations within the existing repertoire of cultural symbols
and values, even as myriad women continued to tighten their binding cloths
every day. The lingering presence of footbound women as they were seen
hobbling on the streets of treaty ports or pulling a plough in a Shandong
village elicited pity and curiosity because they appeared dated and out of
place. (See ﬁg. 1.) They were not even supposed to walk or venture outdoors!
These incongruities bring to the fore the contradictions that a woman had
to embody as remnant of the old order and bearer of the new.

THE MISSIONARY CATEGORY OF TIANZU

The invention of the term “natural feet” or “heavenly feet” (tianzu)—as the
antithesis of “bound feet” (chanzu, guozu)—marked the point of no return
in the cultural and social demise of footbinding. The public use of the En-
glish term can be traced to one morning in 1875 in the southern treaty port
of Amoy ( Xiamen), when Rev. John MacGowan presided over a meeting
that led to the formation of the Heavenly Foot Society. MacGowan (d. 1922),
of the London Missionary Society, first arrived in Amoy on the heels of the
Second Opium War, which opened up five treaty ports to foreign commerce
and the interior to missionary penetration in 1860. Almost immediately, he
and his wife learned firsthand the evils of footbinding when the shrieks of
a neighbor’s daughter pierced the walls. Mrs. MacGowan hurried over to
intervene, only to be greeted by a lecture from the girl’s mother: “But you
are an Englishwoman, and you do not understand the burden that is laid
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

upon us women of China. This footbinding is the evil fortune that we in-
herit from the past, that our fathers have handed down to us, and no one
in all this wide Empire of ours can bring us deliverance.” If the daughter
did not have her feet bound, “she would be laughed at and despised and
treated as a slave-girl.”10
The Reverend did not forget. Fifteen years later, prompted by a divine
revelation, he called a meeting of all the women who attended Christian
churches in Amoy. Amidst warnings of a riot in the city—so threatening
was the idea of a female assembly—sixty to seventy showed up, all unedu-
cated women of the working class according to MacGowan. After the Rev-
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 15
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erend spoke, a “tall, handsome-looking” mother of seven daughters rose from

her seat: “Your eªorts to arouse a conscience on the subject has made me
think very seriously upon the wrong that we Christians have been doing in
consenting to carry on a custom that is inflicting such sorrows upon our-
selves and on the women of this city.” She vowed to leave her daughters’
feet unbound even if it meant they would not find husbands. Reverend Mac-
Gowan recalled fondly that “here her beautiful face was lighted up with a
smile that came from her very soul. ‘Then I shall keep them at home with
me, and they shall cook my rice for me.’” Other women also spoke up. At
the end of the meeting, nine women “signed” a pledge to eradicate the hea-
then practice in their homes and beyond by drawing a cross against their
names written out by a Chinese pastor.11
If the Reverend had not called the meeting— or written about it almost
three decades later—these illiterate women would not have had a chance to
speak up in a public assembly, let alone to have their words preserved for
posterity. Although thoroughly contained by MacGowan’s gospel narrative
with a gigantic title, How England Saved China, the mother of seven daugh-
ters impresses us as having a mind of her own that eluded the Reverend.
What MacGowan interpreted as the determination of a heroic Christian
soul can be construed as a veiled display of family status: my daughters would
stay home and serve me because we can aªord to feed them. It is perhaps no
accident that she dared to speak first. As was customary in a Chinese social
gathering, the senior members of a group tend to be the first and last to speak.
Hence the woman who spoke at the end of the assembly was a seventy-
year-old elder from a respected Christian family, whom MacGowan called
“the mother of the Church.”
The tall mother’s pragmatic concern for her daughters’ future, couched
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

in terms of “cooking rice,” echoed that of the Reverend’s neighbor ﬁfteen

years earlier. MacGowan’s theological perspectives on footbinding appear
more abstract: “It had completely destroyed the grace and symmetry with
which Nature had endowed the women. We are apt to forget that within
the feet lies the secret of the exquisite poise and beautiful carriage that em-
body within them the very poetry of motion, and that add so much to the
charm that women by a divine right seem naturally to possess.”12 Foot-
binding is anti-Christian because Nature—the Creator—endowed women
with integral, natural bodies. The doctrine of Heavenly feet is thus predi-
cated on the construction of a God-given natural body.
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In christening his anti-footbinding society “Heavenly Foot,” MacGowan

foregrounded Christian doctrines while appealing to native belief and ter-
minology. Although the concept of a personal God is unknown to Chinese,
he wrote, their Heaven is a mysterious force that is “analogous to God” in
some aspects. “The sages in ancient times had declared that men were the
oªspring of Heaven. . . . If so, then women also were the product of the same
great Power, and consequently the feet of the little girls when they were
born had been designed with their exquisite beauty by It.”13 The doctrine
of Heavenly feet is thus co-extensive with gender equality.
MacGowan’s hybrid appeal to Christian and Chinese reference systems
is typical. In Chinese he was known by the moniker of Guangzhao (Shin-
ing light), a Buddhist-monk-sounding name.14 The Chinese name of the
anti-footbinding society, too, adopted the indigenous rubric of “Jie chanzu
hui” (Quit binding-feet society), an allusion to the “quit opium-smoking”
societies. Yet all these eªorts of linguistic indigenization only served to high-
light the alienness of tianzu (heavenly or natural feet) in the mid-1870s. Al-
though the concept of natural feet had been expounded as a Christian doc-
trine and hence was familiar to churchgoers, the translated term tianzu did
not enter the Chinese lexicon until 1895, with the founding of the Tianzu
hui (Natural Feet Society) by Mrs. Alicia Little in Shanghai.15
Neither the concept of a natural, integral body nor attacks on footbind-
ing were new to Chinese discourses.16 The signiﬁcance of the category
tianzu lies in the transnational context of its birth and its overt Christian
justiﬁcation. In 1878, a participant at one of the biannual meetings of the
Heavenly Feet Society transcribed a long essay by a Reverend Ye entitled
“Discourse on Quitting Footbinding” (“Jie chanzu lun”). The Chinese pas-
tor displayed a malaise at being scrutinized by the world that was absent in
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

MacGowan: “Looking around the world today, no women other than those
in China bind their feet. This shows that when God made men, there was
no divergence in the shape of male and female feet. This [lack of gender
disparity] is a principle applicable to the past as to the present.” China was
thus uniquely barbaric in world time and geography. Reverend Ye’s argu-
ment then turned to the body’s utility: “When God created human beings,
He intended the four limbs and ﬁve senses to be put to their appropriate
uses. This is true for both males and females.” Footbinding is a manmade
contrivance, analogous to the tower of Babel, that paraded human wisdom
as superior to that of God. It is thus a sinful act.17
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 17
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Whereas MacGowan was sympathetic to the plight of mothers, Reverend

Ye placed the blame squarely on them. “The [Christian] principle of lov-
ing others begins with loving one’s own children. How can you inflict pain
onto your daughter’s feet at age five or six, binding them as tightly as a brand-
ing iron, blocking the qi from circulating like putting a cangue on the an-
kle? . . . I see that during binding, the daughter often cries in pain, but the
mother would strike her and make the pain even more unbearable.” If Rev-
erend Ye had nothing but contempt for the mother, he harbored even less
sympathy toward the daughter, a “seductress” (yaoji) who “beautifies her
looks to promote licentiousness.” She has sinned in “drawing others’ gaze
to her.” There is no mention of men’s responsibility or complicity.18
This formulation of footbinding as sinful on three accounts—as cultural
contrivance, as a violation of parental love, and as a sexual threat to the God-
loving man—is Christian in logic and rhetoric. This early apology for nat-
ural feet set the tone for subsequent polemics by secular Chinese o‹cials,
reformers, and revolutionaries at the height of the anti-footbinding agitation
in 1895–98.19 All the essential elements of that agitation were rehearsed in
Reverend Ye’s essays two decades earlier: a transnational awareness of China’s
parochialism, a utilitarian view of the natural body as a machine, and the
assertion of parity between males and females.20 Most importantly, the sta-
tus of women became a yardstick for the civility of an entire country. The
parity between China and the West depended on gender equality, which
stood the Confucian principle of gender hierarchy on its head. For all of these
progressive elements, however, the discourse of tianzu betrayed a male bias
in perpetuating the view of women as femmes fatales and blaming moth-
ers and daughters for their own misery. These less salutary elements, too,
became more pronounced in subsequent Chinese nationalistic writings.21
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Who brought footbinding to an end—was it missionaries and foreign-

ers or indigenous reformers? This question has been a matter of historical
contention because Chinese agency and sovereignty remain cherished goals
among nationalistic historians today.22 My limited argument here has been
that tianzu is a linguistic category born of a new transnational tra‹c in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was absent in the native vocabu-
lary and became imaginable only by standing the familiar category of chanzu
on its head. In time this logic of dichotomizing and negation spread, and
tianzu became the antithesis of a host of larger deﬁciencies in traditional
culture: gender inequality, parental authority, and, as we will see, class dis-
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crimination. Whatever its origins, tianzu (natural unbound feet) has thus
remained the most poignant symbol of national self-determination, from
its inception through the early years of the republic and unto today.

XU KE AND TANG YISUO:

TIANZU AS A CHINESE NATIONALIST CATEGORY

In the early years of the Republic, Chinese writers made various attempts
to “nationalize” the origins and history of the anti-footbinding movement.
Among them, the man of letters Xu Ke (1869–1928) oªered a China-centered
narrative of the birth of tianzu as a category and a social movement. Xu,
author of “A Survey of Natural Feet” (“Tianzu kaolüe”) and its sequel,
“Words of Knowing Feet” (“Zhizu yu”; zhizu is a pun meaning content-
ment and knowing feet) opened with the familiar global gaze: “Women of
our country are known throughout the world for their bound feet, which
has long been criticized by the people in Europe and America. In the year
wushu of the Qing Guangxu reign [1898], scholar-o‹cials in Shanghai
established the Natural Feet Society [Tianzu hui] and the Anti-Footbinding
Society [Bu chanzu hui]. They issued books and gave lectures, spreading
words of admonition afar. Women in the entire country were to preserve
their naturalness [zhen] if they had not yet bound, or receive relief from
their stricture if they had already bound. The development of their physique
will be promoted, and the shame of the national citizens will be shed.”23 In
coupling the establishment of anti-footbinding societies with the Hundred
Days Reform of 1898 and in attributing the founding of anti-footbinding
organizations to Chinese scholar-o‹cials in Shanghai, Xu recast the motive
force of this movement from one of missionary salvation or foreign inno-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

vation to that of Chinese elite male agency.

In Xu’s eyes, the eradication of footbinding is prerequisite to China’s par-
ity with Europe and America, hence it is an urgent nationalist project. Al-
though Xu used the traditional rendition of time in terms of dynastic reign
years, he showed an acute awareness of the forward march of global time
against which China was to be measured. Yet an equally strong impulse was
to rescue some progressive elements from tradition and native categories.
Xu continued: “The tianzu [in ‘Tianzu hui’] means ‘natural foot’ [tianran
zhi zu]. Only then did the two words ‘tian-zu’ become a noun, a name. Lit-
tle did we know that in the ancient times, we had [the practice of ] natural
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 19
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feet, and it is in fact quite common in the recent past.” Later, in 1928, Xu
Ke found a classical name to this practice: “Today if we say ‘natural foot’
[tianzu], everyone in the metropolis and urban areas would know what you
mean. In ancient times there was no such term as tianzu; they called it ‘plain
or unadorned feet’ [suzu].”24
Mention of unadorned feet, however, was too vulgar to be preserved in
the chronicles of old, controlled as they were by the literate elite. “But our
common people [renmin] have long been accustomed to authoritarianism;
the class distinctions between the rich and poor are deeply ingrained in their
hearts. The scholar-o‹cials [shidafu] did not see what was practiced in the
ﬁelds because it was diªerent from their own custom, or even when they
saw it, they chose to ignore it. Moreover, since the elite considered them-
selves ‘civilized,’ they regarded lands with natural feet as barbaric. . . . I am
enraged by them, by the extreme inequality that separated the rich and pow-
erful from the poor and mean.” 25 In this innovative formulation, natural
feet stand for the wholesome but submerged culture of the plebeians, whereas
bound feet signal the corruption and domination of the patrician class. The
rhetoric of tianzu is thus harnessed as an apology for democracy.
Xu’s project of documenting the neglected practices of natural feet in Chi-
nese history is nationalist in goal and intention. Further, his nationalism in-
volves the leveling of hierarchies and distances on global, national, and local
levels: parity of China with Europe and America as well as equality between
the classes and status groups within China. “A Survey of Natural Feet” is
thus an unabashed piece of revolutionary writing. Instead of discarding tra-
ditional culture altogether, however, Xu resuscitated a usable past, repre-
sented by the “unadorned feet” of the common people.
In his global awareness, political egalitarianism, and Chinese pride, Xu
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Ke shared the outlook of his more famous reformist contemporaries such

as Kang Youwei (1858–1927), who helped found the Do Not Bind Feet So-
ciety (Bu guozu hui) in 1883.26 Xu, a native of Hangzhou and holder of a
licentiate ( juren) degree, had one foot in the world of the civil service exami-
nation and another foot in the world of treaty port culture. In 1899, he left
his minor bureaucratic post in Beijing and eventually settled in Shanghai,
where his wife, He Mojun, worked as a school teacher, and his son and
daughter were enrolled in new schools. His son was later sent to England
and Paris for an advanced degree. Xu made a living as a writer and editor
and was widely known as the compiler of A Classiﬁed Collection of Anec-
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dotes on the Qing Dynasty (Qingbai leichao), a monumental collection of

unique notations about the last dynasty.
Like the literati of old, Xu frequented wine shops and restaurants, build-
ing networks over drinking games and poetry contests. He later published
his contributions, poems that document elegant gatherings in which men
of letters in the Yangzi delta viewed antique ceramics and manuscripts, saw
friends oª on journeys, or inscribed each other’s paintings. Yet even as they
sought to re-create the tranquil world of the imperial literati, the violence
of the times showed through: a poem was crafted for a friend who was felled
by assassins; they mourned the loss of a drawing of an ancient rock in a
Suzhou garden during the 1911 revolution (or “military disturbance”).27
One of the friends who exchanged poetry with Xu was a fellow sojourner
Tang Yisuo (fl. 1904), a native of Suzhou. In his preface to Xu’s pamphlet
on beautiful Suzhou women with natural feet, Tang recounted his early ex-
posure to Christian advocacy of natural feet in the 1880s. Like Xu Ke, Tang
received the tianzu rhetoric with a Chinese nationalist frame of mind.
Stricken with a severe illness, he once sought treatment from an American
doctor, Bai Lewen [Brockman?]. As follow-up, his tiny-footed wife Shi
Jingkai frequented the doctor’s residence to renew prescriptions. One day
Shi brought along a thirteen-year-old maid named Yilan. Mrs. Bai, the doc-
tor’s wife, looked Shi in the eyes and said, “Footbinding and waistbinding
are both bad customs. Look how charming is Yilan, with her two feet in
their natural state [tianran], free from the suªerings of pretension. She must
be a native of Suzhou, isn’t she? In my extended travels, I have discovered
that within the area of several hundred li in Suzhou prefecture, not only do
maids and peasant women have natural feet, but also those fishing, gather-
ing firewood, selling vegetables and flowers, and porting. They mingle in
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the company of men and perform laborious chores requiring physical

strength. Occasionally I see men resting and waiting to be fed, while their
women toil away without complaint. Of course they are blessed with an
obliging temperament, but who can deny that they also enjoy the conven-
ience of having natural hands and feet?” Shi Jingkai felt these words deeply
and conveyed them to Tang upon returning home.28
Mrs. Bai’s valuation of female labor anticipated a national concern with
women’s livelihood at the turn of the twentieth century. Cast in positive
terms, women’s self-reliance (zili) or economic independence became the
condition of their liberation and hence the strongest justiﬁcation for their
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 21
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education. Often, however, the issue was cast in a damning light: women
were parasites. In a seminal essay written in 1896–97, “On Women’s Edu-
cation,” a leading reformist thinker, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), denigrated
the female half of the population as “those with round heads but pointy
feet.” Referring to a saying by Mencius that “those who dwell in leisure with-
out an education are close to beasts,” Liang stated that since every woman
“from the ancient times to the present day” has been unschooled, they have
fared no better than beasts. Although the majority of men are also unedu-
cated, he conceded, these men are at least ashamed of themselves, but the
women are so ignorant that they do not even feel the shame. This is the
root of China’s weakness. “All two hundred million of our women are con-
sumers [ fenli, partakers of profit]; not a single one has produced anything
of profit. . . . No wonder men keep them as dogs, horses, and slaves.”29
Liang Qichao, the most powerful polemist in modern China, used strong
language to incite his readers to action. But in so doing, he perpetuated an
insulting and erroneous image of women, erasing their traditional learning
and domestic labor from the history of the nation. Unfortunately, so
influential was Liang that the image of women with bound feet as parasites,
beasts, and slaves remained the standard view. Shortly after the publication
of Liang’s treatise on cultural reform, a New Year’s print from Yangliuqing,
“Women’s Self-Strengthening” (“Nüzi ziqiang”), drives the same message
home. The print shows a father sitting on one side of a square table while
his dainty wife, a son, and a daughter beckon from the other side. The cap-
tion, written in a vernacular popular after the aborted 1898 reform move-
ment, reads: “In China, most married men with a family to support are be-
ing weighed down. Do you know where the problem lies? It is not that men
cannot make money, but that one man has to feed many mouths. A woman
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

on a pair of tiny bound feet cannot exert herself in many lines of work. She
has to depend on men for what she eats and what she wears. How can the
men not be burdened?” The caption concludes, “China is weak; this is the
most serious sickness.”30
When these messages became commonplace in the 1900s, Tang Yisuo and
Shi Jingkai had moved to Shanghai, Yilan had died, and the anti-footbinding
movement was widespread in cities and towns. Tang regretted that Yilan
did not live to see natural feet becoming fashionable. “If she had lived a lit-
tle longer, I could have remonstrated in front of our relatives and friends
that in my house we have a maid who was ahead of the times.” But Tang
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THE BODY EXPOSED 22
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reported that his wife, by then fifty years old, decided to “unwrap her band-
age to relax her toes.” Shi told her husband, “In the past, I intuited that
what Mrs. Bai said about the convenience of hands and feet was right, but
now I can experience the reason behind her words.”31 As recorded by her
husband, Shi’s voice was calm and matter-of-fact. We do not know how “re-
laxed” her toes became. Although the subject of her speech was the chang-
ing consciousness of a footbound woman, no interiority was disclosed. The
experience of her conversion is credible, but Tang Yisuo has framed the bod-
ily process as a rational and linear one. Shi’s voice is true but incomplete.
To Shi, the natural body is an abstract concept, but its functionalist corol-
lary, the convenience and use of a productive body, made a deep impres-
sion. She fantasized with her husband about an idyllic life spent in physi-
cal exertion after they retired: “If you have a plot of land to plough, I would
bring lunch to you; if you have a mountain in which to gather firewood, I
would bundle them up for you. If you only have a pond or a brook, I would
pick lotus root and trap fishes and shrimps, take them to the market in the
morning and return with wine in the evening. Forgetting the world, we can
while the rest of our years away.” Against the stark reality of women and
children slaving away in the Shanghai cotton mills during the early stage of
China’s industrialization, Shi conjured up a pastoral and utopian picture of
conjugal companionship built on shared labor in a primitive economy.32
Tang’s essay reveals the subtle changes in concepts of bodies and the dim-
ming of the cultural prestige of footbinding in the pivotal era of the 1880s
to the 1900s. It also reveals how the value of natural feet was entangled with
family pride and the pride of locale. He ended by recounting a conversa-
tion with Xu Ke, who declared: “The beauty of Suzhou women is famous.
Yet people only know of the arched foot in the city, and are ignorant of the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

fact that the natural foot of rural women is even more beautiful. This ig-
norance is similar to that of the o‹cials in an autocratic country, who only
recognize pedigree but not real talent.” This is a thinly veiled attack on the
dynastic order. Also palpable is Xu’s awareness of China in a global world:
“The Westerners have a saying, that the women of Spain are the most beau-
tiful in Europe, and the women of Suzhou are the most beautiful in Asia.
It is clear from this coupling of Spanish and Suzhou women that natural
feet are desirable. The beauty of Suzhou natural feet is recognized by the
entire world. Better still, it has existed from our distant past, before the pro-
motion of the ‘new learning’ [xinxue] reformers today” (23b).
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 23
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The coupling of Spain and Suzhou may strike us as odd, but these words
encapsulate the commingling of global, national, and local awareness
around the turn of the century. Xu has accepted without question the au-
thority of the “West” (in the form of Spain) as the arbiter of taste and value.
The natural-footed rural working woman, unsullied by habits of the city,
was made the embodiment of a modern standard of Chinese beauty, a stan-
dard also espoused by Mrs. Bai. Furthermore, Xu’s and Tang’s endorsement
of the tianzu doctrine involves a splitting of local history into the good and
the bad, the latter being the imperial examination system, which sanctioned
a hierarchical order. With this split, the new ideals of equality, freedom, and
democracy can be pursued without discarding tradition altogether.
Xu Ke and Tang Yisuo were transitional ﬁgures. Chronologically they
straddled the end of one millennium and the beginning of the next; polit-
ically and culturally they witnessed the collapse of the dynastic order and
the shaky beginnings of the Republic in 1912. It is remarkable that they nar-
rated these momentous transitions without a sense of rupture or struggle.
Although schooled in the classics, they had little political or economic stake
in the imperial system. The calmness with which they nationalized the rhet-
oric of tianzu, its attendant episteme of the functionalist body, and an egal-
itarian body politic bespeaks the extent to which the foundation of old literati
culture had eroded. The aura of footbinding was dimmed and eventually
extinguished in the process.

WOMAN AS EGG YOLK: A NEW GLOBAL EPISTEME

The lack of struggle—for both Xu Ke and his wife—about the liberation

of feet in his personal memoirs recurred in Tang Yisuo’s Huang Xiuqiu, a
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

long novel named after its heroine. Its first twenty-six chapters were serial-
ized in New Fiction (Xin xiaoshuo) in 1904 or 1905; the final four chapters
were added when it was issued under separate cover in 1906 or 1907. New
Fiction, a monthly founded in 1902 by Liang Qichao in Yokohama, was the
earliest and one of the most influential of the literary journals. As a result,
Huang Xiuqiu ranks as one of the better known examples of progressive late-
Qing fiction. In its linking of the liberation of feet to national salvation and
its focus on a speaking female protagonist, the novel presents a prototype
of the modern Chinese womanhood scripted by the history of the nation.33
Huang Xiuqiu is set in Freedom Village, situated in the temperate zone
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in the eastern half of Asia and home of the Huang ( Yellow) clan. The male
protagonist is a man in his thirties, Huang Tongli (enlightened principle,
or one who understands reason), who sought to overhaul village custom and
politics in a gradual manner. His wife, Huang Xiuqiu, unwrapped her bind-
ing cloths and then convinced Tongli that the best place to start his cam-
paign was to set up a private girls’ school. Together, they battled the super-
stition of nuns, the corruption of Manchu o‹cials, and the conspiracy of
a clansman Huang Huo (yellow peril). In the end, they managed to export
the successful girls’ school model to a neighboring village, champion local
self-government in a village meeting, and organize male and female mili-
tias. Although not much is known about Tang Yisuo apart from his friend-
ship with Xu Ke, it is clear that Huang Xiuqiu is a straightforward statement
of the progressive beliefs of its author.
In its global awareness, gloriﬁcation of the female will, and valorization
of unimpeded circulation ( jiaotong ), both within individual bodies and be-
tween trading nations, the novel places the liberated woman at the center
of a new episteme. Tang’s global awareness takes the form of a fascination
with the earth as a ball-shaped object. The gigantic and abstract concept of
“the globe” is miniaturized, assuming concrete shapes and vivid colors: desk-
top globe; watermelon; egg. The earth is inhabited by ﬁve races, Huang
Tongli told his wife, but only the yellows and whites matter.34 Whereas
Tongli referred to geography (dili) to describe the struggle of the two main
races, Xiuqiu referred to astronomy (tianwen) to describe her doctrine of
the equality of the sexes. Revising traditional Chinese cosmology, which con-
strues heaven (tian) as a dome-shaped sphere covering the square earth (di)
like a lid, Huang Xiuqiu said: “We now know from astronomy that heaven
is egg-shaped instead of dome-shaped. Earth is encased by heaven, like an
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

egg yolk, not a detached piece of square. Heaven and earth are intercon-
nected; it is impossible to deem heaven higher or superior” (177). Between
them, they are describing a new cosmology and global politics marked by
the ideals of equality and the reality of struggling for survival. In struggle
or in parity, China can be deﬁned and located only in relation to other coun-
tries and races.
The cosmology of the egg also teaches the lesson of gender equality.
“Woman is egg yolk. Although she is inside, surrounded by egg white and
shell, without the yolk there would be no white nor shell. . . . All the he-
roes among men, even emperors, are born of women. So women should be
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 25
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valued higher than men. Why are they being oppressed instead? These days
one hears the words of equal rights and equal status [pingquan pingdeng ]
between males and females. . . . Since the two sexes are united, there should
be no distinctions of . . . high or low, big or small . . . between them” (177).
This argument for gender equality, however, is built on a paradox: although
woman is superior to man in function and equal in status and rights, her
location remains “inside” and is in fact enveloped by the egg white that stands
for man. Furthermore, the value of woman is realized in the act of giving
birth.35 The Confucian gendered division of space, which construed the ideal
woman as the inner person, thus found a new expression in the doctrine of
gender equality. This incongruity bespeaks the confusion about a woman’s
proper place and roles in late-Qing society.
In Huang Xiuqiu, the egg is thus at once a metaphor for diªerent-but-
equal gender relations, global social-Darwinian politics, and Copernican cos-
mology. The conjoining of these three realms is in itself nothing new; Con-
fucian cosmology has long held the correlative links between individual,
social, political, and heavenly bodies. The egg-as-globe, however, teaches a
new episteme because it requires a new perspective, looking from the out-
side in. China can be viewed in its entirety, not in parts, only after it is
brought down in size and placed within a global community of nations;
similarly the earth appears as a globular object only when the viewer is sus-
pended in space. In other words, the totality of the nation and sphericity
of the globe are products of miniaturization. Miniaturization, in turn, is
possible only with the viewing subject’s detachment: stepping back from
the object of vision and looking from a distance.
Astronomy (tianwen, phenomena of the sky) and geography (dili, prin-
ciples of the earth), subjects born of this new way of seeing, became pop-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ular in school curriculum around the turn of the century. In Sichuan prov-
ince, a local son whose father ran a private school (shishu) for boys, Zhang
Xiushu (b. 1895), recalled his love of history, geography, and astronomy. Sev-
enty years later, he could still recite the bulk of several primers on these
subjects taught to him between ages three and thirteen. Particularly eye-
opening and memorable was a geography primer, The Globe in Rhymes
(Diqiu yunyan). Although the volume was no longer in Zhang’s possession,
he remembered details about its author, Huang Zhi, a juren scholar who
studied in Japan and who was the principal of a local upper primary school
(gaodeng xiaoxue) in 1903. Fascinated by the primer, Zhang Xiushu sought
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Huang out to audit his geography course, only to discover that the subject
Huang was teaching was the Confucian classic Book of Songs.36
Published between 1898 and 1903, The Globe in Rhymes consists of songs
in five-word and seven-word lines. Each song takes up a lesson in physical
and human geography. The perils of colonialism and the lure of democracy
were themes in several songs still etched in Zhang’s mind: Sichuan prov-
ince, inner and outer Mongolia, Africa, and America. Opening with a song
on the imperial capital, the primer leads the student through lessons on the
five continents, China’s eighteen provinces, inner and outer Mongolia, cap-
ital cities of global nations, and concludes with China’s treaty ports. The
ordering of songs taught the nascent national consciousness by beginning
with the political center of China and ending with its devolution and loss
of sovereignty.37 The new global episteme, which taught that the globe was
populated by sovereign nation-states represented by their capitals, had a dis-
tinctly nationalistic hue. Consciousness of the nation is thus wrought of two
opposite processes: that of distancing, or viewing China in a global com-
munity of nation-states, and of centering, or an obsession with the dissi-
pation and loss of Chinese territories and sovereignty.
The boy student was also fascinated by astronomy. Besides The Globe in
Rhymes, Zhang’s other favorite primer was Songs of Phenomena in Heaven
and Earth (Tianwen diyu gekuo), which oªered lessons in the evolution of
the stars, the planetary system, the orbiting of the moon, the longitudes,
prime meridian, and latitudes, thunder, snow, and rainbows. The earth, visu-
alized on diªerent scales, appears as a slightly flattened round object, one
of the planets evolving in oval orbits, a ball whose surface was marked by
navigators into grids, and surrounded by an atmosphere governed by ther-
modynamics.38 Although Zhang did not recall seeing a globe in his father’s
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

classroom—his father-teacher was probably too poor to aªord props—he

eªectively visualized the spherical globe in its miniaturized form by way of
rhymes and songs.
Pictures of the globe were quite popular in the first decades of the twen-
tieth century. In a pioneering eªort in 1898, China’s first women’s journal,
Chinese Girls’ Progress (Nü xuebao), published an illustration of a classroom
in a girls’ school showing six students huddled in front of a model of the
globe on the teacher’s desk. On the wall behind the lady teacher hangs a
huge map of Asia.39 The cover of The Continent magazine (Dalu) published
in Shanghai in 1902 features a globe in the clasp of a flying dragon. In the
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 27
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Republican era, the globe remained a fetishized object signifying a modern

way of seeing and a national awareness. In Beiping Women’s Normal Col-
lege (Beiping nüzhi shifan xueyuan), the training ground for many Republi-
can women writers, professional women, and feminist activists, students or-
ganized a Globe Society (Diqiu she) and published a monthly entitled The
Globe (Diqiu) in 1929.40
The correlation between the orbiting globe in perpetual motion and un-
hampered circulation in individual bodies was not lost on observers. A
loathing for the stagnant female body, so out of sync with the times and the
new cosmology, contributed to the appeal of tianzu as a linguistic category
and a social program. The word tian conjures up a modern sensibility, not
only because tian-as-naturalness promises deliverance from the contrivance
of Chinese culture, but also because tian-as-heaven suggests the orbiting of
heavenly bodies in a clockwork universe. If the pursuit of science and the
global episteme cast the footbound woman as out of step and out of place—
the traditional other of China’s modern self—the fate of the Confucian clas-
sic in which all male reformers were schooled was more ambivalent. Huang
Zhi taught The Book of Songs in his primary school instead of geography.
We do not know his rationale, but his composition of songs as pedagogical
tools bespeaks his interest in orality. As literature of the common people,
the Songs are compatible with the populist sentiment in modern national-
ism, already expressed in Xu Ke’s discourse of suzu, unadorned feet.
Another Confucian classic, The Book of Changes, supplies the language
of a generative universe in which the modern anti-footbinding arguments
were couched. Thus opens a 1917 essay entitled “Discourse on tianzu”: “The
Book of Changes says that in the beginning there was heaven and earth, and
the myriad things followed. From the myriad things there emerged the man,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

from the man there emerged husband and wife. . . . The Han Confucian-
ists came up with the theory that husband is the bond [gang ] of the wife,
and that the woman’s proper role is to follow others in docility.” This Han
degeneration from a natural universe resulted in “an artiﬁcial contrivance”
and a “loss of natural genuineness” (tianzhen) which, the author implied,
accounted for the eventual rise of footbinding.41
The anti-footbinding movement was an eªort to return from culture to
nature as described in The Book of Changes. “The women’s world is under
a diªerent sky. We tremble at the self-generating power of the evolving tian
[tianxing zhi ziqiang ]; we are pained by the [footbound women’s] di‹culty
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in taking natural strides [tianbu]. This is the reason for the growth of the
Tianzu hui.”42 The substitution of tianbu for tianzu underscored the value
placed on movement, footsteps, and tra‹c in the early years of the repub-
lic. This valorization of speed, in turn, was part and parcel of a larger pic-
ture of a universe in perpetual motion with its evolving globe. This equa-
tion of tianxing and tianbu, of evolving universe and walking bodies,
however, fostered a view of the body as an abstract entity or a metaphori-
cal site. This erasure of the physicality of the female body, so prevalent in
the anti-footbinding discourse, rendered any realistic description of pain
di‹cult. There is no better illustration of this than the novelist’s treatment
of Huang Xiuqiu’s footbinding experience and its undoing.

FEMALE AGENCY: WILL OVER BODY

This erasure of the physical body is central to Tang Yisuo’s portrayal of

Huang Xiuqiu’s agency, which was almost entirely wrought of her self-
awareness and volition. An orphan, she suªered indignities and neglect in
the hands of the maternal aunt who raised her. Concerned that Xiuqiu would
not be able to marry, the aunt took great care in binding her feet despite
the girl’s screams and tears. These early pains formed a sediment of deter-
mination, which one day propelled Xiuqiu to make something of her life
by working side-by-side with men (8–12). Tang Yisuo was careful to ascribe
Huang Xiuqiu’s awakening to a latent strength inside her, not to foreign in-
spiration or her husband, who was supportive but at first incredulous. It is
significant that Madame Roland, a heroine of the French Revolution, came
to her in a dream the night after Xiuqiu liberated her own feet (16–19). How-
ever, it is equally significant that Huang Tongli and Madame Roland sup-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

plied the “theory” that guided Xiuqiu’s subsequent actions, the latter by
transmitting three books and the former by explaining them.43
Huang Xiuqiu’s agency is established by her changing her name, from Xiu-
qiu (elegant autumn) to Xiuqiu (embroidering Earth). Brushing aside her
husband’s warning that if she unwraps her binding cloth she may not be
able to walk and that she will be laughed at, she declares: “As a person I
stand on the surface of the earth. If I fail to do something, I fail to become
a person; that would be truly laughable. Now I am letting out my feet; it is
nobody else’s business. If anyone laughs at me, not only am I not afraid, I
will persuade all the women in our village to let theirs out. . . . I may feel
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uncomfortable in the first couple of days, but in ten days or so, I will be
able to fly and run. Just watch” (13–14). What a statement of the ideal of
the volitional agent! Ironically, the logic of Huang Xiuqiu’s ambition is that
of the male Confucian gentleman as presented in the classic Great Learn-
ing: rouse one’s will, improve and brighten up (“embroider”) the village, then
the neighboring village; then the whole country can be transformed.
Having let her feet out, Huang Xiuqiu is present and active throughout
the story. She is poised, courageous, and wise, a fitting heroine for new
China. The change from bound to unbound is a point of departure for
Huang Xiuqiu and the novel. She is thrown into jail for seditious gender-
bending. Binding and unbinding are construed as social and political prob-
lems, not personal or bodily ones (145–46). After her release, however, there
is scarcely any mention of her feet. As a symbol footbinding is vital to the
story, but as an embodied practice or firsthand experience it is marginal if
not irrelevant. Footbinding is a symbol of her early humiliation, and unbind-
ing, a sign of her will to be a public agent. The unbound foot does recur,
however, as a sign of the new culture: Dr. Bi, a well-traveled woman doctor
from the south, is big-footed (dajiao, 58; tianzu is not used in the novel).44
And later, Huang Xiuqiu insists that her school will not admit footbound
girls (213–14). Above all, the bound foot is a metonymy of the congested
body, a symbol of the Chinese interior which was choking to death on its
own phlegm (81). It is not surprising that the novelist—a stickler for robust
circulation in the body—would name as his heroes explorers and colonial-
ists who circumnavigated and civilized the globe: Columbus, Magellan, and
Livingston (131–32, 224).
To the novelist, the bound foot is an external sign useful in its symbol-
ism, not an embodied reality. Xiuqiu’s feet cease to be an issue after she
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

“liberates” them: she travels, reasons, and acts, willfully ignoring the pile of
bent bones, the donut twist that could not be straightened or uncooked.
The body of the footbound woman appears as though feet were a change
of clothes that could be refashioned at will. Huang Xiuqiu’s agency is built
on her will at the expense of her absent body. Despite great attention paid
to her words, motives, and reasoning, she has no interiority. Herein lies the
male perspective of the novel. Contained by this male reformist perspec-
tive, the female voice in Huang Xiuqiu is an inﬂected voice that arises not
from the depth of her body but from the ephemeral realm of her will.
When the body does appear in the novel, it has the same instrumental
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and symbolic quality as Huang Xiuqiu’s feet. Hence Huang Tongli pontiﬁ-
cates: “A person has a body like a tree has branches. No matter how sorry a
shape the trunk is in, the branches would still grow. No matter how un-
worthy is the person, if he or she can eat bitterness and toughen his or her
will, no one can fail to be a useful vessel” (132). This is the functionalist
body described above by Tang’s wife, Shi Jingkai. The feeling and sensuous
body is erased. The body-as-machine makes for a convenient signpost whose
use is advertised on its surface. A signpost has no use for interiority.
Speciﬁcally, the body in Huang Xiuqiu is a signpost for displaying one’s
cultural allegiance. Shanghai girl students decked out in fashionable dress,
bobbed hair, and leather shoes are renegades who prostitute themselves to
fashionable causes and Westernized playboys (73–74, 76–77). The New
Party reformers, too, incurred Tang Yisuo’s wrath. Chanting slogans of “Love
my country; save my race,” they plotted to murder their parents. These hyp-
ocrites are always clad in Japanese-style hats or straw hats and leather shoes
(80, 119). “These people should be put on display at the Chinese Exposi-
tion, ridiculed by people from countries east and west” (80). Fully-clothed,
embodied people, male and female, have taken on the symbolic poignancy
of China’s national shame usually imputed onto one female body part, the
bound foot.

GU HONGMING:
THE HUMILIATION OF BEING LOOKED AT

Tang Yisuo’s suggested punishment of public display bespeaks an awareness

not only of the global context that China found itself in, but also of the
heightened importance of visuality in transactions between nations. To be
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the object of eyesight is an unequal exchange that often confers humilia-

tion. In particular, educated Chinese men’s awareness of being in the
transnational world took the form of an awareness of being-looked-at. Men’s
queues and women’s bound feet became eyesores only after they came un-
der the scrutiny of people in advanced nations. It is thus not surprising that
the ﬁrst generation of native reformers who rallied against footbinding had
traveled outside China or had extensive dealings with foreigners. We have
already seen the embarrassment expressed by Reverend Ye, MacGowan’s col-
league in Amoy. Other salient examples include Wang Tao (1828–97) and
Zheng Guanying (1842–1922).45
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 31
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The vantage point of reformers’ anti-footbinding discourse is thus situated

outside China; it is one of a Chinese man looking at China from the outside
in, and in so doing, he also looks back at the Westerner or Japanese who
looks down on him. This politics of seeing is inter-national, and eyesight—
physical and metaphorical—is instrumental to the imagining of a new Chi-
nese identity or ethnicity in a global context. Like the free-ﬂoating globe
that cannot be espied in full until one travels to space, modern Chinese na-
tional consciousness is by deﬁnition transnational in reference; it originated
from the gaze from the outside in.46 The narratives that then sprouted are
“gigantic” in their abilities to invent a point of view that lies outside the
boundaries of the national body.
If the anti-footbinding rhetoric was born of an oªshore vantage point,
the passion of the most famous “defender” of footbinding, Gu Hongming
(Ku Hung-ming, 1857–1928), is explicable only in the same transnational
context. Gu became an icon—the lotus lover—because no other educated
person in the modern world had such ridiculous taste. Gu’s love of small
feet, which he allegedly called China’s national essence, stems from the pecu-
liar nature of his nationalism, which was underscored by his even more pe-
culiar appearance. One of Gu’s students at Peking University, where he was
a professor of English literature, thus remembered him: “When we looked
at Gu Hongming after the establishment of the Republic [1912], on the sur-
face he did appear to be a stubborn conservative: a thinning queue dangled
at his back, a gown and a riding jacket from sometime in the Qianlong-
Jiaqing-Daoguang reigns [1736–1874] covered his body, an old and worn-
out hat sat on his head, and cloth booties on his feet. All were shabby and
dirty. His desolate appearance invited derision and laughter.”47 He looked
the part of his self-chosen identity after the fall of the imperium, that of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the leftover elder. His nationalism took the form of nostalgia for the last
emperor.
Ignored or maligned by generations of Chinese scholars, Gu’s antiquar-
ian tastes are seldom seen as what they really are: badges of authenticity for
an outsider. Critics and admirers alike overlook that Gu was an overseas
“Chinese”—a colonial subject no less—whose Chineseness had to be ac-
quired, tested, and worn on his sleeve. Gu was born in Penang, Malaya, to
a Chinese father who descended from a long line of professional elite in the
service of British colonizers. Gu remained resolutely silent about his mother,
about whom nothing is known, prompting widespread rumors that she was
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European.48 Educated in Europe (primarily Edinburgh and Leipzig) from

the age of thirteen to twenty-two, Gu had no home nation or culture to call

his own until he embraced Chinese culture and the Chinese patriotic view-
point with ferocity around 1879–81. Gu likened this turning point to a re-
ligious conversion, after which he was made to “become again a Chinaman.”49
Gu’s use of “again,” implying that he had a secure Chinese identity be-
fore his European education, was misleading. Gu grew up with only rudi-
mentary knowledge of Chinese language and cultural practices. Although
as a child he learned the Amoy dialect spoken by the “Babas” of Malaya,
he did not read a word of Chinese. A maverick proficient in Malay (his first
language), English, German, French, Japanese, Greek, and Latin, Gu for-
mally learned classical Chinese when he became a secretary and foreign
aªairs advisor to Zhang Zhidong, governor-general of Hunan and Hubei,
at age thirty.50 Some legends describe how Zhang hired tutors to teach him
a text as rudimentary as the Analects; others relay how he sought to master
the language by reciting the arcane Kangxi Dictionary. Decades later, his
students reported that the characters he scribbled on the blackboard often
had missing or extra strokes. So accustomed was the public to thinking of
him as a Chinese scholar that when admirers asked for his calligraphy, a
customary flattery, they were shocked by the awkward proportion and spac-
ing of his scrawl.51
In fact, Gu was schooled in a diªerent learned tradition: a disciple of
Thomas Carlyle, his prose was said to rival that of Matthew Arnold. Most
heartening to Chinese readers were his correspondence with Tolstoy, his
meeting with Somerset Maugham, and his being the subject of philosopher
fan clubs in Germany. In gossip and bantering, the Chinese loved to relate
his ability to beat the Westerner at his own game and to stand the latter on
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

his head. For example, Gu, who introduced Goethe to China, was said to
read German newspapers upside down on a train because otherwise it would
be too boring; his genius in English involved the recitation of Paradise Lost
backward ﬁfty times. Invariably, the unsuspecting foreigner who set out to
ridicule him was shamed.52 Gu’s Western learning, then, was a matter of
nationalistic pride in the eyes of his compatriots. His valorization of classi-
cal Chinese, couched in terms of his infamous opposition to the introduc-
tion of vernacular literature, was the homage of a hybrid prodigal son. A
tribute to him that circulated in Beijing expressed the sentiment: “After the
Boxer indemnities, if there weren’t a Gu Hongming propping up the face
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 33
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of our country, those Westerners wouldn’t even think that the Chinese [are
advanced enough to] have noses on our faces!”53
From personal experience, Gu was acutely aware of the linkage of visu-
ality with national pride in the global world. His liberal colleague at Peking
University, Hu Shi, related a story Gu told of his early days in Scotland:
“Everyday I stepped outside, children on the streets followed me and
shouted, ‘Look! A Chinaman’s pigtail.’” Another story relates that when
Gu disembarked at Southampton, a hotel maid mistook him for a girl be-
cause of his queue and tried to stop him from entering the men’s bathroom.
Later in life, as if to spite the Europeans, Gu wore his queue as “a badge and
insignia—almost a religious symbol—the flag of Chinese nationality.”54 The
fact that Chineseness was an identity that Gu self-consciously embraced,
as a response to being ridiculed, is often lost on his critics who condemned
his support for the monarchy, concubinage, and footbinding. While we will
return to Gu’s ultraconservatism below, here it is important to recognize the
distinction that Gu made between “to observe others” and “to be observed
by others.”
Gu once was turned oª by the smirk on the face of a finely-attired late-
Qing o‹cial whose photograph appeared in a newspaper. He recounted (or
perhaps invented) a lesson about appearance and class he learned in England
as a teenager. One day he chanced upon an aristocrat wearing a coat em-
broidered in gold and a hat adorned with bouquets sitting in a handsome
horse-drawn carriage. Before he could finish feasting his eyes, a servant
emerged from the market and drove the carriage away. When Gu mentioned
the scene to his landlord, the latter told him that the gentleman in finery
was in fact the servant and the shabby servant, the master. “It is because an
exalted person only wants to observe others, not to seek to please others.”
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Gu concluded with a story closer to home: “Actors have always been de-
spised according to our Chinese custom; it is exactly because their daily ex-
ercise consists of ‘seeking the other’s gaze.’”55 Politicians who publicized their
photographs—who oªered themselves visually to the public—were thus
inverting the hierarchy between high and low. So sensitive was Gu to the
power inequalities between the seeing and the seen that he couched them
in terms of the starkness of class distinctions.
Gu’s valorization of concealment or self-eªacement should not be taken
too literally, for after all he acquired global fame by ﬂaunting a queue in Re-
publican Beijing. Observers have noted that Gu was a born contrarian who
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delighted in scandalous provocation. Perhaps the same spirit accounts in

part for Gu’s love of the bound foot. There is also a deeper nationalistic logic
underneath Gu’s defense of traditional Chinese culture, as embodied in a
superior Chinese femininity. In two crucial aspects Gu shared the premises
of his progressive colleagues who championed tianzu and new culture: a be-
lief in women’s status as the marker of a civilization and a profound under-
standing of the humiliation implied in being the subject of unilateral gaze.

RESISTING THE GAZE: IDEAL WOMANHOOD

The “society women” of the West, Gu wrote in 1904, “exempliﬁed the de-
cline and degeneration of European civilization in the present age” in their
robust, gender-bending masculinity. “In China, these busybodies have tried
to reform our wonderful women with small feet” so that the latter would
turn into the same type of manlike women. In a rare written defense of foot-
binding, Gu explained that he saw it as female self-protection: life in China
was so impoverished that women were forced to bind their feet, thus ex-
cusing themselves from the most exhausting forms of labor.56 In contrast
to the chaotic gender relations in Europe, a gender harmony built on male-
female distinctions signals the superiority of Chinese civilization.
The feminine ideal in China, Gu argued, consists of a selﬂess devotion
to others. The perfect woman is at once cheerful (“debonair”) and bash-
ful.57 Although he did not articulate it, following this logic, footbinding
can be understood as the bodily expression of the most admirable quality
of Chinese women: passivity and serenity. Just as the shabbily clad English
servant who was the true master, the demure Chinese woman was exalted
in status in refusing to draw attention to herself. Gu’s love of footbinding
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

thus rests on an idealized womanhood that is saintlike and sovereign, a sphere

of inviolability in a turbulent age.
That the two “defenses” he furnished for footbinding—as self-protection
from hard labor and as an expression of passive virtue—are contradictory
does not matter. Nor does it matter that his views are at odds with the so-
ciological reality of his times. The historian Hui-min Lo, the most author-
itative and clear-eyed biographer of Gu, has observed that the colonial plan-
tation in which Gu grew up was “in the backwoods of the island [Penang ]”;
he was “surrounded by people, including his parents, who knew next to noth-
ing about China or Chinese culture beyond fanciful hearsay and dubious
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 35
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versions of occasional rituals performed by hired Tamils.” Therefore, as an

adult Gu suªered the need—and enjoyed the freedom—to invent a picture
of a pristine, timeless China to suit his politics. “With his literary gifts and
exceptional imagination, Ku Hung-ming [Gu Hongming ] created for him-
self a picture of his people and their civilisation which could only ‘exist’ in
wishful thinking.”58
What kind of a lotus lover was Gu Hongming in everyday life? In their
remembrances published in the early 1930s, not long after Gu’s death in 1928,
colleagues Hu Shi and Zhou Zuoren as well as his student Luo Jialun, all
famous intellectuals associated with new culture, did not mention Gu’s
predilection. Accounts that appeared in Taiwan in the 1970s were more
graphic. These stories talked of his two daily medicines: his wife, allegedly
a footbound Hunanese beauty, was his stimulant whereas his natural-footed
Japanese concubine was his sedative. Whenever Gu suªered from writer’s
block, he would summon his wife to his side and squeeze her “lamb’s trot-
ter.” Gu was also said to have muttered a seven-word mantra that summa-
rized the mysterious beauty of bound feet: “slender, small, pointy, arched,
fragrant, soft, and straight.” One anecdote had him equating the delight of
bound feet to eating fried fermented beancurd and rotten eggs, native del-
icacies that no foreigner would touch.59
Given how famous or infamous Gu Hongming was as a lotus lover, it is
surprising that he did not discuss it at length in his writings, that none of
his contemporaries described it in writing, and that when it was reported
later, the limited number of anecdotes were reiterated and embellished in
subsequent accounts. Instead of trying to separate Gu Hongming’s person
from legend, it is more fruitful to focus on the two interlocking processes
of mythmaking surrounding Gu: his own idealization of “traditional China”
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

and the public’s fascination with his idealization. His love of footbinding
was always recited as part and parcel of his alleged apologies of concubi-
nage, caning, infanticide, eight-legged essays, opium smoking, spitting in
public—all signs of Chinese backwardness perpetuated by a century of mis-
sionary writings.60 Although few Chinese readers had stomach for these
vices, they relished the ridiculous attempt of someone talking back in a
quixotic gesture of deﬁance: What you take as national shame, we take as
national pride.
Such is the irony of Gu Hongming, born a British colonial subject and
a descendent of compradors who devoted his entire life to ranting about
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imperialism. So radical was his critique that he had to manufacture and idol-
ize a perfect China before the violence of colonial contact. The radical impli-
cations of this posture lie in his tactic of exaggerating the distance between
China and the rest of the world: China is to be judged not by Enlighten-
ment standards, but by its own deﬁnitions of womanhood, justice, and hu-
man value. This deliberate distancing stems from the same nationalistic im-
pulse as the reformers’ eagerness to seek parity by the “catching up” rhetoric
embedded in their linear history of the nation as we have seen in Xu Ke and
Tang Yisuo.
Gu was clearly not a feminist who championed women’s liberation; but
in being a defender of Chinese culture he was a nationalist, even a patriot.
His idealized Chinese woman, in fact, was a metaphor of the sovereign Chi-
nese nation who could resist not only the foreigner’s gaze but also his way
of seeing. Indeed, Gu Hongming was an even more fervent nationalist than
such reformers as Zheng Guanying or Liang Qichao because he refused to
take Western standards of progress and civilization as Chinese yardsticks.
He alone could talk back in German, French, or English and declare them
parochial tongues. When footbinding found its sole defender in such an
odd character, we can only conclude that it had ceased to be a prestigious
or even relevant practice during the ﬁrst two decades of the twentieth cen-
tury. Therein lies the success of the tianzu movement that Reverend Mac-
Gowan had called into being over a quarter-century earlier in Gu Hongming’s
ancestral home of Amoy.

In sum, the linguistic category of tianzu gained currency in a key transi-

tional period in modern history: the 1890s–1900s. Under the watchful eyes
of foreign powers, the Qing multiethnic empire sought to reinvent itself as
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

a modern nation-state; Chinese culture lost its footing and became an open
question. In this era of uncertainties, the discourse of tianzu oªered moral
and ontological certainty. It did so in part by way of its logic of assertion-
negation: the new “natural feet” became imaginable only by standing the
native practice of chanzu on its head. As such, the rhetorical power of tianzu
is both destructive and constructive.
The constructive power of tianzu manifested itself most strongly in the
progressive view of history it facilitated: modernity as negation of tradition.
The discourse of tianzu engendered not only a new valuation of the body,
but also a new way of looking at the world, hence of being in the world. In
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GIGANTIC HISTORIES 37
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speciﬁc terms, the tianzu movement promulgated an enlightenment epis-

teme: one founded on faith in circulation within the individual body, in the
social body, and on the surface of the earth. As such it ushered in a global
awareness of heightened visuality, a nationalism built on strong bodies, and
a social vision of gender equality.
The establishment of the new, however, required the denigration or dis-
missal of the old. So overwhelming was the destructive power of tianzu that
we seldom take stock of the detritus littering its path: the stubborn body of
Huang Xiuqiu, the pastoral yearnings of Shi Jingkai, the anticolonial conser-
vatism of Gu Hongming. They are out of sync and out of place. Nor have
we paused and analyzed the two mechanisms of the rhetorical power of the
tianzu discourse, containment and visual exposé. The strategy of containment
works by minimizing perspectives or voices that do not ﬁt, as we have seen
in this chapter. In its power to miniaturize other views of the body and the
world, tianzu is integral to gigantic histories of the nation in the globe.
The strategy of visual exposé, in turn, works by shaming the other by sub-
jecting her to one’s unilateral gaze. In this chapter, we have seen how this
visual logic was rooted in the humiliation that China and the Chinese suf-
fered under the patronizing eyes of missionaries and foreigners, which Gu
Hongming keenly felt. By the beginning of the Republican era, chanzu had
been thoroughly photographed and dissected, hence exposed and discred-
ited as China’s national shame. (In chapter 2 we will examine how the Chi-
nese reformers relied on the same strategy of exposé in anti-footbinding ral-
lies, as if the women could be humiliated into submission.)
The thesis of this chapter is that the rhetoric and discourse of tianzu con-
tributed to the extinction of the aura of footbinding. The unquestioned ac-
ceptance of the tianzu episteme by such a range of writers as Liang Qichao,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Xu Ke, Tang Yisuo, and even to a signiﬁcant extent Gu Hongming signals

that footbinding had lost all its cultural prestige or justiﬁcation by the 1910s.
On the levels of social practice and individual reception, however, the order-
liness of the enlightenment episteme broke down. As people listened to
speeches in stadium rallies or glanced at a poster on a lamppost, they took
from them only those partial truths that ﬁt their lives and outlooks, essen-
tially miniaturizing the gigantic narratives by cutting them down to size. A
fuller assessment of the anti-footbinding movement, therefore, must also
include an examination of the local conditions of its implementation from
the 1900s to the 1930s, to which we move in the next chapter.
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THE BODY INSIDE OUT

The Practice of Fangzu, 1900s–1930s

The tianzu movement acquired national urgency in 1898, when the reformer
Kang Youwei submitted a passionate memorial to the Guangxu emperor,
urging him to ban footbinding because it put China at a disadvantage in
global competition.1 Encouraged by the furor, a Madame Shen spoke up
about her suªering in a letter to Xue Shaohui (1855–1911), editor-in-chief
of the journal Chinese Girls’ Progress (Nü xuebao). Xue, a classically educated
gentrywoman, was one of eight founders of the Chinese Girls’ School (Nü
xuetang), which was masterminded by none other than Liang Qichao, au-
thor of “On Women’s Education,” and Jing Yuanshan, head of the Shang-
hai Telegraph Bureau. Other founders included Zheng Guanying and Kang
Youwei’s brother Guangren, all early agitators against footbinding. Xue’s hus-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

band and his brother, Chen Jitong, both graduates of the Naval Academy
in Fuzhou, as well as Jitong’s French wife, were also part of the pioneering
group.2 Considering Xue’s own activism and the Western-learning back-
ground of her family and colleagues, Madame Shen had probably expected
her to chime in with a powerful condemnation of footbinding.

XUE SHAOHUI: “NEITHER A HORSE NOR AN ASS”

Yet Xue Shaohui had a mind of her own. In her response to Shen’s com-
plaints, Xue expressed opinions about footbinding that are so far removed
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from the enlightenment perspective that they were as singular in her times
as they are today. “Your intentions are admirable, but your words seem ex-
cessive,” she began. She then proceeded to stand two prevalent arguments
of the anti-footbinding discourse on their heads: that it was not sanctioned
by tradition and that women with bound feet are femmes fatales. Citing a
spate of standard allusions to small feet in classical texts, Xue adopted the
method of philologists to argue that footbinding did enjoy precedent in an-
cient times. (As it happens, she was wrong.)3
In disputing the tianzu polemics Xue’s goal was not to defend footbind-
ing, as Gu Hongming had done, but to introduce a vantage point that had
been missing in the gigantic histories: a subjective view from inside the
woman’s body. She began by rebutting one of Kang Youwei’s objections,
that footbinding detracted from parental love: “[A parent’s] compassion is
not harmed by ear piercing; how can we say that parents are unkind? In the
bed chambers [the joy of footbinding ] exceeds having your husband paint
your eyebrows; it is not that men are disrespectful [of women].” With in-
direction and tact Xue voiced a rare woman’s perspective that had not been
heard before on how footbinding was conducive to conjugal pleasures.
Furthermore, the contributions that a woman can make to her family and
country depend on “her ten ﬁngers pushing a needle and thread year after
year; the companionship she shares with her spouse, and the diligence with
which she manages the household and the kitchen.” If this seems a tradi-
tional view of female virtues, Xue added that a woman’s self-strengthening
(ziqiang ) is rooted in her education, her way with “poetry and books.”4 Her
point is that footbinding is a trivial, private matter; bound or unbound, a
woman’s foot is simply irrelevant to her mission in life and her contribu-
tions to the nation.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

“Those who think that footbinding is heresy or perverse, what would they
say about the current fad of small waists in Western countries, which has
not resulted in mass starvation, or that the practice of blackening teeth has
survived in Japan, without being detrimental to health?” Although the global
comparative viewpoint was common, Xue’s logic was not. Her intention
was not to make the usual relativist argument that “we have our vice but
so do they,” but to call attention to the power of culture—what Pierre Bour-
dieu would call “habitus”—in sustaining a meaningful everyday life. The
sediment of conventions makes a practice that appears outrageous to an out-
sider seem entirely natural to the insider.
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Xue Shaohui did not find bound feet admirable. They constituted a form
of cultural contrivance, and “no matter how dainty and pitiful the ‘twin
hooks’ [shuanggou] and ‘lotus petals’ [lianban] may look, the ‘curved arch’
[gongwan] barely inches long makes for clumsy and hesitant steps.” In the
transitional period she witnessed, “the rise and fall of tastes are as whimsi-
cal as switching from salty to sour, the demure and the trendy each follows
her own fashion of decoration. Therefore, why shouldn’t it be that it is all
right to have bound feet, just as it is all right not to bind?” Xue’s tolerance
stems from her appreciation of the stubbornness of bodies: “Now they sug-
gest that those who have already bound should all let their feet out at once.
But no magical pill can grow a new set of bones; a severed head cannot be
reattached. If you insist on bending crooked into straight by force, you cre-
ate something that is neither a horse nor an ass. How would that improve
customs and reform society?”5
Xue’s views, which construe the body as both marginal and essential to a
woman, seem contradictory at first glance. The shape of a woman’s body is
irrelevant to her ability to read books and study mathematics; her value as
a person and a citizen depends in large part on her education, her mind,
and her will. At the same time, Xue shows a rare appreciation for the uni-
directional nature of time’s arrow, an irrevocability of processes that defines
the body’s physical limits. It is this understanding, seldom voiced by the
male anti-footbinding advocates, that defines Xue’s female sensitivity. This
sensitivity allows her to transcend the moral certainty embedded in the
“tianzu-good: chanzu-bad” formulation. Instead of adopting a judgmental
attitude about what other people should do with their bodies, Xue coun-
seled: leave the women alone. In so doing she anticipated the promises and
problems of fangzu (letting feet out) as a political and social movement.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

FROM TIANZU TO FANGZU

It is unfortunate that Xue Shaohui’s appreciation for the staying power of

culture or an embodied way of life was out of step with the quickening rev-
olutionary clamor around her. Caught up in a sense of urgency in the 1900s
as the dynasty was breathing its last, reformers and revolutionaries sought
to overhaul old customs overnight, making the “liberation” of feet a mat-
ter of life and death for the nation.6 If tianzu was an abstract, disembodied
discourse, the social agenda of fangzu was pragmatic and locally situated.
ForEBSCO
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THE BODY INSIDE OUT 41
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only of women’s habits of thinking but also of the stubbornness of their

bodies. In this confrontation, new views of and knowledge about female
bodies were created, as we will see, as were new female subjectivities.
The activities and targets of anti-footbinding societies that flourished in
the late 1890s and 1900s fall under two rubrics. The first involves a covenant
of patriarchs, with members vowing that they would not bind their daugh-
ters’ feet, nor would they bring in a tiny-footed daughter-in-law. As family
heads and community leaders, they took it upon themselves to transform
social customs. The focus expanded to other-directed education and prop-
aganda eªorts as time went on, and old women as well as young girls be-
came the targets of intense propaganda work. The fangzu message was im-
parted to the public first and foremost by the traditional medium of literature.
Hence government notices were plastered on street corners and city walls
in railroad towns in the north; the Tianzu hui reported that it distributed
a hundred thousand pamphlets and tracts in Shanghai, Chengtu, and Xi’an
by 1904; and numerous essay contests were sponsored by the anti-binding
societies.7 These, together with the newsletters and annual reports of the orga-
nizations, inundated the market with a wealth of information about foot-
binding, much of which had never been committed to writing before.
Following a long-standing Confucian association of visuality with
woman—pictures were supposed to appeal to illiterates and females—many
of the tracts are illustrated. Perhaps more than the proliferation of words, it
is in the circulation of visual images that the anti-binding societies became
an agent of perceptual change. Visual representation of the bound foot, even
fully shod, was provocative to Chinese eyes; the exposure of bare feet was
taboo even in the ars erotica before the nineteenth century. The introduc-
tion of Western imaging techniques, photography and later X-ray radiog-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

raphy, undermined this visual taboo almost overnight. In the 1860s, com-
mercial photographers in Shanghai paid or coerced poor women to unwrap
their binding cloth, producing the ﬁrst images of the bare bound foot. Régine
Thiriez, a historian of early photography in China and Europe, has noted
that both the transaction and the images were considered risqué. In spite of
it, or perhaps because of it, by 1865 it was customary to include at least one
image of Chinese vice— opium smoking, footbinding, or execution—in
photo albums that tourists would buy in Shanghai, Yokohama, or Paris. Pre-
sented as part of timeless “Chinese customs,” a small number of images of
naked feet were recycled into the 1910s and 1920s.8
Missionary doctors
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in scientiﬁc treatises published in medical journals. Having studied ampu-

tated feet and live specimens, general practitioners and surgeons illustrated
their findings with drawings and later also with regular and X-ray photo-
graphs (see fig. 3).9 Both the commercial photographs and the medical re-
ports had a restricted, primarily Western circulation. But images have a so-
cial life that reverberates into unlikely corners even without direct contact.
Chinese scholars might not have souvenir albums in their living rooms, but
they could feel the humiliation in their bones. Kang Youwei revealed in his
1898 memorial that “foreigners have long taken photographs of [our vices]
and laughed at us, calling us barbaric. And the most laughable matter that
brings us the most humiliation is footbinding. Your humble servant is deeply
ashamed of it.”10
Most ironically, the anti-binding crusaders were the first to utilize these
shameful images and promulgate them to a massive Chinese audience at
the turn of the century.11 In due time, the parameters of what was permis-
sible to look at expanded for Chinese viewers. The unseen and the indecent
became an everyday sight; the female body was turned inside out. Thiriez
has discerned a momentum of exposé in photographic portraits of Chinese
women: “[S]ettings and postures generally became more daring as the cen-
tury drew to an end and a new one dawned.”12 When formerly provocative
postures became familiar, the envelope was pushed, resulting in even more
revealing images. In this way, too, the anti-footbinding societies circulated
new visual knowledge about feet and renewed the provocation by more bla-
tant displays from the 1900s to the 1920s.
In heralding a public ritual—the rally—the anti-footbinding movement
became an especially eªective venue for the transmission of new, visceral
knowledge about footbinding. These rallies, held in churches, schools, gov-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ernment o‹ces, and athletic grounds, were highly theatrical performances.

They worked by putting the female body on display, sometimes with props
and sometimes without. Since natural, unbound feet are not particularly
interesting to look at, they have no shock value. To provoke people to action,
the fangzu movement resorted to a spectatorship of its opposite—chanzu,
now presented with a live specimen or with models ranging from realistic
to grotesque. The Shanghai Tianzu hui, founded in 1895, heralded public
meetings with props and visual aids such as wooden or plaster models of a
truncated foot with the four digits neatly folded down, toenails painted white
(see ﬁg. 4).13 The more familiar the previously taboo sight of the bare foot
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became, the organizers seem to imply, the easier it would be to imagine fe-
male pain, and the more natural or desirable tianzu would appear.

SCHOOL-BOUND:
THE GLORIOUS RECOVERY OF CAI AIHUA

In the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century, tianzu became domesticated as

part of the daily lexicon as local schools began to stage fangzu rallies. In De-
cember 1904, one such meeting was held at the Germinating Enlightenment
School (Fameng xuetang) in Daixi, a prosperous town in Wuxi county, Zhe-
jiang, to commemorate the liberation of a girl’s feet. Two reports in the Tocsin
Daily ( Jingzhong ribao) oªer a fascinating glimpse into the novelty of such
public rituals and the recruitment of females as both the passive exhibit and
the speaking subject, not to mention the gap in the strategies and concerns
of female and male anti-binding crusaders.
As described by the unnamed reporter:

Girl student Cai Aihua was enrolled in the Germinating Enlightenment School
in spring. Having been educated for less than a year, she has already acquired
“civilized thoughts” [wenming sixiang ]. On the fifth day of this month, [her
teachers] Xu Zehua, Lin Menghuan, and Cai Lünong gave speeches vehemently
denouncing [tengchen] the harm of footbinding during their ninth children’s
assembly. Then on the fifteenth, the president of the Anti-Footbinding Society
in Lili [a town in the neighboring Wujiang county, Jiangsu province], Mrs. Ni
Mu’ou, mailed her a gift of patterns for new shoes and booties, as well as
instructions [chenshe] for letting feet out. The student thus came to see and
feel much, and resolved to let her feet out. She decided to start that very day,
which coincidentally was another day oª [days ending with five were off-days].
Therefore, after the tenth children’s assembly that afternoon, a commemora-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

tive meeting was called in the same venue. Cai Lünong gave her a gift of four
words: “Gloriously recovering a lost object” [guangfu guwu].14

We surmise that these words were written on a banner or a scroll.

These are curious words, in Chinese as well as in English, and we will
elaborate on their implications on the making of the female speaking sub-
ject below. Su‹ce it here to note the primacy of words in male-initiated
anti-binding eªorts. Reformist teachers and reporters lectured on the harm
of footbinding, composed lyrics, and wrote articles, all integral parts of their
enlightenment project. The word for “vehemently denounce” (tengchen, lit-
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erally, painstaking-disclose) conveys a sense of urgency that propels one to

speak up. In contrast, Mrs. Ni of the Lili Anti-Footbinding Society displayed
a female insider’s perspective in her sensitivity to the practical nuisance of
unbinding that is reminiscent of Xue Shaohui’s. The explanation (chenshe)
she provided was in the form of practical instructions, together with pat-
terns for making shoes. In other words, disclosing, speaking, and instruct-
ing (chen) comprised the operative mode of male and female crusaders alike.
But women like Mrs. Ni showed concern for the material needs of the girl,
for she understood that the care and maintenance of the feet would not end
with their “liberation.” This perspective contrasts with the male crusaders’
view of the female body as an external object that can be lost and recovered,
as in the eyes of Cai Lünong, or manipulated like a machine, as in the eyes
of Tang Yisou. Mrs. Ni, also known by her maiden name Wang Shouzhi,
was one of several Chinese female founders of anti-footbinding societies.15
Adopting a structured format as precise as a laboratory report, the sec-
ond version of this story, dated December 31, 1904, is subdivided into three
headings: (1) Rationale [of Cai’s decision to unbind]; (2) Making Speeches;
(3) Singing. Before turning to Cai’s motives, we may take note of the exag-
gerated tone of the meeting:

(2) Making Speeches: First, the “huizhu” [the protagonist of the assembly]
Cai Aihua vehemently denounced [tengchen] the suªering and harm of
footbinding. [She said words like] starting today the binders will be un-
wrapped. Second, teacher Xu Zehua ascended the podium [dengtan] and
made a speech; so overjoyed was he that he looked crazed. He ﬁrst congratu-
lated the “huizhu” and admonished other girls to follow, so that they can
compete with each other in gloriously recovering the lost body [guangfu guti].
He also admonished the “huizhu” not to pride herself on her tianzu, but to
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

show pity on her community [tongqun], persuade them, so as to deliver the

myriad beings to the other shore [pudu zhongsheng ]. Together they may jump
from the ﬁre pit and ascend the world of supreme happiness. Third, the head
teacher Cai Lünong ascended the podium and oªered congratulations. He
deliberately praised the “huizhu” profusely, so as to make those who have yet
to unbind jealous. He also admonished the boy students not to marry foot-
bound women. After the speech, he was so pleased that his glee was palpable.
(882–83)

Teacher Xu and Teacher Cai both looked possessed. Such exaggerated emo-
tions beﬁt a Christian baptism or revival meeting, although here, in the secular
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setting of a school, instead of sermons there were speeches and in the place
of hymns, a song on the joy of letting feet out. Cai Aihua did not confess
her sins but did speak of a crime being inﬂicted on her. Against the Chris-
tian tenor and the conversion narrative that structures the meeting, the re-
porter’s persistent use of Buddhist terms appears incongruous. The rituals
of “ascending the podium” and “making speeches” (yanshuo) are borrowed
from Buddhist liturgy; Cai Aihua’s missions of “deliver[ing ] the myriad be-
ings to the other shore” and “ascend[ing ] the world of supreme happiness”
are compassionate acts of the Boddhisattva.
Indeed, so alien is the spectacle of a public assembly organized around the
bodily state of a young girl that the imported Christian liturgy, which pro-
vided some of the ritual forms, did not su‹ce. Buddhist words and con-
cepts were inserted to lend familiarity. The meeting ended with a third inspira-
tional ritual, this time borrowed from modern political rallies with imperial
overtones: “(3) Singing: Teacher Xu Zehua led the entire class of scores of
boys and girls, together with guests and head teachers, through a chorus of
‘The Joy of Letting Feet Out’ three times. At the end of the refrain, Xu ex-
claimed: ‘Cai Aihua wansui [ten thousand years]! Daixi womanhood [nüjie]
wansui! The future of Chinese women [nüzi] wansui! Wansui! Wanwansui!’
Meeting dismissed” (883). Earlier Cai Aihua was being compared to a Bod-
dhisattva, now she was being saluted as the goddess of the new republic.
One longs to know more about Cai Aihua, who was said to have “bar-
baric” parents but a “civilized” brother, none other than the head teacher
Cai Lünong. The reporter described her struggles leading up to the crucial
moment of unbinding in a long passage entitled “(1) Rationale,” but it rings
hollow. Under the inﬂuence of her brother, for years she had harbored “nat-
ural feet thoughts” (tianzu sixiang ), but she hesitated because her resolu-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

tion was weak and she did not want to be a vanguard. Then she was moved
upon hearing the speeches at the children’s assembly, where Xu called foot-
binding a shameful, self-degrading act of “shaping your body after prosti-
tutes and actors” (changyou qi shen). Then her brother and Xu lobbied her
intensely for days. Finally Mrs. Ni’s gift sealed the deal, and Cai was ush-
ered onto the podium to broadcast the pain and harm of binding to her
classmates (882).
The narrative of budding awareness and hesitation giving way to resolu-
tion and action recalls that of a Christian testimony detailing a believer’s
journey from ignorance to salvation. Cai’s conversion to the gospel of tianzu
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was construed as the result of personal resolution and external guidance, al-
beit without divine intervention. Yet the reader does not really know her
inner struggles, her feelings of pain and jubilation. She was said to have spo-
ken, but she did not say much and her actual words were not quoted. She was
construed as a speaking subject with an agency of her own, but she appeared
more as a spectacle on the podium, even an Exhibit A for Daixi womanhood.
Earlier Cai was said to have recovered a “lost object” and a “lost body.” In
a third variation of the “gloriously recovering” formulation, the reporter
praised her as “a Columbus who gloriously recovers tianzu” in Daixi (“guang-
fu tianzu zhi Gelunbo”; 882). As a navigator of uncharted oceans and “dis-
coverer” of new lands, Columbus was a hero to late-Qing reformers, as we
have seen in Huang Xiuqiu. A Columbus who recovers something is either
a mixed metaphor or a contradiction; this curious expression thus betrays
an ontological ambiguity of tianzu as a new creation and as an improvement
on a previous state. These three variants of “glorious recovery” are premised
on two opposite views of the female body. To call Cai Aihua the Columbus
of Daixi who “recovers tianzu” is to evoke an image of the female body as
a piece of pliant dough. Tianzu refers to a primordial state of not-binding.
The personal history of the embodied self—whether a girl’s feet were once
bound and let out or never bound—becomes irrelevant. This view of tianzu
as Columbus’s exploit thus operates on an erasure of time and history.
The other two formulations, tianzu as the recovery of a lost body or a
lost object, locate the female body in history but insist that despite having
been broken or lost, the “natural” body can be recovered by female will. All
three formulations, therefore, privilege female will over the physicality of
her body. Moreover, in framing the problem of unbinding as that of “glo-
riously recovering,” the male reformers used a nationalistic term that equates
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

female bodies with lost territories or sovereignty. In this way, female bodies
were made central to the project of national salvation, but only as a meta-
phor outside the realm of a woman’s embodied experience.
If the conversion narrative erases the physicality of the body, it drama-
tizes the conﬂict felt by girls who found a new authority structure in male
(and occasionally female) teachers and activists while being beholden to the
old mores of mothers and grandmothers. What happened to Cai Aihua when
she returned home after the rally? Did her mother scold her and apply the
binders even tighter? Did she guard her recovered body with heightened
resolution, having been emboldened by her public speaking experience (and
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what exactly did she say)? Did she put the binding cloths on and oª in a
seesawing battle of parental and brotherly will? As we leave Daixi to meet
other females whose bodies have become templates for national histories
and whose privacy was put on display, we long to hear the words she was
supposed to have uttered that fateful day.

THE JOY OF LETTING FEET OUT

The song that Xu Zehua led the students in singing was composed by Cai
Aihua’s brother, Lünong. Perhaps taking clues from his sister, the song in-
structs on the practical procedures of letting feet out instead of celebrating
tianzu as an unproblematic natural state:

The joy of letting feet out, what joy!

Please listen to my letting-feet-out song.
Stuª cotton wool between toes,
Walk steadily on ﬂat ground.
Wash feet with vinegar and water,
Stop using a long binding cloth.
Shorten the cloth by one foot every seven days,
Take special care for one month.
Go to sleep without the binders,
So that the blood can circulate.
Once you let your feet out,
Don’t be afraid of troubles that others make.
The joy of letting feet out, what joy!
Let’s all sing the letting-feet-out song. (883)

Although we are not told of Cai Aihua’s age, since she was enrolled in school
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

for less than a year, she was unlikely to be older than ten, hence her feet
must have been in their initial stage of binding. These simple instructions,
based on the principle of gradually reducing pressure on the bent foot and
enhancing blood circulation, would probably su‹ce.16 Fangzu for young
girls like Cai was merely a step-by-step procedure; once they resolved to
unbind, they were likely to “recover” the function of their feet if not their
entire shape.
Older women, however, had to battle bodies more resistant. For them,
fangzu was not a one-time procedure but an ongoing bodily state that is
not inherently diªerent from chanzu: never completely successful; always a
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work in progress. A leaflet published by the Letting Feet Out Society (Fangzu
hui) in Suzhou and addressed to adult and old women presents a realistic
picture of the hurdles involved in letting feet out. Written in the first-person
by twenty named ladies “who all had been binding our feet since young,
and only recently began to let them out,” the tract details five methods that
they had tested on themselves: (1) making looser stockings and shoes; (2)
gradually getting rid of the binding cloth; (3) straightening the toes and the
ball of the foot; (4) applying cures for the broken skin and corns that would
accompany the letting out ordeal; (5) getting rid of the habit of wearing in-
ner high heels.17
The twenty ladies gave methodical and practical instructions that only a
woman with bound feet could fathom. For example, they suggested mak-
ing a series of shoes and stockings, each half an inch longer and two-to-
three-tenths of an inch wider than the last; making the soles of the shoes
one-to-two-tenths of an inch wider than the feet could improve stability
(72). This was never done for shoes for bound feet, as it would make the
feet appear bigger. The instructions for doing away with the binding cloth,
likewise, are based on a gradual inversion of the familiar ways of binding.
Do not discard the binding cloth overnight, as the sudden surge in circula-
tion would cause the feet to swell. Keep the four digits loosely bent by wrap-
ping them once or twice with a short length of cloth, two to three feet long,
tucking the remainder under the heels. Originally, to achieve a small pair
of feet, the proper way of wrapping the toes was from top to bottom, or
clockwise from the outside in (shunrao) for the left foot but the opposite
( fanrao) for the right foot. Now since the goal was to reverse the binding,
the loose wrappers should be applied backwards: clockwise for the right foot
and counter-clockwise for the left. After six months, there would be no need
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

for the binding cloth (72–73).

The method of dispensing with inner high heels (li gaodi) also reveals (to
us) the hidden mechanics of binding feet as it instructs the practitioner to
unbind. Inner high heels are triangular wooden lifts that women slipped
onto the heel area of their shoes. Not only did they make the bound feet
appear smaller by elevating the heel, but in helping to distribute the body
weight more evenly they also provided support and comfort. The Suzhou
ladies counseled substituting pieces of cardboard or cattail bags stacked to
a similar height. Since these materials are soft, the lift would ﬂatten upon
prolong wearing, when it would be replaced. As the arch of the foot grad-
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ually flattens, the paper or cattail lift would eventually be rendered unnec-
essary (74–75).18 Such detailed instructions were never committed to writ-
ing when footbinding was a viable practice because they were transmitted
orally and demonstrated corporeally. The availability of written instructions
to unbind feet (and to bind, by inference) in itself signaled the creation
of new knowledge about women’s bodies and new venues of its national
circulation.
The meticulous concern of the Suzhou ladies is manifested in their rec-
ommendation of a foreign oil, “yellow Vaseline” (huang huashiling ), as the
best relief for corns and calluses that would ensue from the torturous re-
versals inflicted on one’s feet. But if a woman did not have access to a for-
eign pharmacy, the oil from the bones of a freshly killed goat would su‹ce
(74). Finally, they invited all women who desired further instructions or
suªered discomfort to drop by during their consultation hours, held on the
fifteenth day of every month after three o’clock at Wang’s residence, Five
Dragon Hall Lane, Ten Spring Street, inside the Feng Gate in the city of
Suzhou. Those who lived elsewhere were welcome to write (76). While invit-
ing other “comrades” (tongzhi) to share their methods, the Suzhou ladies
vouched that old and young had let their feet out successfully using their
method, including an old lady in her seventies or eighties. “The comfort
and convenience of letting feet out are comparable to a blind man regain-
ing his sight—they are beyond words. Nor can a person who has not let her
feet out imagine [the joy]” (75).
The comparison of letting feet out to the miraculous healing of the blind
contradicts the carefully constructed message in the rest of the tract.19 In
their meticulous attention paid to the physicality of flesh and bones, the
Suzhou ladies have made a persuasive argument about the reversibility of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

footbinding. With details of each of the ﬁve methods laid out, they drove
home the impression that with patience, determination, and the ability to
endure more pain, any woman could successfully let her feet out in due time.
Yet they knew better than to present the body as a piece of molding clay or
a lost object (or eyesight) that can be recovered. Perhaps for this reason they
did not describe the wobbly and misshapen let-out feet that were the best
that women who had bound feet for a long time could hope to achieve. The
hope of a miraculous rebirth that they slipped into their instructions un-
derscores how di‹cult, painful, and incomplete the process of letting feet
out was for older women.
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YAN XISHAN’S
ANTI-FOOTBINDING CAMPAIGNS IN SHANXI

This fact was lost on a new generation of bureaucrats charged with fangzu
in their districts. The drive to end footbinding received a boost after the es-
tablishment of the Republic in 1912, when a fragmented state brought it-
self to bear on the bodies of its citizens. But, in fact, Sun Yat-sen’s Republic
was short-lived, and its 1912 proclamation to ban footbinding was never im-
plemented.20 In many provinces, which were virtually independent states,
however, civilizing regimes sought to reform customs as the foundation of
a modern body politic. Not only did the anti-footbinding movement be-
come entangled with local politics, it also served as the vehicle through which
people contested the encroachment of state power, and in the process they
articulated their parameters of privacy.
These developments unfolded in Shanxi under the warlord Yan Xishan
(1883–1960), the ﬁrst to engineer and sustain province-wide campaigns to
eradicate footbinding, from 1917 to 1922.21 Not content with education and
persuasion, he brought the power of the state to bear on legislation, police
enforcement, and the dispatch of feet inspectors into people’s homes. Yan’s
rhetoric was akin to that of the natural feet societies in the coastal areas. But
the will and ability to use state power, however fragmented and circumscribed,
changed the nature of the anti-footbinding movement from voluntary social
action to state mandate and surveillance. This, together with the availability
of a sizable number of edicts, circulars, and notices compiled by the legacy-
conscious Yan, makes an examination of the Shanxi case especially revealing.
As a prototype for the entire province, in 1912–14 Yan organized a militia
group, the Peace-Keeping Association (Baoan she), in his home county of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Wutai. The militia was charged with the somewhat contradictory tasks of
maintaining public order and instigating social reform. The village headmen
and local leaders were empowered to conduct household inspections; fam-
ilies whose women refused to let their feet out were ﬁned. They brought
along one female chaperone on their inspection tour, going as far as peeling
oª the socks of footbound women. Villages north of the Hutuo river com-
plied, but those south of the river rose up in arms and had to be paciﬁed.22
Yan Xishan, the military governor (dujun) of Shanxi who also assumed
civil responsibilities in 1917, was undeterred. The eradication of footbind-
ing became a province-wide target under his “Six Policies” campaign,
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1917–22. Stated in positive terms, the six priorities are water control, seri-
culture, tree planting, ending opium smoking, tianzu, and queue cutting.
In 1918 “Three Matters” of livelihood were added: cotton cultivation,
forestation, and animal husbandry. In his declaration, Yan followed the na-
tional script prevalent since the 1898 reform period that construed women
with bound feet as a terrible financial burden: “The people of Shanxi live
in abject poverty. The cause of poverty is that those who produce are few
and those who eat are many. . . . Among our population of about 10 mil-
lion, half are women and most of them are not engaged in production.”
Ostensibly, footbinding was opposed for economic reasons; later it was
grouped with opium smoking and gambling as the “Three Ills.”23
Male haircutting, in turn, was mandated because of its obvious political
symbolism. Although the 1645 Qing order for all Han men to conform to
Manchu hairstyle was met with violent resistance, almost three centuries
later the habit had been naturalized to the extent that many men kept their
queue after the collapse of the Qing imperium. In 1919 Yan rebuked a county
teacher “whose queue was dangling like a rope. What a horrid sight!” Yan
ordered not only the clipping of queues but also a close cropping or clean
shaving of the head; even hair two to three inches long was suspect because
so ingrained was the identification of queues with the old order that any
unkempt hair—a queue in the making—signaled an incipient restoration
movement. The order, first intended for o‹cials, students, and merchants,
was declared a success in May 1918 and was extended to “ordinary people”
(putong renmin).24
The symbolic import of tianzu was as unmistakable as the queue. Al-
though the binding of feet posed no political threat, it was the sign of na-
tional shame. Yan, a graduate of the Tokyo Military Academy in Japan, had
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

internalized the global episteme that produced the category of tianzu in the
late Qing. “The harm of footbinding is great. It hinders the movement of
females and maims their bodies. Not only is it absent in the ﬁve continents
and ten thousand countries of the world, even the imperial family and
Banner people of the former Qing dynasty had tianzu,” he wrote in a 1918
notice to all people (renmin), warning of an imminent ﬁne. “Moreover,
nowhere is the Han custom of footbinding more severe than in Shanxi. This
is why our population is dwindling, our bodies are becoming frail, and our
people are sinking into deeper poverty.” Over one hundred thousand copies
of the notice were printed and distributed to county authorities for posting.25
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In a speech to middle school students the following year, Yan described

a diªerent temporal relationship between the world, China, and Shanxi.
“The scores of countries in the world are like China: they do not have the
custom of footbinding. Bringing upon China the ridicule of the world, foot-
binding had become China’s greatest shame. China occupies a part of the
world, and Shanxi occupies a small part of China. Now, the habit of foot-
binding has been eradicated in all of China’s other provinces. If Shanxi does
not pull itself up, how can we stand tall on the surface of the earth?”26 Al-
though empirically untrue, Yan’s belief that Shanxi alone was backward con-
veyed his determination to catch up. In applying the national narrative of
civilization and progress to Shanxi, Yan’s rhetoric is nationalistic even as he
highlighted the division of the country between the progressive coastal cities
marked by tianzu and a backward interior marked by chanzu.
Yan Xishan’s approach to social change was top-down. Administratively,
he dispatched edicts and supervisors from the provincial capital; at the lo-
cal level, he relied on enlightened bureaucrats, students, and teachers to pro-
vide personal examples and to implement prohibition measures. Since the
literacy rate was low, Yan saw speech making as the best method for mass
education and mobilization. “Lecturers” (xuanjiang yuan) were dispatched
periodically from the capital to explain policies and directives. In addition,
when thirty thousand students from the upper primary schools and above
were preparing to return home for the new year holidays in 1919, Yan “com-
missioned” them to give speeches on tianzu and other matters outlined in
a primer, What the People Should Know. He admonished them to form itin-
erant lecturing teams with former imperial students and graduates of mod-
ern schools in their home villages, and ordered the local authorities to assist
in the organizing eªorts.27
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Yan’s grassroots mobilization promulgated the global episteme to the most

remote villages in the interior northwestern province. These eªorts estab-
lished tianzu and male haircutting as urgent matters of public concern. The
political import of personal appearance is built on a concept of the body
that bifurcates it into outward form and inner spirit, but places the personal
and social bodies on a continuum. As Yan put it in a speech to newly elected
lawmakers: “Although haircutting is an outward matter that pertains to the
individual body, who are we to say that the thinking [guannian] of the people
wouldn’t change because of it?”28
By May 1918, eight months after the initial directive, one Tianzu hui had
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been established in each of the 105 counties, boasting a total membership

of over twenty thousand. The remarkable speed was due to the fact that all
civil servants in county o‹ces and all village heads were made compulsory
members, the former at the threat of dismissal. Among commoners, all males
twenty and older were eligible to join. The members’ main duties were to
make donations to the association and to admonish nonmembers to change
their thinking. They were also to serve as models by enforcing fangzu and
tianzu in their own houses.29 The pervasiveness of Tianzu hui could only
mean one thing: that footbinding was still practiced in every county of the
province.

CRIMINALIZATION OF CHANZU

Even before his “Six Policies” campaign, in late 1916, Yan recruited local
leaders and male students to help enforce his decree titled “Regulations
for the Strict Prohibition of Footbinding.” In conception and terms this
decree shows an engagement with the messy realm of local practice ab-
sent in national proclamations. From the day it took eªect, which was the
day that it was posted in public, young girls were forbidden to start bind-
ing, girls under the age of fifteen who had already started to bind were to
let their feet out ( jiefang, to unwrap and release), and those over fifteen
were not allowed to wear shoes with arched wooden soles (mudi; see figs.
5, 7e). After a grace period of one month, the parents of newly bound girls
would be fined, as would the makers and vendors of wooden heels (3–30
yuan). After three months, fines would be levied on those who refused to
let their feet out or those who held on to their soles (2–20 yuan). After six
months, anyone who served as a matchmaker for footbound ladies or brides
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

caught wearing arched soles would be fined (3–30 yuan). The magistrate
in counties and the head of police bureaus in municipalities were charged
with the implementation.30 Chanzu, in its various sartorial guises, was thus
criminalized.
Two years after the decree, Yan Xishan received reports that in over fifty
counties, or half of the total in the province, the feet of all girls under fifteen
were let out. Buoyed by the instantaneous result, in his 1918 notice (cited
above) he extended the fangzu order to girls under ten. Staking the prestige
of his o‹ce, which was also his personal prestige, on the success of the im-
plementation, Yan vowed to dispatch state inspectors in July to impose pun-
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ishments on parents, parents-in-law, village headmen, and magistrates who

were lax.31
The terms of the stipulations and the structure of penalties bespeak Yan’s
astute understanding of the personal and cultural forces that contributed
to the popularity of footbinding. He understood that female bodies were
not slabs of pliant dough. Hence older women were spared the pain of un-
binding, but they were no longer permitted to perpetuate the cultural pres-
tige of small feet and its attendant standards of beauty by wearing shoes
with arched soles or, as stipulated in a later notice, decorating their ankles
with copper bracelets. Arched soles, a notable feature of Shanxi-style shoes,
accentuated the curve of the bent metatarsals and made the foot look dainty.
In the coastal cities, as early as the 1900s a new style of shoes with a far gen-
tler wooden sole became fashionable as women gradually relaxed the regi-
men of arching without necessarily giving up the binding of feet. Called
Kun-shoes (kunxie), some examples of this store-bought footwear featured
downright flat soles made of fabric or leather (see figs. 6, 7). Some observers
considered them a sign of the beginning of the end.32 We may recall the
di‹culties in completely straightening out the bent toes and the arch in
the fangzu instructions given by the Suzhou ladies. With their flatter arch,
Kun-shoes made sensible footwear for let-out feet or “half-bound” feet (ban
chanjiao).
But in Shanxi the high arch and the attendant crevice underneath were
still prized in the early years of the Republic. When women started to make
Kun-shoes in Yuwu township, they were hailed as a sign of reform in 1918.
To remake cultural norms, Yan went as far as ordering all operatic troupes
in the province to stop performing with stilts that mimic the sway of bound
feet.33 In paying attention to the artifices of illusion-making on stage and
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

in everyday life, he showed an uncanny understanding of the cultural aura

and sexual appeal of footbinding. In singling out matchmakers for penalty,
he also acknowledged the importance of marriage as the institution that re-
produced female customs.34
One unintended outcome of the criminalization of footbinding was the
establishment of an adult female legal agency. When a footbound woman
was older than ﬁfteen and wore heels, she herself (benren) or her “house-
hold head” ( jiazhang, either parent or in-law) would have to pay up. It is
not clear how many women did pay, nor is it speciﬁed by whom and on
what basis the decision would be made. But this female agency was cir-
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cumscribed by the very conditions of its production. The prohibition was

enforceable only by social surveillance, as evinced by Yan’s curious wording:
“when others inform against her, or when [the authorities] discern that the
oªense is true.” The “or” makes it di‹cult to ascertain whether a girl’s neigh-
bors or state agents were primarily responsible for reporting the oªense. In
either case, what agency she had came in tandem with heightened scrutiny
of two often contending authorities.
A second unintended consequence of the prohibition edicts was that they
served to define discursively the boundaries of chanzu. Although the pol-
icy goal was articulated as tianzu, unlike the earlier missionaries Yan was
not interested in the ontological status of the natural foot. The main con-
cern of the result-oriented administrator was in fact fangzu. Yan’s pragma-
tism may account for a convoluted and self-contradictory usage: “to alter
and let out natural feet” (gaifang tianzu).35 Many women caught in between
fashion regimes experienced fangzu as a perpetual transitional state: neither
tianzu nor chanzu. In the eyes of the state, however, fangzu involved diªer-
entiating between degrees of bondage according to age and ornamentation.
For girls fifteen (or ten) and under, wrapping one’s feet with a binding cloth
constituted footbinding. For those older, footbinding was signified not by
a piece of cloth but by wooden soles. The meting out of punishment re-
quired unambiguous material signs. What mattered was not the size or phys-
iological state of each individual’s feet, but standardized reckoning of sur-
face accoutrements that were readily visible, hence countable and accountable
by the e‹ciency-minded bureaucrats.

THE STATE AGAINST THE PATRIARCHS

The enforcement of these decrees hinged on the state’s ability to inspect

women’s feet, hence literally subjecting women to its gaze. The heads of the
newly installed districts and county authorities were to “scrutinize and look”
(chajian) and tabulate the number of footbound females in each locale; their
auditors were to verify the data and to ascertain the percentage of footbound
women “on the basis of what met their eyes” (yi yanjian wei zhun).36 The
abuses and complaints that resulted were so ferocious that Yan had to issue
restraining orders. In March 1918, Yan ordered that all inspections had to
be conducted “after sunrise and before sunset.” The village wardens had to
notify the women by calling their names from the outside and asking them
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to step into the courtyard or go out to the front gate. Only the county mag-
istrate had the authority to impose fines.37 One can imagine the potential
threat of state agents entering people’s living quarters in the dark, harassing
the men, molesting the women, and extorting money. Yet measures devised
to ensure a certain communal accountability by conducting the inspection
outside had the ironic eªect of making the women’s humiliation more pub-
lic. Despite the restraining orders, rumors persisted that feet inspection was
an excuse for fondling women.38
In March 1919, Yan pled with the counties to hire female inspectors and
authorized the channeling of fines to finance the operation. After all, he
mused, having the male police force and bureaucrats interfering in matters
that concerned the bodies of women was inappropriate for the body politic
(zhengti).39 Later that year, regulations for the dispatch of female inspectors
into villages were announced. The ideal inspector was a middle-school grad-
uate over twenty years old, but given the scarcity of educated women, any
hardworking woman of good repute would do as long as she had unbound
or let-out feet. She would receive a salary and travel expenses from the county.
Her job was to report oªenses to the county authorities, but she had no power
to impose or collect fines.40
The bureaucratization of feet inspection became an arena in which
people contested or negotiated with the state the boundaries of their pri-
vacy. Successive regulations outlining the conduct and jurisdiction of feet
inspectors give an indication of the violence of this encounter and the pre-
carious position of the inspector. Yan stipulated that a female inspector could
bring a patrolman to the villages with the explicit task of “protecting” her,
but he had to wait outside the front gate and was not to extort bribes. At
the same time, the villagers needed protection from the inspector. Hence
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

rules stated that she could not linger in the house, nor should she make “ir-
relevant remarks” on the styles of other articles of clothing and jewelry on
the women’s bodies. Before inspection could commence, she had to notify
the headman or ward warden of each village, who would accompany her.41
Changing the gender identity of the inspectors did not alleviate opposi-
tion and may even have exacerbated the patriarchs’ resentment. People saw
anti-footbinding, enforced by humiliating inspections and onerous ﬁnes, as
a frivolous project of an overreaching state. Yan related an instinctive reac-
tion on the streets: “What does this trivial matter have to do with politics,
so that the government should interfere in all seriousness?” Implied in the
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term “trivial matter” (suoshi) is a concept of the bodily-private that people

assumed should be immune from state micromanagement. The people drew
a clear line between the personal and the governmental. The same rhetori-
cal opposition between o‹cial power and privacy was evident two years later
when, after the high tide of fangzu subsided, rumors raged that “The gov-
ernment [guanting ] has given up meddling [guan] in women’s bound feet.”42
Yan’s logic, that unless women unwrapped their binding cloths, Shanxi
would be a laughing stock in the rest of China and China would lose face
in the world, must have seemed opaque to many. The national and global
connections were simply too distant to be relevant to their daily lives. Un-
able to see from Yan’s gigantic perspective, people sought the “real” reason
for the government’s intrusion from whirls of rumor. Once the women
stopped binding, according to one rumor, Yan Xishan would draft them
into the army and dispatch them into battle. Other rumors betrayed fears
that were more immediate: old scholar-gentry feared that the end of bind-
ing would destroy morality and female docility, making women unmar-
riageable. In a pair of adjacent counties in the south, families vied to marry
oª girls as young as thirteen or fourteen upon hearing a rumor that the au-
thorities would force their will only on daughters but not on brides.43
That rumor probably started when the female inspectors in one of the
counties, Lucheng, inspected daughters but left brides alone. That so many
parents found the rumor believable may suggest a malaise about the am-
bivalent status of daughters in their natal families. Once ensconced in the
authority of her in-laws (pojia), people expected her body to be oª limits
to the state. Coupled with the widespread anxiety that a tianzu woman would
be unmarriageable, this rumor accentuated the precarious position of un-
married daughters in a “no-man’s” land. Enforced unbinding was thus an
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

assault on the patriarch’s jurisdiction over his daughter-in-law. Teenage mar-

riage, already a common practice that Yan sought to end, became an expres-
sion of people’s resistance to the government’s intrusion into their private
lives.44
Although we do not have the account books for each county, circum-
stantial evidence suggests that many patriarchs simply paid the ﬁnes to get
the state oª their back. After all, this was merely one of the many levies they
had already swallowed, as Yan himself so succinctly described: “The three
duties of the people are: serving as a soldier, paying taxes, and getting an
education. Don’t forget!” By July 1918, the ﬁnes were pouring in. In theory,
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the Tianzu hui in each county was entitled to 30 percent of the income,
whereas the remainder would finance the county girls’ school (or, if there
was none, the boys’ school).45 Yan complained that although the amount
of deposits was logged, the cash was often unaccounted for. He ordered all
counties to designate a separate set of books for the fines, listing activities
in four columns: opening balance, deposit, withdrawal (with receipts), and
ending balance. New books were to be submitted every two months.46 The
political business of fangzu thus created, at least on paper, a self-su‹cient
economy administered by the county authorities.
From the patriarch’s perspective, the fine was a squeeze by an overzealous
governor aligned with a corrupt local gentry. The extractions provided for
more inspections and further penalties, lining the pockets of the o‹cials
and local gentry who controlled the Tianzu hui and the schools. The abuses
were so severe that in June 1920 Yan ordered county authorities to allocate
all Tianzu hui expenditures for the salaries of female inspectors, which in
eªect meant the disbanding of the Tianzu hui. He admitted: “Upon recent
inspection, the majority of the county Tianzu hui’s are empty shells.” In
Pinglu county, the penalties were so excessive that Yan cautioned “admin-
istrative fines, meant to teach a lesson, are diªerent from criminal penal-
ties.” Referring to the large number of people being caught, he suggested
that not all should be fined to the maximum amount stipulated. In Shouyang
county, Yan discovered that county authorities descended upon the villages,
arbitrarily appointed village women as inspectors, and pocketed 40 percent
of the fines thus collected.47 The abuses foreseen in a satirical short story,
“Excising Small Feet,” discussed in the next chapter, had become a reality.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

GENDER AND CLASS: BIFURCATED WOMANHOOD

Even with the employment of female inspectors, by design Yan Xishan’s anti-
footbinding campaign was a male-to-male operation. The leaders and pri-
mary constituency of the anti-binding movement remained male, as evinced
by the proposed establishment of a Refusing to Marry Footbound Brides
association in every county, which automatically enlisted all male students
as members.48 The constitution of the Tianzu hui, in turn, was written ex-
plicitly for the male subject, as we have seen. Yan’s strategy was to mobilize
male students, teachers, bureaucrats, and local gentry to change female be-
havior by making their patriarchs accountable. All of the former were people
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from the upper echelon (shangdeng renjia) who should take the initiative in
reforming social customs.49 Yan’s was thus an “elitist” vision that rested on
a utopian alliance between the old male elite and the new.
In practice, the conservative gentry often provided the most steadfast re-
sistance, spreading rumors and arousing fears about women’s marriageabil-
ity. O‹cialdom fared only slightly better. In 1918, Yan warned that he could
see through local o‹cials covering up their lack of action with charades of
“empty words.” In his annual review of the tianzu work of county magis-
trates the following year, Yan singled out twenty-four for formal praise and
reprimand. Fifteen were deemed praiseworthy, two of whom were rated par-
ticularly commendable, whereas nine were reprimanded, one seriously.50
Contrary to Yan’s vision, the campaign became a battleground between
reform-minded men, often urban and younger, and the entrenched con-
servative forces that the village gentry and recalcitrant bureaucrat personiﬁed.
A handful of women did join the Tianzu hui; in Xiangling county ﬁve
were commended, along with six men, for their extraordinary dedication.
The men received a horizontal plaque inscribed with an auspicious saying
whereas the women’s prize was a standing trophy. In Fanshi county, the mag-
istrate’s wife and daughter traveled from village to village inspecting and
persuading women to unbind. They also received a trophy from Yan.51 Al-
though the prizes are diªerentiated by gender, these women occupied the
same privileged social position as the elite men. The anti-binding move-
ment thus created two diametrically opposed female subject positions. This
is perhaps not by intention, since the recruitment of female helpers was not
in Yan’s original plan. But with the participation of female inspectors and
the magistrate’s female kin, womanhood in Shanxi was divided into the ed-
ucated and privileged who served as agents of the state on one side, and vil-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

lage illiterate women who resisted their encroachment on the other.

Given the extensive nature of the campaign and the voluminous docu-
mentation it generated, it is remarkable how little of women’s feelings or
experience, on both sides of the divide, they reveal. Pain as a subjective bod-
ily experience was curiously absent in Yan’s anti-footbinding rhetoric, which
is predominantly a discourse of shame. On the rare occasion of addressing
all women older than sixteen in a December 1919 directive, he adopted the
paternalistic tone of a patriarch lecturing his subjects. Referring to himself
as “this governor,” he called upon “you women and girls, old or young, to
hurry up and loosen your binding cloth.” Yan sounded like a stern father:
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“I hear that many girls around ten are not binding, or have let their feet out.
But those older than sixteen, although they are not wearing high heel shoes
on the outside, inside their feet are still wrapped in strips of cloth. Look at
you! Don’t you have any self-respect? What are you doing this for, harming
your own body and causing others to look down upon you?”52
The discourse of shame is predicated on pairs of “social eyes” judging the
woman, but it also recognized her individual volition. Yan sounded almost
naïve in his eagerness to assign miraculous power to women’s will to un-
bind. He told older women, for example, to simply “take the binders oª
and in several days, your tendons and bones would stretch out, the blood
and qi would circulate freely. How much more convenient it is!”53 He had
in fact shown more appreciation of the stubbornness of old women’s bodies
in his legislation.
Yan concluded with a personal warning: “Today I send this notice, going
to such length to persuade you, because in truth I pity you so, you igno-
rant women. Hurry up and get rid of your old bad habits, don’t let my con-
cern for you be in vain. From now on, if you still bind and swaddle, the
female inspector will ﬁnd out and you’ll be severely punished. By then your
regrets would be too late!”54 In his words, the girls who embraced tianzu
appeared to be adults, whereas the old women who resisted were children.
The infantilizing of footbound women is also evinced in the rewards that
Yan designed for them. At the inception of the campaign, Yan printed over
one hundred thousand copies of “a colored drawing” to be handed out as
prizes. Later in 1918, he ordered each village to identify the ﬁrst woman who
let her feet out, promising her an “artistic trophy.”55 The association of the
female with visuality, contrasted here with the award of plaques with in-
scribed words to men, betrayed an ingrained gender hierarchy. Females, and
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

children, were deemed especially receptive to sounds and sights. As the state
sought to remake them into modern citizens, they were locked all the more
tightly in an inferior female place.
Ostensible partners in the civilizing project, female inspectors were no
match for the male leaders in authority and power. Occasionally these
women were educated and could stand on their own. For example, in Yan-
shi county, female primary school teachers were hired in 1918 to “supervise
and urge” (duze) the provincial lecturers and village heads and to help per-
suade the footbound women. In the provincial capital, in early 1919, female
students from the Normal, Gongli, and Shangzhi schools were mobilized
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THE BODY INSIDE OUT 61

to take turns to inspect feet on Sundays.56 For the most part, however, in-
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spectors were local women who may or may not have been literate. We do
not know the extent to which each identified with the tianzu episteme. In
any case, her success depended less on her ability to persuade other women
and more on the resolve of the magistrate to impose fines and on the pa-
triarch’s ability to pay. Caught between male authority and complacency,
she was a pawn in a duel between state and local society.
The unprecedented invasion of state power into people’s bedrooms was
all the more transgressive because it was conducted primarily by women and
on women. The recruitment of educated women as representatives of the
state, although limited in number, precluded the possibilities of female al-
liance or sisterhood across class lines. Even as they were standing in the same
courtyard staring at each other, women who personified the enlightenment
project could not be coeval with the old women stuck in their shameful ways.
The unequal power dynamics of missionaries civilizing a pagan nation were
now being played out by one group of Chinese women to another. No won-
der that the latter resisted and held on to their customary ways, now cher-
ished all the more as their own.
The antagonism between the educated women and the illiterate women
they tried to “liberate” was dramatized in an anecdote recorded by Zhou
Songyao, a male reformist writer, in an anti-footbinding pamphlet published
around 1929. One Madame Liu Guofang, a teacher at the Wushi Girls’
School in Gao’an, Jiangxi province, went down to the villages with several
colleagues from the Women’s Association to persuade peasant women to let
their feet out. They were greeted by a barrage of curses: “What business do
you have meddling with my feet! I’m old and don’t need to eat from my
looks [niang laole, you buxiang mai yangzi]. Why on earth do you girlie stu-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

dents care about the long and short of others’ feet?”57 The footbound
woman’s robust ego is evinced by her term of self-address, niang. Literally
“mother” but more appropriately “your mother,” it conveys her sense of su-
periority over both the hoity-toity teachers and lowly prostitutes by virtue
of her seniority in the family system. Unlike prostitutes and actors who had
fallen through the kinship safety net and had to eke out a living by draw-
ing the gaze of others to themselves (mai yangzi), she had won her security
and power in the time-honored way—giving birth to sons and serving her
in-laws. And the teacher from the city had nothing over her. The gulf be-
tween the subject positions of the educated woman and the footbound
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woman is thus rooted in the conﬂict between two authority structures and
channels of success for women: the new school and the old family.

THE RECKONING

Between 1918 and 1920, Yan issued numerous decrees and orders to goad
individual counties to take anti-binding seriously. Indeed, no one can doubt
his sincerity and vigilance upon examining the mountain of legislation, di-
rectives, and primers he produced, only a fraction of which was discussed
here. In 1920, Yan received reports that almost all of the girls under fifteen
had ceased to bind and felt optimistic enough to begin enforcing fangzu
among older women, who were understandably the most resistant. Some
agents imposed fines on the older women, but few bothered trying to per-
suade them to change their habit. Other than harassment, the campaign
had made no impact on the lives of older women.58 Even the victory with
girls was mostly illusionary. In 1921, rumors spread that the government had
ceased to be concerned with women’s feet, and girls promptly began bind-
ing in many counties. A desperate Yan repeatedly goaded his o‹cials to keep
up the momentum; giving up midway would mean a complete waste of ear-
lier eªorts.
Yet the administrative will to dispatch inspectors and impose fines could
not be, and indeed was not intended to be, sustained forever. Once the pres-
sure receded, county reports that girls had resumed binding did in fact be-
gin to trickle in.59 Like the mass movements that Mao Zedong would con-
duct decades later, Yan Xishan’s fangzu campaign was launched with fanfare
but tapered oª in the early 1920s, even as weathered signs and posters still
hung from lamp posts and brick walls in towns and villages. Yan held onto
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

his anti-footbinding platform in successive village administrative reforms

in the late 1920s and even after 1932, but any reformist fervor rings hollow
at its second sounding, a reminder of the promised transformation that the
ﬁrst attempt had failed to deliver.
Census reports suggested that modest gains were made: in 1928 the pro-
portion of footbound women among the female population of the prov-
ince was 17.8 percent. In 1934 it was reduced to 8.63 percent, or 435,497 fe-
males. A 1932–33 census, however, counted almost one million women aged
thirty and under who had bound feet (under 15 sui, over 323,000; from 16
to 30 sui, over 625,000), although the deﬁnitions of “bound feet” used are
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THE BODY INSIDE OUT 63

not speciﬁed.60 Furthermore, without village-by-village statistics through a

period of time, it is hard to ascertain the reliability of these ﬁgures and the
meaning of such arbitrary comparisons across a span of years. Nonetheless,
Yan’s campaigns had likely reduced the number of young girls who bound,
especially in the urban areas, and the subsequent unrest with the Japanese
invasion of China in 1937 provided a more compelling deterrent. The need
to run away from marauding soldiers persuaded many mothers that they
could no longer aªord to bind their daughters’ feet.
In Shanxi as elsewhere, however, the tianzu rhetoric was irrelevant to the
older women whose bodies were accustomed to decades of binding. For
them, chanzu was a “natural” state in terms of their everyday, embodied re-
ality. They could be intimidated into unwrapping the binders momentar-
ily in front of the foot inspectors, but no amount of administrative order
or criminalization could return their feet to the “natural” state of tianzu. To
the older women, the state-imposed fangzu movement was no more than a
make-believe: a performance of compliance if not a charade.

THEATER OF THE ABSURD

From a logical point of view, the surest way to eradicate footbinding would
be to dissuade young girls from starting. Given the stubbornness of older
women’s bodies and their resistance to the harassment, it would make sense
to leave them alone. In a matter of decades, footbinding would come to a
natural end.61 The fangzu movement in the twentieth century, however,
did not have the leisure to pursue this option because of two conditions
of its birth. The sense of national urgency and the personal humiliation
that the male reformers felt under the global gaze compelled them to seek
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

immediate and visible results, no matter how symbolic. The tactic of vi-
sual display that the movement adopted, in turn, goaded the reformers to
ﬁnd more and more shocking props and new slogans for their rallies that
were held in athletic grounds or party headquarters throughout the
provinces after the establishment of the Nationalist government in Nan-
jing in 1927.62 The cessation of binding by girls, like tianzu, lacks drama,
hence is not interesting to look at. In contrast, fangzu—literally the un-
wrapping of older women’s binding cloths—is full of blood, sweat, and
tears, promising endless entertainment.
Indeed, symbolic victory became the substance of the fangzu movement
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as it became routine in the late 1920s and 1930s; performance was an end
in itself. The fluxes inside a woman’s body, the contractions and swellings
that render chanzu and fangzu more gradations on a spectrum than its two
poles, are not amenable to representation. Objects exterior to the body—
the material implements needed for binding feet—came to symbolize both
footbinding and its enemy. In Yan Xishan’s Shanxi, arched wooden soles
served that function. Elsewhere, strips of binding cloth, the fabric most in-
timate to a woman’s skin, fluttered in public spaces to announce the end of
the footbinding era.63
The exhibition of the binding cloth was attributed to Deng Changyao,
the head of the O‹ce of Civil Aªairs (Minzhengting chang) in Shaanxi, a
province west of Shanxi. Charged with the letting out of feet, Deng drafted
a three-stage program in 1928 that mimicked Sun Yat-sen’s tutelage program
toward developing parliamentary democracy: admonition; enforcement;
penalty.64 In the first stage of admonition, a Tianzu hui was to be estab-
lished in the provincial capital with branches in the county seats. They would
send educators to primary schools in the villages who would see to it that
every schoolboy would wear a cloth banner declaring: “I refuse to marry a
boundfoot woman.” In the next stage, enforcement, inspectors were dis-
patched with a gong to each household. Having forced the women to un-
bind, the old binding cloths were to be collected and shipped to the county
o‹ce. Those under thirty who still refused to unbind would be fined and
their parents detained.
The image of thousands upon thousands of used binding cloths piling up
in the magistrate’s august o‹ce was amusing, if not hilarious, and soon Deng
became nationally famous. An article in the newspaper Shenbao told of Deng
and his runners scouting the neighborhoods to snatch away every cloth
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

binder in sight and stockpiling them in his o‹ce. Soon his collection in fact
reached several thousand. When he invited o‹cials and “the people” (ren-
min) to a binding cloth exhibition, everyone covered their noses and chuck-
led. Deng also led a pageant of “bare-legs-tiny-feet” into the villages, en-
tertaining with songs and speeches. It is not clear who bared their legs.
Having oªered a reward of five dollars (dayang ) for each hundred confiscated
binding cloths, in one month he was said to have collected over 25,400 tro-
phy strips. Similar slogans and exhibitions sprang up across the country; in
Jiangxi province a mountain of confiscated shoelaces was erected, with a
tombstone, as public monument.65
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The bureaucratization of anti-footbinding campaigns brought two for-

merly incongruous elements into the same discursive space: male bureau-
cratic order and female bodily odor. This incongruity prompted parodies
of overreaching state power, creating sympathy for the footbound woman
as the subject of harassment. Hence popular accounts of these exhibitions
depict them as farces and exercises in excess. The Shenbao article presented
Deng’s fangzu rally as a vanity fair: “A large-scale ‘cherishing the people’ meet-
ing was held in mid-November 1927 at the O‹ce of Civil Aªairs. The dec-
oration was most unusual: the two corridors behind the front entrance dis-
played binding cloths of all sizes: long, short, wide, narrow. Strip after strip
they draped, like the scarves on display in department stores. Some were
stained with blood and had yet to be washed. Several hundred pairs of red
embroidered slippers were hoisted above the middle entrance. They were
all pointy like horn and corn, what a treat for the eyes!” In the hall, sheets
of “fangzu songs” were on display, and behind the hall a straw canopy was
set up with a stage, ready for a “carnivalesque talk show [huazhuang jiang-
yan].”66 In an age of visual overkill, even bloody binders failed to elicit out-
rage. Instead, they reminded the reporter of merchandise artfully displayed
in department stores to tug at the buyer’s purse strings.
Nor was Deng Changyao’s performance interpreted as intended. “That
day, Deng ascended the stage and performed a talk show that was funny
and absurd [huaji tuti]. When he talked, he sniªed the binders and shoes
held in his hands and acted as if he were going to vomit. The audience
laughed so hard that they could not sit up. It happened that several ladies
with three-inch golden lotuses wandered into the hall. Deng ushered them
on stage and, having lectured the masses [qunzhong ] on the beneﬁts of fang-
zu, unwrapped the ladies’ binders personally. The masses applauded like
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

thunder. After his speech, the masses requested Mrs. Deng on stage so that
they could examine if she had big feet. Mrs. Deng boldly went on stage and
held up her two feet for all to scrutinize. The audience broke out in cheers
that pierced the sky.”67 Deng’s performance was evidently enjoyed by all.
But it is less clear how the unwrapping of the ladies’ binders and Mrs. Deng’s
self-exhibition were supposed to persuade more women to unbind their feet.
Some among the masses had probably thought that they were watching a
show at the temple fair.
By the 1930s, there prevailed a sense of exhaustion as the anti-footbind-
ing campaign went from a spontaneous missionary movement to a local re-
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formist eªort to a routine national bureaucratic operation. The strategy of

exposing female suªering and shame had also come full-circle, as exposure
now brought ridicule and laughter directed at the male bureaucrat. It was
said that as county magistrates had to fulﬁll monthly quotas, many proceeded
to purchase new fabric on the market to entice women to give up their used
and putrid ones.68 What began as an eªort to end footbinding ended up
refurbishing the one material implement that had come to symbolize the
custom in the 1930s. What would the women do with an endless supply of
fresh, clean binding cloth, gratis from the county magistrate? Could the anti-
binding movement have actually prolonged and facilitated the binding of
feet?
One of the stories that encapsulates this curious reversal and shiftiness of
meanings during the last stage of the fangzu movement concerns an over-
seas-born young man known as Overseas-Chinese-Lotus-Lover (Ailian
Qiaosheng). As recounted in a 1938 anthology, the story tells of how he was
so enamored by the bound foot that he sailed to China to locate a dream
wife. Yet the pickings were slim in an age when footbinding had lost its pres-
tige. Young women with bound feet were scarce, and the handful who re-
sisted the tide were so traditional that they refused to be looked at. He could
not even locate photographs of their lovely slippers. In a last-ditch eªort,
he enlisted as a foot inspector for the fangzu movement in an unnamed prov-
ince, keeping a secret roster of all the beauties with chanzu. He then revis-
ited the eligible candidates, ostensibly to ascertain if they had started to un-
bind, and inspected the smoothness of the skin on their bare feet. Thus he
secured his bride. When others criticized him for contradiction between
words and deeds and confusing the public with private interests, he retorted:
“I’m only liberating her!” He made a model of her foot and special-ordered
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

a pair of shoes, with the moniker “liberation.” Both the structure and the
shape were old-fashioned arch shoes, but the vamp was made of golden kid-
skin with cut-oª relief; the inside was lined with red felt. He asked his bride
to unwrap her binding cloth and slip them on her bare skin.69
This curious story of a foot fetishist derives its comical appeal from ex-
cesses and instabilities. Not only do deeds stand words on their head, the
words also double up on themselves. To the overseas Chinese man, “liber-
ating” the woman means saving her from the fangzu regime (which claims
to liberate her), only to deliver her to the bondage of his golden kid arched
slippers. Less than a century after the deprecating eyes of the Euro-Ameri-
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cans stared the Chinese scholar out of his complacency, the reading public
in the 1930s treaty ports had turned the West into an imaginary place: home
of the last lotus lover who would put Gu Hongming to shame. The para-
dox of a connoisseur of chanzu camouﬂaged as a fangzu inspector bespeaks
a fracture between the outside and the inside, or between appearance and
the real. The next chapter argues that in this very fracture and instability of
meaning lies the end of footbinding’s history.

The anti-footbinding movement, with its rhetoric of tianzu and practice of

organized fangzu, enjoyed considerable success in achieving its stated en-
lightenment goals. In circulating new images of and knowledge about foot-
binding, it helped extinguish the appeal of a custom whose mystique had
already suªered from its diªusion throughout all social classes. The premises
of modern Chinese nationalism and feminism—the inevitability of progress
and the autonomy of individual agents—were crystallized in the intellec-
tual and social eªorts to end footbinding during the last decades of the Qing
dynasty. In the Republican period and especially in the 1920s, the fangzu
campaigns were among the first organized reform eªorts that spread an en-
lightenment episteme to the countryside and in such interior provinces
as Shanxi.
Previous scholarship has uniformly celebrated the anti-footbinding move-
ment as a milestone in the liberation of Chinese women, but my conclu-
sions are somewhat less sanguine.70 My first reservation concerns the inherent
di‹culty in defining and tabulating the success of the letting-feet-out move-
ment. The rhetoric of tianzu and its attendant narratives of miraculous con-
version connote moral and ontological certainty. Behind the artificial pre-
cision of statistical figures, however, there are in fact no objective, universal
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

criteria that measure fangzu as a successful, permanent state. On the aggre-

gate level that confounded the bureaucrat, did success mean a certain per-
centage of girls unwrapping the binding cloth the day the foot inspector
came by? Or did it mean older women had stopped binding tightly over an
extended period of time? The ambiguity was more pronounced if the mat-
ter is considered on an individual level. What if a woman loosened her bind-
ing cloths for months and then tightened them again because of discom-
fort or a change of mind? Do four folded digits but a ﬂatter arch mean
chanzu or fangzu?
More than merely semantic problems, these ambiguities reveal the power
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inequalities that plagued the anti-footbinding movement from the start.

Tianzu and fangzu are “gigantic” categories formulated from a vantage point
outside the concerns and rhythms of the women’s embodied lives. Tianzu,
defined as an original state they had already lost, condemns them to reliance
on a miracle whereas fangzu places them in the position of the acted-upon.
No wonder that the women with bound feet—young or old—did not think
in such terms. After the movement had raged and tapered oª, they con-
tinued to purchase or make Kun-shoes with flattened soles, decorated in
traditional floral motifs but in fashionable hues of bright pink, magenta,
and lapis blue that only imported chemical dyes could produce.
The most glaring deficiency of the anti-footbinding movement is the misog-
ynist attitude expressed toward women with bound feet. Whereas the lead-
ing male thinkers called them parasites and femmes fatales harmful to the
nation, the campaigns either infantilized or humiliated them by exposing
their bodies to ridicule or inspection in public. The humiliation did not
stem from abuses or imperfect execution, but was embedded in the culture
of national shame that produced the urgency to unbind feet in the first place.
Furthermore, the tactic of the campaigns is inherently paradoxical: the spec-
tacle of female suªering, which provoked people to change their thinking
and behavior, accentuated the association of femaleness with passivity and
victimhood. Narratives of female suªering conferred power onto those who
publicized them, be they male nationalist reformers or urban educated
women, who occupied a male subject position. One woman’s pride and free-
dom was predicated on another woman’s shame and bondage.
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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE:

Connoisseurship in an Age of Disavowal, 1930s–1941

From hindsight, the most signiﬁcant achievement of the anti-footbinding

movement lies in the new visual and textual knowledge about feet that it
created and circulated. The luxury of hindsight, which makes a complete
history of footbinding possible, is aªorded by an encyclopedic compila-
tion, Picking Radishes (Caifeilu), which contains all that there is to know
about binding feet. The project was the labor of love of Yao Lingxi (1899–ca.
1961), a man of letters from Dantu, Jiangsu province, who wound up in
the British Settlement of the northern treaty port of Tianjin after a string
of minor bureaucratic posts.1 First serialized in 1933–34 in Heavenly Wind
(Tianfeng bao), a tabloid published in Tianjin, these columns on feet in-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

clude citations from earlier works and new submissions by Yao, his friends,
and readers.
The writings were later anthologized in ﬁve volumes and issued under
the editorship of Yao between 1934 and 1941. A sixth volume, a selection of
the choicest entries from the earlier books, also appeared in 1941.2 The more
popular of these stories thus traversed multiple loops: from whatever the
source to tabloid; from tabloid to book; from book to “the best of . . . ”;
from printed word to hearsay; and back to the printed word. The result of
this roundabout quotation is a monument of redundancy, more than a mil-
lion words that spread across some two thousand pages. If the project had
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not been interrupted by war, it might well have ended from sheer exhaus-
tion. There is nothing more to be said and known about footbinding.
Whereas the tone of the entries ranges from scholarly, scientific, autobio-
graphical, or erotic to comical, the nature of Picking Radishes is pornographic:
men exposing women’s bodies for male pleasure and commercial gain. Yao
Lingxi was unabashed about his profit-making motives, and, as we will
see, equally unabashed was the sexual explicitness of some of the accounts.
Yet the gesture of this pornography is serious, as is its purpose of exhaus-
tive documentation and comprehensive knowledge. This exhaustion pro-
vided closure, allowing these disparate fragments to constitute a complete
field of knowledge.

YAO LINGXI AND HIS FRIENDS:

COLLECTORS OF THE RECENTLY DATED

Picking Radishes is a gold mine. Every scholar who has read it—Howard
Levy is a prime example—has cited individual entries from it as documen-
tation of certain aspects of the historical truth about footbinding, be it re-
gional distribution, gradual decline, or female experience. But a text with
pretensions of total representation cannot be read so randomly. The truth
or message carried by Picking Radishes is embedded in its very encyclopedic
and serial form, which took shape as a result of textual imitation, recycling,
and invention.3
In its serialized origins, fragmentary form, and open appeal for manu-
script submissions toward future sequels, Picking Radishes resembles a tra-
ditional collectanea or encyclopedia. The social locations of the editors and
contributors, their nostalgic backward-glancing posture, and the nature of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the knowledge produced, however, are meaningful only in the thoroughly

modern context of treaty port urban culture. The world of Picking Radishes
is thus rife with contradictions, although that did not seem to bother Yao and
his friends.
They were, however, extremely defensive about the object of their desire.
It was, to say the least, embarrassing to be a connoisseur of the bound foot
and its paraphernalia in an age of disavowal. Over three decades after the
proliferation of anti-footbinding societies in the 1890s, by the 1930s con-
demnation of footbinding had become the norm among the educated sec-
tor in the coastal cities. Yao Lingxi and his colleagues were all too aware of
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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 71
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the absurdity of their obsession and the impossibility of self-defense. They

tried anyway.
The punch line was delivered by Tao Baopi, a scholar and fiction writer
who was said to have been shocked to death in 1927 when the Communists
occupied his hometown of Changsha, Hunan province, and ordered the lib-
eration of feet. Tao, an unrepentant lotus lover, left behind these memo-
rable lines: “The bound foot is an antique. We won’t think of making a piece
of antique to order, but what’s wrong with admiring what is already here?”
(CFL: 356). In denying that appreciation leads to promotion, Tao under-
scored the finality with which the cultural prestige of footbinding had ex-
pired.4 One of Tao’s admirers, Zhou Ying, explained: “People ridiculed us for
wanting to promote footbinding. But even if we had wanted to, we wouldn’t
have been able to. . . . No woman is so stupid that she would suªer pain for
something that is no longer à la mode [modeng ]. In due time, the extinc-
tion of footbinding will come as a natural trend of history” (CFL: 355; CFL
II: 289).
Zhou Ying, a resident of Shanghai who became Yao Lingxi’s associate ed-
itor, claimed to be a modern observer of the progressive march of history
who recognized the futility of turning back the tide.5 There is no reason to
doubt his sincerity. In the 1930s, readers in the treaty ports firmly associ-
ated footbinding with backwardness and regarded it with disdain. Zhou’s
and Tao Baopi’s gesture of disavowing footbinding was echoed by Yao Lingxi
in his choice of the anthologies’ title. “Picking radishes” (caifei) is a clever
play on words that allows at least two readings, both hinging on an unflat-
tering assessment of bound feet. A song from the classic Book of Songs pro-
vided the allusion:
Caifeng caifei (picking–wild greens–picking–radishes),
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Wuyi xiati (not–to–lower–body).

The conventional reading can be translated as: “Do not discard the leaves
just because the roots (‘lower body’) are bitter or defective.” In other words,
even an unworthy body has partial virtues. Yao thus oªered this interpre-
tation: although admittedly footbinding is a defect, we should not discredit
the female body, nor should we shun the subject matter (CFL II: iii–iv).
Could Yao be sending a more provocative message at the same time? The
second line can also be read: “Do not disdain the female private parts.” The
“lower body” is euphemism for genitals.6
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The connoisseurs depicted footbinding as a remnant—not a phantom

but a concrete presence—caught in the process of vanishing. An expres-
sion, so vivid in conveying the pathos of living in transitional time, recurred
in Radishes: “[In the split second it takes to] turn your body, it has become
a relic” ( fuyang zhijian, yicheng chenji), and “The future will look upon us
as we now look upon the past” (CFL IV: 161; CFL II: 370). Their alleged
intention was not to revive a dying practice or to arrest the tide of history,
but merely to capture the ﬂeeting traces in words and pictures for poster-
ity. Moreover, the lotus lovers suggested that these traces should be seen
through a historicist lens; the customs of each epoch should be judged in
the context of prevailing values at the time.
Even more insistent was the connoisseurs’ pose as ethnographers, using
the language of the ethnography (minsu xue) movement popular in the 1930s.
“Yao Lingxi wants to do a history of customs [ fengsu shi] while we still can,
before the tiny-footed women become extinct,” quipped a friend. “If you
say Picking Radishes promotes footbinding, do you also suppose that those
who study ancient history want to be emperors, or that vendors of chamber
pots love to drink urine?” (CFL: 7). Emperors had vanished; the bound foot
was dated and disappearing. As relics from the imperial past, they were cou-
pled as objects of nostalgic longing. Chamber pots? That was a non sequitur.

THE PRODUCTION OF NEW

ETHNOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE

In the name of preserving customs, the Radishes editorial team appealed for
submission of memoirs, interviews, surveys, photographs, drawings, and
stowed-away shoes from readers throughout the country. The knowledge
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

they sought was empirical and their preferred inscription machine was the
camera. Yao and Zhou repeatedly admonished their readers to take clear
photographs, send postcards, and, when all else failed, make drawings (CFL
IV: 200). One reader considered this impulse a Western trait: “I have read
monographs written by Westerners on Chinese customs. They always at-
tach the true image of our women’s slender toes in the form of bare-all [chi
luoluo] camera shots or diagrams. They show frontal and side views; they
pry open the bent toes and heels to take pictures. The reader has a complete
glimpse” (CFL: 354–55; emphasis mine). Photographs or diagrams were taken
to be more thorough methods of inscription than words because, like the
X-ray machines,
EBSCO Publishing :they
eBookrevealed theAcademic
Comprehensive inner truth in (EBSCOhost)
Collection a more realistic
- printedmanner.
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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 73
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Not only are all the visual angles covered, but also the full temporal se-
quence is revealed: “Some shots are taken when the binders are being tight-
ened; some are taken after binding is completed and the shoes are being
slipped on; some when the anklet and embroidered shoes are in place. There
are even photographs of an array of binders and shoes, all classified and cat-
egorized. . . . Westerners are high on curiosity [that we Chinese should not
imitate], but we cannot be second to their venturesome spirit of scrutiniz-
ing every matter and every object” (CFL: 354–55). What distinguished the
Westerners, then, was not their imaging machines but their inquisitive spirit
and all-seeing eyes.
Heeding this call, Yao opened The Best of Picking Radishes (Caifei jing-
hualu, 1941) with forty new photographs (presumably taken by Chinese).
Some are composite studies showing variations of regional or period styles
in the soles, heels, and shape of shoes. But the majority of connoisseurs
seemed ill at ease with the scientific discourse that had won intellectual high
ground by the late 1920s.7 Some “scientific” treatises on, for example, the
aesthetics of feet or the physics of lilt smack of mimicry if not parody (CFL
IV: 54–63; CFL II: 103). Clearly the reader did not have to adore science to
find the photograph of a tiny-footed courtesan pleasurable.
A handful of connoisseurs appeared to be practitioners of positivist sci-
entism. Hu Yanxian, a frequent contributor and supplier of the composite
photographic studies, showed an impressive propensity for measuring and
tabulating with frightening accuracy. A native of Beijing, he documented
the twenty steps involved in the making of Banner shoes fashioned by the
Manchus and Chinese martial (Hanjun) women, who did not bind their
feet, as well as their sartorial rituals (CFL: 206–9; 229–30). Unveiled in even
more minute detail are the lengths of each part of the foot (unbound and
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

bound compared), presented in a table with thirty-two columns and ﬁve

rows; the anatomy of fourteen parts of a shoe, described with a drawing,
legend, and notes (see fig. 6); the six stages of evolution of the shape of soles
in the recent century, explained with two sets of drawings, one sectional
and the other aerial (see fig. 5); and designs and patterns of socks (see fig.
8; CFL: 221–29). If Hu Yanxian had meant the excessive documentation to
be a satire of positivism, his strategy misfired. His measurements are so ex-
acting that his sincerity seems overwhelming.
It is evident by now that even as these lotus lovers claimed to be mere
recorders of a vanishing custom, they were generating new knowledge on
the EBSCO of Picking
pagesPublishing Radishes.
: eBook The bound
Comprehensive Academic foot had never
Collection been- photographed
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and measured in such detail before the age of its vanishing. Scientiﬁc real-
ism supplanted literary imagination as the entree to footbinding’s truth. Not
only the epistemology of these connoisseurs but also their inscription ma-
chines and medium were modern. With or without visual aids, the printed
word seemed a lot more contagious, a lot more likely to get entangled with
life, when it circulated on the pages of tabloids and mass-produced books in
an age of modern transportation.
In a transitional age when personal knowledge of footbinding was in-
creasingly scant, the anthologies became practical textbooks and guidebooks.
Several years into the serialization, readers began to submit impressions of
their travels to cities or districts described in Picking Radishes, some carry-
ing a copy of the book like a Lonely Planet tour guide. One reader professed
to have learned everything he knew about bound feet from Yao Lingxi’s
columns. He later traveled to Tianjin, Yao’s hometown, surveyed the brothel
district and reported the sightings of two footbound prostitutes. He wrote
to Yao at the tabloid; Yao visited the two shortly, composed poems to com-
memorate the encounter, and published the entire sequence of texts in a
later anthology (CFL IV: 313–16).8
To facilitate text-to-life-to-text encounters, Yao launched a “Lotus-
Seeking Club” in 1938 and drafted a covenant. All who read Picking Radishes
and had their interest piqued, especially those skilled in drawing, photogra-
phy, and sculpture (note the emphasis on the visual), were welcomed to join.
If they discovered writings about feet or were inspired to craft their own
(classical Chinese please), Yao would consider publishing them. Viewpoints,
research, or reports of “contacts with lotus feet” were of value. Yao was also
interested in any article of clothing that covered the tiny foot, in material
form or in photograph. He would pay cash for the use of the objects or ne-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

gotiate a price for purchase. Photographs would be shared with other mem-
bers willing to bear the expenses of reproduction. Good photos of both the
arched and never-bound foot were also welcomed. Attached were detailed
instructions for submission as well as the addresses of Yao Lingxi in Tian-
jin and Zhou Ying in Shanghai. The two were to circulate mimeographed
address updates of new members every month (CFL IV: 201–3).
Club members were also encouraged to collect other kinds of informa-
tion: If you ﬁnd a footbound woman willing to unwrap her binding cloths,
introduce her to us. If you know a tiny-footed prostitute, send her name,
rank in brothel, age, native place, name of troupe, and address to the club
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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 75
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“to facilitate investigation” (CFL IV: 202). It is self-evident that the un-
specified gender of Yao’s and Zhou’s intended readers is male. We do not
know how many joined, but the covenant is an apt summary of the edito-
rial preferences that produced the Picking Radishes anthologies.9
With this fan club trading in information and objects, it became di‹cult
to sustain Yao’s earlier disclaimer that appreciation of footbinding can be
divorced from its promotion. He might not have succeeded in enticing mod-
ern girls to take up binding, but in keeping the knowledge alive and infor-
mation current, he promoted the connoisseurship of feet.10 This connois-
seurship, even as it speaks the modern language of investigative science and
ethnography, is deeply nostalgic by nature and in rhetoric. Yao Lingxi’s iden-
tification lies not with the forward-looking modernizers but with the van-
ished literati. It is no accident that he announced the launching of the
Lotus-Seeking Club in the form of a covenant (sheyue), a genre popular in
the late-Ming when gatherings of moon-gazing poets or romantic politi-
cians abounded.
Such connoisseurs as Yao Lingxi, Tao Baopi, Zhou Ying, and Hu Yanxian
were schooled enough in the old world of the literati to pull oª a studied
imitation. Yao Lingxi is acclaimed today not as a tabloid writer but as a cred-
ible authority on the Ming novel Plum in the Golden Vase (also known as
Golden Lotus). There is no mistake, however, about their location as cul-
tural producers in a new world of heightened circulation of news and in-
formation. Hence Tao, the unrepentant lotus lover, styled himself Baopi,
“addicted to newspapers.” Surely they were “transitional figures,” but the
overused label does not do these people justice. What distinguishes the con-
noisseurs from such transitional writers as Tang Yisuo and Xu Ke decades
earlier is the former’s posture: they want to seize the present moment by
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

looking back, not forward. Their goal is not to resuscitate the past but merely
to savor whatever is left of it.
Indeed, their lack of self-consciousness and agony set them apart from
serious intellectuals in early twentieth-century China. They embraced such
opposites as appreciation and disapproval of the bound foot or scientiﬁc
measurements and literary imageries without a trace of incongruity but with
barrels of laughter. Their world has no paradoxes, only fragmentary knowl-
edge and body parts that generate inﬁnite amusement. They shouldered no
“gate of darkness,” only gaieties. Nor did they suªer crises of identity, only
hangovers and a lack of sleep. On the surface, these purveyors of knowl-
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edge about women’s feet appear to be the happiest and most well-adjusted
writers in modern China.

MIMETIC NOSTALGIA:
NEW CONNOISSEURS AS OLD LITERATI

The connoisseurs’ playfulness should not be mistaken for a lack of purpose.

Playing (youxi) was a prevalent way of life and mode of writing for a dis-
tinct group of male scholars after the abolishment of the civil service ex-
amination in 1905. The signiﬁcance of this seminal event in the changing
fortunes of Confucian culture (wen) cannot be overemphasized. The formal
severance of political power from the written word and knowledge of the
classics created a vacuum but also new possibilities, one of which was writ-
ing as and for entertainment. Playing or whiling leisure away (xiaoxian)
became serious business.11 Previous scholars have focused on the anxieties
generated after the ground rules that had scripted imperial Chinese life were
swept away. The productive purpose of reconstituting new rules through
playing has gone unnoticed.
All the recognized major events of modern Chinese history are political:
from the 1898 Reforms to the 1911 Revolution; from the May Fourth Patri-
otic Movement to the Northern Expedition. The private, the sentimental,
and the sensual have been thoroughly erased. If we pause long enough from
the public world inhabited by nationalistic reformers and revolutionaries,
we may notice a striking unfamiliarity in the tempo and rhythm of the world
of Yao Lingxi and his friends. It is a forgotten world of private male plea-
sures, of fragments that do not add up to overarching theories, of indul-
gences that matter little, and passions that do not save the nation or any-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

body. Male connoisseurs of the foot and its paraphernalia did not so much
resist national history as ignore it. But in playing with feet they were also
playing with time, and, in so doing, they carved out a space of repose out-
side the purposeful march of the nation.12
Two kinds of regression in time— of nostalgia—are involved in the con-
noisseurship of feet: reclamation of personal childhood, discussed below,
and playful imitation of the literati, the paragon of male privilege that ceased
to be reproduced after the end of the examination system. Worse still, af-
ter the fall of the dynasty in 1911, the literati became an appendage to a hol-
lowed center: the emperor they were supposed to serve and the dynastic or-
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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 77
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der to which they pledged loyalty had ceased to exist. The ontological am-
biguity of this leftover man is similar to that of the footbound woman, which
helps explain his identification with her. Both his and her presences were
concrete and visible; they were spotted in the marketplace and on the pages
of newspapers. But slowly the individual bodies expired, one by one, bring-
ing an entire institution to a close. Meanwhile, their phantom bodies elicited
laughter, ridicule, and pity from the modernizers.
Even as they shared a disdain for grand narratives and a fascination with
body parts, the lotus lovers who appeared in Picking Radishes were not a
uniform group. Their generation can be measured by the distance between
them and the receding literati world. Tao Baopi, among the older genera-
tion, provided a crucial link between the world of “new fiction” in the late
nineteenth century and the world of treaty port pictorials in the 1930s. From
the literary careers of Tao and his contemporaries we can see how “small-
talk” (xiaoshuo) was the common denominator of disparate genres of tra-
ditional fiction, late-Qing fiction, and modern newspapers.13
Tao Baopi was at once an author and a critic of a new genre—fiction pub-
lished in periodicals, often in serialized form—that inherited the cultural
prestige invested in the old genre of eight-legged examination essays. In his
short story “Excising Small Feet,” Tao heralded the connoisseurship of
footbinding-as-antique which was later embraced by the Picking Radishes
group. Set in 1904, one year before the examination system was abolished,
the story was first published in 1907 in Stories Every Month (Yueyue xiaoshuo),
a magazine specializing in original short stories and detective stories in trans-
lation. Written in a classical prose laden with bureaucratic jargon, Tao’s story
tells of a certain sixty-something o‹cial-in-waiting (xunjian), a pathetic
figure who purchased a degree which made him eligible for an appointment
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

but for years had failed to land a formal post. He had the look of the ailing
imperial China: “His bones are saturated with suªering; his face yellow and
emaciated. His strides are hesitant and his spirits decrepit. If you regard him
closely he has the look of an opium addict, or maybe he is suªering from
oversex.”14
To ingratiate himself to his boss (daoyuan), who complained of an empty
coªer depleted by the Boxer indemnities and the training of a modern army,
the old scholar racked his brain for a moneymaking venture. He stumbled
into the bedchamber and eyed his concubine, who was sitting by the bed-
side, head lowered and absorbed in something. “Is she worrying about
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monthly expenses? Is she sewing diligently? No, no. She is tending to her
tiny golden lotus like a silkworm bound by her own cocoon. She wants to
ingratiate herself to the old goat and avail herself as his plaything” (179–80).
Echoing the slogan of the anti-footbinding movement, that footbinding
turns potentially productive citizens into men’s sex objects, Tao did not show
any sympathy for the lotus lover throughout the story.
His concubine’s feet excited the o‹cial-in-waiting. He summoned two
butlers to grind ink and drafted a memorial in proper format. He hit upon
a perfect plan: “Everybody knows about the vice of footbinding. But being
a custom that is handed down for generations, it cannot be eradicated all
of a sudden. Why not excise the small feet so that the state can be richer
and the women can gradually be free? . . . All females whose feet measure
two-and-some inches have to pay a daily tax of fifty coppers [wen]. Knock
oª ten coppers if they measure an inch longer, and those at least six inches
would be exempted.” 15 The daoyuan, thinking it an excellent idea, forwarded
the memorial to the regional inspectors.
The inspectors rejected the proposal as laughable, unenforceable, and dan-
gerous. Who would go around taking measurements? What if the people,
already weary of missionary encroachments, interpreted it as another as-
sault on their way of life? The old scholar tried to garner support from his
colleagues: “Excising small feet would change a bad custom and open up
new opportunities. Both the country and the people will benefit. What’s
wrong with it?” One responded, “Are you looking for a job under the skirt?
But first of all, are you willing to let out the lovely tiny feet of your concu-
bine? If not, you will have to pay through your nose even if you manage to
land the tax-collecting job to grease your pockets!” (183–85).16
The lotus lover, corrupt and spent, is a laughable figure. The object of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

his desire also appears dated and ridiculous, a relic from a decrepit world.
Tao Baopi, a connoisseur of footbinding, did not promote its virtues in this
story but merely sent the message: leave the women alone. As antique, foot-
binding is dated and will in due time pass away. The overreaching state and
its greedy o‹cials bear the brunt of his satire.17
When the dynastic order was breathing its last in the ﬁrst decade of the
twentieth century, it became transparent that the prestige of footbinding
and the civil service examination were intrinsically linked. The premise of
“Excising Small Feet” and Huang Xiuqiu, discussed in chapter 1, is that
bound feet, like eight-legged essays, are remnants of an ossiﬁed order, su-
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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 79
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perﬂuous in their exquisite details. A profusion of form masked the empti-

ness inside, devoid of content and utility.18 After the fall of the Qing dy-
nasty, this identification of the two leftover objects became explicit. Pick-
ing Radishes reports banter popular at the time: What do the woman who
liked to bind her feet and a candidate who fussed with his examination es-
says have in common? They both wanted to show oª (CFL II: 240). A cou-
plet, supposedly crafted during the 1860 decade of restoration, thus described
the ultimate male privileges in the old imperium: “Watching a concubine
bind [or wash] her feet; / Being chosen as the Presented Scholar” (CFL II:
79, 311). So firm was the identification of word and foot that one relict of
the literati, Ye Dehui, was said to have loved to hold a tiny foot in his hand
while he read and wrote (CFL IV: 294).
After the fall of the imperium, the scholar-o‹cial, who used to enjoy un-
matched public glory and private pleasures, had become an object of nos-
talgic longing or contempt, depending on one’s political stance. In either
case, the lost art of footbinding and its literati admirers were conjoined as
symbols of male privilege. Hence despite Tao’s ridicule of the o‹cial-in-
waiting, his own favorite pastime took the form of a literati gathering: a
group of drinking friends composing poems to a set theme (shoelaces, for
example) or to each other’s rhyme (CFL: 100–118). Such gaming recalls the
world of Xu Ke and Tang Yisuo in Shanghai. As advocates of tianzu, Xu and
Tang may seem Tao’s polar opposites at first glance. Yet curiously “Excis-
ing Small Feet” resonates with Huang Xiuqiu in language and intent, for
both use women’s feet to tell an anti-bureaucratic reformist story. Moreover,
Tao and Tang displayed a similar familiarity with the vainglories of bu-
reaucratic culture and the hollowness of o‹cial essays. These writers of xiao-
shuo in fact hail from a similar cultural and textual world, one that was
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

mimetic of the traditional literati. This gesture of deliberate imitation

marked them as irreducibly modern.

THE CONFLATION OF TIANZU AND CHANZU

That Tang Yisuo and Tao Baopi could appear so similar is more than a func-
tion of their shared cultural milieu. It is also rooted in a dynamic of textual
citation and anthologizing itself. At the moment of its birth, the novel cat-
egory tianzu was construed as the opposite of chanzu. Yet in the pamphlets
and treatises that the anti-footbinding movement produced, the simple
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phrase had to be expanded into wordy polemics. In so doing, proponents

of tianzu used legends and expressions from the pre-existing discourse of
chanzu. They simply lifted verbatim, for example, the origins myths of Con-
sort Pan, Consort Yang, or Yaoniang. As such, the discourse of tianzu often
appears to be curiously identical to that of chanzu.
In his search for incipient practices of natural feet in Chinese history, Xu
Ke recycled lengthy sections from old texts—philological treatises and con-
noisseurship literature— often without adding commentary of his own. If
the polemical prefaces and afterword of “A Survey of Natural Feet” and
“Words of Knowing Feet” are deleted, the reader would not be able to glean
the compilation date or intention from the bulk of the main texts. The only
exception is a section entitled “Modern Tianzu” in the former. In fact, ap-
pended to “A Survey” is a study of footbinding that is equal in length to
the survey of natural feet.19
This curious conﬂation is also evident on the pages of Picking Radishes,
where Xu’s treatises were anthologized in a slightly abridged form (CFL:
43–52) right before the manifestos of the classic lotus lovers Li Yu and Fang
Xuan. Not only did they appear under the same heading, “Evidential stud-
ies” (“Kaozheng”), they even drew from the same repertoire of legends and
poetic allusions. Without the vocabulary developed for connoisseurship,
much of it gathered by the evidential scholars in the previous centuries,
tianzu would not have had a linguistic leg to stand on. Whether one claims
to be for, against, or indiªerent to footbinding, the knowledge that one trans-
mits in writing—in the form of fragments of poems or anecdotes from the
classics and histories—is in fact the same.20
There is no better illustration of this indeterminacy than the oeuvre of
the poet Lotus Addict (Lianchi), a proliﬁc author of poems in praise of nat-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ural feet and a profusion of elegies for bound feet and their assorted para-
phernalia: shoes, bedslippers, soles, shoe patterns, heels, shoelaces, and others
(CFL II: 73–91). In one breath he declared:
Stubbornly and obsessively I adore the lotus.
Since infancy I have ﬁxed my eyes on hems of skirts.
In old age my addiction is now worse than ever,
Without pausing I seek to reveal all mysteries of the lotus. (CFL II: 80)

In another breath, he adopted a female voice in a classic anti-footbinding

song that could have been featured on a tract:
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Afraid of boarding a train, I think it is a tumbling tower.

Getting on and oª an ocean liner brings even more peril.
Having traversed rivers and oceans to afar,
I now know that big-feet are better than golden hooks. (CFL II: 91)

Is he a lotus lover or a hater? The poems in themselves provide no deﬁnite

answer. Lotus Addict, fully aware of this, was having fun playing with the
inventive possibilities.

Don’t say that Lotus Addict is ﬁckle,

Now repudiating his old love for the lotus.
Are they sincere, these new lyrics of mine?
Writing a history of the lotus [lianshi],
I await a new era and chronicle [ jiyuan]. (CFL II: 90–91)

Yao Lingxi remarked astutely that Lotus Addict was an innovator whose
lyrics and posture are irreducibly modern. “Poems praising tianzu have no
previous allusions to rely on [qiangwu gushi]. Hence unless they are ac-
companied by lyrics on chanzu, one would not know where to begin.” Lo-
tus Addict’s set of six tianzu lyrics, of which the trains and ocean liner poem
quoted above is one, shun all received footbinding allusions. Evoking a brave
new world of high-rise buildings and globe trotting, the poet invented not
only new expressions but also a new system of reference. Thus his lyrics com-
prise an original modern text (CFL II: 91–92; cf.73 and CFL III: 34–40).
The polemical message of an anti-footbinding song is embedded in its
context, such as the venue of a Tianzu hui rally, and its tone of delivery.
Taken out of context, anti-footbinding polemics may serve other purposes,
or none at all. As we have already noted, the proliferation of anti-footbinding
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

literature of the 1890s to 1920s made knowledge of binding feet more ac-
cessible and may have thus ironically prolonged its life as a social practice
even as it helped diminish its cultural aura. Yet by the time all of these texts
were incorporated into Picking Radishes in the 1930s, words seem to have
lost their social moorings altogether. In this sense, the Radishes volumes con-
stituted a disembodied textual universe, an empty vessel that served as a re-
ceptacle of conﬂicting desires and an incubator of new meanings. It is ironic
then that an encyclopedia formed in no small part by recycling old texts
and suªused with nostalgia turns out to be not only modern but also ex-
tremely inventive.21
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THE INVENTION OF FANG XUAN

This paradox of invention from recycling is key to understanding the dis-

course of connoisseurship in Picking Radishes. Connoisseurship is a form of
identification. Since the ninth century, with the invention of the category
of “antique,” connoisseurship has been associated with collecting.22 Obses-
sion for all kinds of objects reached new heights in the commercialized ur-
ban culture of the late Ming. Judith Zeitlin has analyzed the idealization of
obsession ( pi) itself in the sixteenth century and its association with the cult
of genuine love (qing ). True love for an object melts the distance between
self and object, rendering connoisseurship what the late-Ming aesthete Yuan
Hongdao called an act of “self loving the self.” In its extreme, connoisseur-
ship is a form of self-expression.23 Modern lovers of feet, however, fashion
playful, exaggerated, and contrived selves that are far cries from the con-
noisseurs of Yuan Hongdao.
Two types of bound-foot connoisseurs appeared in Picking Radishes: those
who wrote and those who were written about by others. Fang Xuan was one
of the two foremost representatives of the former (the other being Li Yu, to
be discussed in chapter 5). Nothing is known about this author of five short
treatises on footbinding but his profusion of sobriquets. Although he has
been identified variously as a writer from the Qianlong, Kangxi, or “ancient”
periods, Fang’s earliest appearance was in 1914, when the treatises were an-
thologized in two collectanea that appeared in the same year.24
Fang Xuan was a master of playing games with words. All five of his trea-
tises are exercises in imitating the literati in their preferred genres and brothel
drinking games. One popular treatise is “Miscellaneous Sayings from Jin-
yuan” (“Jinyuan zazuan”), a collection of banters. One example: “Likeness:
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

The small foot is like the silver dollar; everybody loves it. Big foot clad in a
tiny platform shoe is like the squeaking of toads.” Or, “No lasting harsh-
ness: A kind mother binding her dear daughter’s feet.”25 Imitative of the
genre zazuan initiated by the Tang poet Li Shangyin, these are games of
association that embody no deep meanings, only the diction and wit of
rhetoric. One imagines them to be drinking games or musings of bored
travelers.
Another treatise, “Aesthetics of the Fragrant Lotus” (“Xianglian pinzao”),
was cast as a xiaopin-essay, a popular genre among late-Ming literati. Mod-

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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 83
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eled after the “Aesthetics of Plum Blossoms,” a treatise on reﬁned taste in

everyday life, “Fragrant Lotus” features short lists such as “the nine ranks of
fragrant lotus” or “four taboos of fragrant lotus.” The presumed reader was
the not-so-refined voyeur, who was supposed to derive pleasures from such
recommendations as the “four unspeakable delights of binding and wash-
ing feet: secret espying from behind a screen; smelling their fragrance in the
dark; watching their shadow on water; viewing their image in the mirror.”26
The perspective of viewing and the angle of the gaze are crucial, as evinced
by Fang’s comments on the “three best sites for lotus sightings.” “The slen-
der spring arch only touches the floor; the narrow new moon descends not
from the sky. In my travels I found three scenic spots where the moon traces
and arch shadows can be espied from below by lifting one’s head, and not
confined to an aerial examination. The famous mountains and auspicious
sites under heaven are full of gatherings of skirts, hence there must be other
scenic spots [for such viewing ]. In the years to come, as my waxed travel-
ing clogs hit the trail, I will select other spots.” The three sites are, coinci-
dentally, “In front of the Three Mountains Gate, Tiger Hill, Suzhou; be-
hind the temple of Wang Tianjun, Maoshan, Jintan; under the osmanthus
tree in Pingshan Hall, Yangzhou.” 27
This is voyeurism at its worst; the woman is literally turned into a piece
of art, an object scrutinized from all angles. Given its explicitness, “Aesthetics
of the Fragrant Lotus” was quoted in virtually every subsequent work on
footbinding as a document of the lure of the bound foot (CFL: 155ª). Many
of the connoisseurs in Picking Radishes showed a taken-for-granted famil-
iarity with his words (CFL: 4, 102; CFL II: 5, 17; 264, 267; CFL IV: 54; CFXB:
253). Yao Lingxi and Zhou Ying considered Fang Xuan and Li Yu connois-
seurs par excellence, praising their skills in writing about the aesthetics of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

feet but stopping short of discussing sex in the open (CFL II: 284; CFL IV:
340). One contributor to Radishes, who called himself “A Faithful of Lotus-
ism” (Lianjiao xinshi), wrote that his love for “Aesthetics of the Fragrant
Lotus” was so deep that when he first came upon it twenty years ago he
could not bear to let it out of his fingers (CFL II: 99–103).
Could not bear to let it out of his fingers? Was he serious or exaggerat-
ing? How literally should we take these voyeuristic connoisseurs who appear
more and more like sexual perverts or morons? With readers and admirers
like these, Fang Xuan’s “Aesthetics”—forty fragments jotted in jest—attained

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canonical status as the manifesto of connoisseurship of footbinding in “tra-

ditional” China. How much weight can Fang’s flimsy text and, for that mat-
ter, women’s bound feet bear? The sheer absurdity of contrast between tone
and purported meaning cautions us not to read Fang’s treatises and other
words of feet appreciation in Radishes too literally.
The truth is that Fang Xuan is a curious author, and his treatises are enig-
matic by design. What the unsuspecting modern reader may not know is
that “Aesthetics” is the only text of its kind in the history of Chinese liter-
ature. Everybody quotes it because it is singular in its obsessive details and
explicit longing. Yao Lingxi made a perceptive comment: “Talking about
the lotus began with Fang Lichang [Xuan]. But other than ranking and com-
menting, most of his are empty words” (CFL IV: iii). New words on feet in
an old bottle of imitative genres, the treatises are literally an invention. Yao
presented Fang as an “ancient” (guren) along with the seventeenth-century
connoisseur Li Yu (CFL IV: 340), but I am not convinced. None of his works
contain reliable internal references to the time and place of their produc-
tion, nor can I find any textual traces or mentions of them before their first
publication in 1914.28
If indeterminacy in time characterizes the texts produced by Fang Xuan,
every known fact about the author is a gesture of imitation and oªers mul-
tiple interpretive possibilities. The name Fang Xuan itself is imitative of a
Song poet. Internal references suggest that he sojourned in Guangping, a
common place name which could be in Zhili, Henan, Jiangsu, or Anhui.
He gave the impression that he was a scholar-o‹cial who frequented cour-
tesan parties, went sightseeing at scenic spots, and was conversant with literati
genres associated with leisure. Above all, he established his authorial identity
on his imitation of literati genres and their games. Was he one of them? In
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

his afterword to “Miscellaneous Sayings from Jinyuan,” he feigned fear of re-

venge by an army of women who, angry for his teasing the lotus, would kick
and knock his writing brush (guancheng ) out of his hand: “I ﬁnished writ-
ing and broke down in laughter.”29 Perhaps Fang Xuan—whoever he was—
was also laughing at the readers who took him too seriously or literally.
Almost every scholar who studies footbinding has quoted Fang Xuan as
evidence of foot fetish in China. Until we know more about the date and
circumstances of the production of these treatises, however, we should not
take his words in such a straightforward manner. Fang’s import lies in that
he ﬁgured as “the original” literati connoisseur for others to imitate. Writ-
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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 85
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ing commentaries or sequels is a prevalent way of paying tribute by imita-

tion. A Faithful of Lotus-ism who could not bear to let “Aesthetics” leave
his hands lamented that Fang’s coverage was confined to feet from China
proper (Zhongyuan) and proceeded to supplement it with his knowledge
of Guangdong. Quotation and anthologizing constitute another means of
textual imitation, and Fang’s originality was evinced by the frequency with
which he was being cited in entirety or fragments.30 Identification with an
“ancient” connoisseur led to the production of more texts. The result is the
insuªerable wordiness of the connoisseurship literature.
For all its superficial fascination with voyeurism, the literature of con-
noisseurship crafted by Fang Xuan and the Radishes crowd is not interested
in looking at the female body, which got lost in a mountain of superfluous
words. The voyeurs were less seduced by the bound foot than by the word
as a vehicle of representation. The connoisseur who writes is obsessed with
his own verbosity. Once again, connoisseurship is the ultimate expression
of self loving the self.

SECONDHAND SEX:
THE CONNOISSEUR AS BOY, IMPOSTOR, AND COLLECTOR

To be more precise, the Radishes connoisseurs’ obsession is a form of self-

as-modern-men-of-letters loving the self-as-traditional-literati. By deﬁnition
it is backward-looking and nostalgic. In its excessive sentimentalism, this
obsession exhausts and exceeds the aesthete’s xiaopin-essay genre and requires
new modes of narration. Hence the most emotionally and sexually explicit
passages in Picking Radishes are also the most innovative and modern. There
is no textual precedent for such revealing psychological descriptions of the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

eroticism of foot.31 The same is true for narratives of pain from within the
women’s bodies.
A small number of lotus lovers wrote about their direct erotic contacts
with the bound foot. These accounts are always framed by deliberate dis-
tancing between the time-space of the encounter and that of storytelling:
couching the story as childhood memory, shrouding the encounter in a haze
of smoke and intoxicating liquor (CFL II: 136), or presenting the sexual
memoir as a posthumous work (CFL IV: 305). Therein lies the boundary
between decent and indecent exposure in a 1930s treaty port tabloid. In par-
ticular, the most frequently used distancing device is the all-seeing eye of
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the boy. The innocence of prepubescence allows the voyeur to gain entrance
into the female quarters, play all he wants with an adult woman with bound
feet, and narrate the sensuous excitement of kissing the foot or sni‹ng the
toe without social or moral sanction (CFL IV: 305–6; cf. CFL: 293).32
Ironically, when erotic games with feet are presented as those of the pre-
pubescent boy, they of course appear as indulgences of the presexual stage.
The sexuality of the male is thus denied. This bifurcation of eroticism and
sex finds a forceful statement in one of the most blatantly sensuous stories
about the sex of footbinding, when the narrator solemnly declares that play-
ing with a foot is qualitatively diªerent from sexual intercourse (CFL IV: 211–
25). The story details an eighteen-month aªair between a twenty-something
maid and her master half her age, Yu Aitong (Same love as mine). It was
authored secondhand by one Jinling Aitesheng (The scholar from Nanjing
who loves peculiar things), who claimed to be Yu’s friend. Yet the entire
thirteen-page narrative is put in the first person: a long quotation without
quotation marks.
The maid Plum Girl (Mei’er) and her master devised many games in their
mutual seduction. She once retrieved a tiny paper bag of minced water chest-
nut (ling jiao, one of the metaphors for the bound foot because of its tri-
angular arched shape) from the crevice at the bottom of her foot—the ero-
togenic zone—and fed it to him. His fondling her foot could “make her
brook flow” and he would ejaculate as she collapsed into his arms (CFL IV:
218). Yet Plum Girl is the first to articulate the diªerence between these games
and sexual intercourse. The master asked: “When you let me fondle you,
are you suªering or are you happy?” Plum Girl answered: “Who would let
others fondle her at will? Especially the body of a woman is inviolable, but
things are diªerent when the fondler is someone you love. . . . But there is
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

a diªerence in feelings of pleasure [kuaigan]: the arousal of sexual desire

[qingyu] brings happiness that lasts only that one tensed moment; afterward
one feels all the more tired and lethargic.”
If intercourse exhausts, loving tenderness restores. “But after a hard day’s
work, when I get a good caressing and kneading from you, my body would
be soothed all over and my spirits rekindled. Moreover, your thousand kinds
of tenderness and ten thousand ways of cherishing me make my joy
overﬂow” (CFL IV: 222). Later, he added that she refused to have intercourse
because she was afraid of getting pregnant (CFL IV: 223).33 This seemingly

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straightforward statement of female desire, however, is not what it seems,

because it is told by a man, and in quotation for that matter. No matter
how realistic and believable Plum Girl may sound, she is more a provoca-
teur of male desire than an informant on female desire.
Sexually explicit narratives like this are rare in Radishes. This is in part
due to the fact that footbinding was dead in the 1930s treaty ports—hence
the amazing confessions of many connoisseurs that they have, in fact, never
laid eyes on a bound foot, let alone fondled one. They are impostors. One
may dismiss such disclaimers as those of perverted men letting themselves
oª the hook, but I choose to believe them, for it explains the curious insis-
tence on authenticity in their narratives and their empiricist tone. Without
much personal experience to rely on, they had to smother the reader with
emotions or to narrate in exquisite detail their sexual encounters in order
to make their accounts believable.
Zhou Ying, Yao Lingxi’s associate editor, confessed that “since childhood
I have worshipped the tiny foot,” a lifelong love kindled by reading a novel
about a connoisseur, Hu Xueyan (CFL IV: 144, 157–58). The problem for
“crazed foot-worshippers like us is that although we are devoted, we have
scant opportunities to play with the lotus. We speak [about footbinding ]
as if flowers are falling from the sky; in fact, we are doing no better than
going to bed hugging a stiª board.” The fact that modern connoisseurs are
impostors means that they are first and foremost collectors. “Since we can-
not find any real targets, we turn to collecting materials about feet. This is
like painting a loaf of bread when you are hungry” (CFL II: 288–89).
Words, images, and things are traces of a lost world and disappearing
bodies. “What we collect is, first of all, words about the lotus. All fellow con-
noisseurs have a large miscellaneous collection of these, regardless of whether
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

they are words praising or trashing the lotus. For words trashing the lotus
often reﬂect its beauty. Secondly, we collect photographs of beautiful
women’s lotus feet. Those of naked feet are the hardest to come by, hence
the most prized. Lastly, we collect embroidered shoes, all of which are tiny
and exquisite. Bedslippers are particularly priceless. When I ask my lotus-
loving friends, all have this obsession with collecting, and even our modes
of collecting are similar” (CFL II: 288–89). Such words as “worshipped,”
“devotion,” and “crazed” that Yao and Zhou used sound hollow. No amount
of excessive earnestness can disguise the fact that connoisseurship in an age

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of disavowal is an empty exercise. From reading a novel to collecting words

to writing Picking Radishes, the only context that can be generated from the
production and consumption of texts is more texts, not social experience.
The exaggerated emotions of the connoisseurs were nonetheless heart-
felt. Yao Lingxi evoked the transcendental power of love, borrowing the lan-
guage of both the late-Ming cult of sincere love (qing ) and the garden of
purity in Dream of Red Chamber to describe the emotions of connoisseur-
ship: “When human emotions are moved, they would have to be lodged.
When the lodged emotions are steadfast, they become an obsession. If your
emotions are not lodged, you would feel numb and your heart unanchored,
oblivious to the pleasures of living. Not only have I lodged my emotions in
this [footbinding ], so have many in this world. Why do we lodge our emo-
tions in this? Because it cannot be had. Our longing turns into a disease, to
relieve it we have to speak up. Since our obsession is deep, our words are
unstoppable.” Unlike the late-Ming supreme love, which embodies the
power of realization by transcending life and death, this latter-day desire is
unrequited as a foregone conclusion.
In the unattainability of the bound foot—its distance and alterity—lies its
attraction. Yao continued, “Born after the faltering of the lotus age, we can
no longer see the beauty of the lotus hook.” This distance accentuates the
contrast of an imagined bygone age with the violence that tore China apart
in the early decades of the twentieth century. “As we live through this kalpa
[age] of titanic demons [Asura], we cannot escape the calamities of warfare. . . .
Only in the world of the golden lotus can we rest our hearts and lodge our
spirits. . . . The beauty of imagination is more enchanting than the excite-
ment of seeing with your eyes or fondling with your hands. I delight in my
own delights and seek momentary comfort from them” (CFL IV: iv-v).
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

INTERVIEWS WITH GRANNY:

FEMALE DESIRES TOLD SECONDHAND

The location of footbinding in the past and the posture of the connoisseurs
as impostor created problems for them as narrators of the sex of footbind-
ing: they could not present themselves as a participant in the act. In an age
of disavowal, the male experience of footbinding-as-sex can be written about
only as nostalgia. A Faithful of Lotus-ism, the admirer of Fang Xuan men-
tioned above, used two strategies to narrate explicit sexual behavior, albeit
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not the psychology of sex: childhood memories (and childhood memories

of his wife’s) and interviews with old connoisseurs.34
Similar to Zhou Ying and Yao Lingxi, Faithful described himself as a vi-
carious connoisseur, born two decades too late to have personal experience
of the fragrant lotus. The closest he came was as a boy, when he sniªed the
stolen shoes of his cousins in bed. He compared it to gazing at a plum tree
to quell a thirst (CFL II: 118). His wife, who started binding at five but let
her feet out at eight or nine, recounted fondling her sisters’ feet to feel their
bones. Faithful also wrote of how she beseeched her young cousin to reverse
current fashion and begin binding so as “to quench my [Faithful’s] desires,”
but the girl refused (CFL II: 124–25).
Faithful’s interviews with old connoisseurs were presented in two halves;
the first consisted of his conversations with a “leftover elder” (yilao) or “elder”
(zhanglao), and the second began abruptly with the connubial delights of a
certain “Granny” (lao, elder, with radical nü, female). The gender of the el-
der who appeared in the first half was ambiguous: “she” was twice called a
“hair-pinned elder” ( jinguo yilao) who treasured her own arched feet. Her
steadfastness was likened to the integrity of a loyalist minister from a van-
quished dynasty. Faithful used her to convey a sense of authentic transmis-
sion of knowledge, likening her to a white-haired palace-woman from the
Tang emperor Xuanzong’s court, who recounted intrigues of court life be-
fore the An Lushan rebellion shattered the empire and sent the emperor and
his entourage into exile (CFL II: 120). Witnesses of the fall, the aging palace-
women were the sole custodians of authentic memory of past grandeur. No
wonder that the literati impostors likened themselves to them (CFL II: 130;
CFL IV: 158).
But at times the elder (as yilao, no longer jinguo yilao) spoke as a “he.” He
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

quoted an ancient’s elegy of bedslippers and adopted a monkish voice in con-

demning forced binding by artificially softening the bones. “He” who dis-
cussed the diªerence between bony and fleshy feet fashioned an all-knowing
male voice. But “he” shifted again to a “she” when recounting the training
of a maid whose natural endowment in terms of an even distribution of
bone and flesh ranked among the top two from hundreds and thousands.
The elder taught the girl the art of wrapping, shaping, applying tonic, and
burning incense. Graduating to be a “senior disciple,” the maid did not take
up with any of her numerous suitors until one day her prince arrived with
over one hundred pairs of specially ordered embroidered shoes representa-
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tive of Suzhou, Yangzhou, Fujian, and Guangdong styles. The elder, im-
pressed by his sincerity, sent her blessings by hand-stitching a pair of bed-
slippers which fit the maid’s “flesh hook” like a glove. They had an orgy for
three days and night, “no water nor gruel could sip through.” Disheveled,
the maid said that she would die without regret (CFL II: 120–21).
If this reads like a martial arts novel, perhaps it was meant to. The selec-
tion of a prized disciple, secret recipes, the mother of all weapons, and a
finale of combat that would end all combats are familiar tropes, not of the
traditional erotic novel, but of the late-Qing martial arts adventures. The
sexual encounter, a journey of male desire, appears comical when narrated
by a female. Yet only females were privy to the secret knowledge and ritu-
als of wrapping and unwrapping the binding cloth. Hence the gender of
the leftover elder’s voice was constantly shifting during the interview with
Faithful.
The explicit narration of female desires in the second half of Faithful’s
interviews was assigned to “Granny.” Granny, whose husband was an o‹-
cial, once traveled with him to Xianyou, Fujian, famous for its footbound
beauties. During her search for prospects to introduce to her husband, she
came across several amorous females. “One was a teenage concubine of a
prominent family who disdained sexual intercourse, preferring to fondle the
penis. She would unwrap her binders when she was aroused and rub her
feet around the penis.” She delighted in seeing the man making a mess. An-
other was an ex-courtesan who changed partners every month. “Most cu-
rious is a woman who liked to grab her friend’s tiny toe in lieu of a dildo.
She would not be happy without going through seven or eight [unclear if
toes or friends] in a night” (CFL II: 124).
This rare description of a homoerotic tryst between two or more women
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

sounds more credible when told by a woman, Granny. But as one of the
three stories of the oversexed and menacing female, it ﬁts the stereotype of
the femme fatale authored and consumed by men in erotic novels.35 Was
the bound foot an enticement for female-to-female desires? We cannot be
sure. The sexual encounters recorded by Faithful through a nostalgic inter-
view are interesting in his ability to narrate both male and female desires
through a shifty, gender-ambiguous voice. This device allows him to broach
the subject of female desire from a female perspective but, ultimately, not
very convincingly. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the real-life details that

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Faithful included, for example the death of Granny in the previous year and
his changing her shoes in the co‹n, the narrative reads like fiction. Faith-
ful’s concoction of his lotus-loving wife, who tried to persuade her young
cousin to take up binding and indulged Faithful by planning a trip to Da-
tong, the mecca of footbinding (CFL II: 125), rings false in an age of dis-
avowal. She seems Faithful’s female alter ego or, in other words, a figment
of his imagination.
The desires of Granny, Faithful’s wife, the Xianyou women, and the Plum
Girl, as explicit as they may seem, are desires reflected through the eyes of
the male connoisseur-impostor. The impostor is the voyeur and also the male
ventriloquist. Other occasional narratives of female autoerotic desires in Pick-
ing Radishes share the same shifty quality of Faithful’s retelling of Granny’s
tales. Not only do they occupy an ambiguous space between the made-up
and the real, they also fashion confused narrative voices and points of view.
In an extreme example, a neighboring woman’s love of her own small feet
was completely embedded in, and narrated by, the boy voyeur’s curious gaze
through a rear window (CFL: 282). Simply put, these secondhand voices
cannot be trusted. They bespeak how the bound foot as an object of mod-
ern male fantasy was an expression of male nostalgic desires, but tell us lit-
tle about female views in this matter.

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF SHOES:

YANG TIEYA AND HU XUEYAN

If Fang Xuan, the writing connoisseur, inspired imitative writings that out-
paced his own in sexual explicitness, connoisseurs whose deeds were being
written about are a diªerent matter. The mimetic connoisseurship they in-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

spired took the form of the invention of gadgets, new and better objects to
play with. It is thus no accident that both Hu Xueyan and Yang Tieya, con-
noisseurs distinguished by their deeds, were associated with the myriad uses
and fantastic life of shoes.
Hu Xueyan was a modern connoisseur in that he was not a scholar but a
merchant. A Hangzhou banker and philanthropist, he made his fortune by
ﬁnancing the indemnities and military expenditures of the Qing court in
the 1860s but went bankrupt in 1883. According to the diarist Li Ciming,
Hu “kept as many as a hundred women from good and mean families, many

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THE BODY EXPOSED 92

from raiding.”36 This act, imitative of an emperor, inspired a novel center-

ing on Hu’s garden mansion and antique-buying activities, with only rare
glimpses of his footbound harem (he forbade his women to wear skirts, pre-
ferring pants which embellish the shape of pointy feet; 38). Hu the wealthy
merchant plays the role of a connoisseur-as-emperor.
The novel, called The Uno‹cial Biography of Hu Xueyan (Hu Xueyan wai-
zhuan,) was prefaced 1903 and published around that time. It was attrib-
uted to an author who sounds Japanese but is not, Dajiao Shiyu (Ohashi
Shikihane), and was alleged to have been published in Tokyo. It became a
legendary work among the Radishes lotus lovers, creating high expectations.
But when such a reader finally came across the book, he was bound to be
disappointed by the formulaic and superficial descriptions of feet.37 The
paucity of details results from the fact that footbinding served a symbolic
function in the novel, as a relic from history before Westernization. “For
the wind of equal rights between male and female had yet to spread to China,
and footbinding was an elaborate matter in the Hu mansion. They consid-
ered it a shame to find one female with big feet in the house, oblivious as
they were of the world of tianzu in the myriad countries and nine conti-
nents” (28–29). The fictional Hu Xueyan, who installed telephones in the
sixteen quarters housing his wives and concubines to facilitate his summons,
was indeed a latter-day emperor in a polygynous harem. It is significant that
the historical Hu Xueyan flourished in the 1860s–1870s, decades of the sup-
pression of the Taiping rebels that from hindsight shone as the last restora-
tion of the imperium.
So unsatisfying is Uno‹cial History of Hu Xueyan that lotus lovers took
to embellishing it by fantasizing about shoes. One, Sanyou (Three Friends),
claimed to be fortunate enough to live next door to a Granny who was for-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

merly a maid in the Hu mansion. Granny disclosed elaborate details about

a hierarchy of shoes in the Hu harem: feet three inches or smaller were al-
lowed to be clad in bright red shoes with gold embroidery; four inches or
smaller, pink with embroidered flowers; five inches or smaller, miscellaneous
colors with flowers; bigger than five inches, unadorned blue cloth shoes. Be-
sides hierarchy by size there was also hierarchy by status: maids and concu-
bines both wore red silk bedslippers, but the former could embroider them
only on the tip whereas the latter fashioned embroidery all over. Bedslippers
were also worn in the daytime for Hu’s convenient fondling. In the sum-
mer, slipper soles were crafted from jade to make them cool to the touch
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(CFL: 267). In a subsequent volume, however, Three Friends confessed that

he was actually associate editor Zhou Ying and that the details about shoes
were gleaned from his memories of a childhood reading of a much more
detailed version of the novel (CFL II: 286). There was no Granny. I suspect
that neither was there an unabridged Uno‹cial History of Hu Xueyan, since
there is no evidence of it whatsoever.
A text of fabricated origins created its own objective reality— or was it
the generative power of objects that fabricated texts? Yao Lingxi recorded
that one day a friend oªered to sell him two leaves of translucent jade with
tips that arched slightly upward. Around the edges were rows of tiny nee-
dle holes, and the words “shoe sole of the concubine of Hu Qingyu tang”
were etched in Small Seal script in the middle.38 Hu Qingyu tang, as he
later learned, was the name of a century-old pharmacy owned by Hu Xueyan
in Hangzhou. Yao declined to pay an exorbitant sum for two pieces of “use-
less object,” but through them he came across the Hu Xueyan story (CFL:
158–59). Later, he presented a similar description of the jade soles in a story
of Hu, which includes additional details. Hu evidently used the soles, worn
by a concubine lying on a couch, to roll tiny balls of opium. Upon learn-
ing that the soles were crafted from a jade screen, Yao remarked: “What a
waste of natural resources!” (CFL: 181–82).
How ironic that Yao Lingxi, who echoed Tao Baopi’s plea that the bound
foot should be appreciated as an antique object, would demand utilitarian
value from a pair of jade soles. Yao’s resorting to the language of “useless
objects” and “waste of natural resources” betrays his allegiance to the mod-
ern creed of productivity and the utility of the natural body. Curiously, Yao’s
sneer was also Confucian in tone, frugality being one of the clubs with which
literati hit merchants over the head. The danger of mercantile economy has
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

always been its waste and its spectacle: its conspicuous consumption. The
most enduring image from the eighteenth-century capitalistic heyday of the
salt merchants of Yangzhou is a golden urinal.39
Hu Xueyan was also said to use a small shoe as a wine cup, an act so as-
sociated with the late-Yuan connoisseur Yang Tieya ( Weizhen, 1296–1370)
that it was simply known as the Tieya Obsession (Tieya pi).40 Correcting
the impression that the famous poet was so vulgar, if not deranged, that he
found pleasure in drinking putrid wine, an early-Ming source speciﬁed that
Yang sipped wine from a cup placed inside the oriﬁce of a small shoe, not
directly from it. During the tumultuous last years of the Yuan dynasty, Yang
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retired to Suzhou and passed his time by drinking and gaming in courte-
san houses. Drinking from the shoe was punishment for those who lost a
gamble.41
Unlike other legendary deeds of connoisseurs, which were shrouded in
an aura of fragrance and romance, Tieya’s Obsession was honest to a fault
in its insinuation of the disgust of bodily odor and filth. Hence as early as
the late Ming, the writer Shen Defu shifted the narrative focus from Yang
Tieya to his friend and dinner companion Ni Yuanzhen (Zan, 1301–74).
Ni, a famous painter whose obsession with cleanliness ( jiepi) was legendary,
was so incensed whenever Yang passed the lotus cup that he would flee the
table.42 The combat of two obsessions, footbinding and cleanliness, draws
a chuckle because it exposes the physicality of flesh usually sanitized by the
elegance of connoisseurship literature.
The Qing writer Ji Yun (1724–1805) recorded a legend signaling that this
supposedly romantic and light-hearted practice of drinking from a shoe had
become a cautionary tale. During the ancestral rituals performed on Zhong-
yuan, the fifteenth day of the seventh month, the head of a prominent
family lifted his libation to his ancestors and set it on the table. At that mo-
ment one of the glasses cracked open, an ominous sign. The culprit turned
out to be his son, who had placed the glass in a courtesan’s shoe several
days ago. Ji Yun described the Tieya Obsession as “lewd, excessive, and dirty,
vulgar to the utmost.”43 In his revulsion he articulated the aesthetic of foot-
binding before the age of disavowal: averted eyes, indirect representation,
and avoidance of the physicality of feet.
Despite longstanding revulsion, or perhaps because of it, drinking from
a courtesan’s shoe persisted as the most enduring and imitated act of con-
noisseurship. Its association with Yang Tieya, the first known connoisseur
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

named by contemporary sources, not mythical emperors, ﬁrmly linked the

appreciation of bound feet with the nostalgic and pleasure-seeking modes
of literati culture. Indeed, three of Fang Xuan’s ﬁve treatises are rules for
drinking games, one being “The Moon-Circulating Wine Cup” (“Guanyue
cha”), an emulation of the Tieya Obsession.
In the commercialized economies of twentieth-century treaty ports, the
uses of shoes multiplied, and the relationship between form and function
became ever more fanciful. Yao Lingxi reported that he found in the Zhong-
yuan department store in Tianjin a new consumer product, slip-on high

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heels made of cloisonné or red seashell sequined with diamonds. For ten
dollars ( jin) a lady could keep a pair in her purse, slip them onto her leather
flats, and hit the dancing floor. Why not try drinking from them, Yao mused
(CFL: 170). Craftsmen of the Jingdezhen kilns kneaded porcelain clay into
shoe-shaped wine cups and decorated them with erotic pictures.44 So real-
istic were they that prostitutes in Jiangxi reportedly wore them to bed (CFL:
187). Another connoisseur recalled that twenty years ago he had seen in
Beijing stores outside the Zhenyang Gate a bedslipper fashioned with a rub-
berized sole in the form of a penis (“Guangdong fake instrument”). Priced
at four ounces of silver, the shoe was said to be popular with widows (CFL:
199–200).
Unlike the footbound woman herself, these shoes are not relics from a
past age of connoisseurship but are instead products of a new commercial-
ism that associated treaty port culture with sexual license. If, as Zhou Ying
explained earlier, a modern-day connoisseur is first and foremost a collec-
tor of artifacts and texts, this collecting activity takes the form of purchas-
ing in the modern marketplace. A connoisseur is a shrewd consumer who
knows his way around in department stores as in flea markets. No wonder
that some entries in Radishes read like a shopping guide, as connoisseurs de-
bated the best antique stalls in Beijing to find a bargain slipper (CFL: 202–4).
The commodified nature of the shoe as a fetish object added to its po-
tency as talisman. One man suªering from nocturnal emission cured him-
self by tying a tiny shoe—smaller than his erect penis— on his penis and
testicles before going to bed (CFL IV: 126). In this curious reversal, what
used to be an object of wanton desire and enticement for orgasm or loss of
self in the bygone days became an instrument of self-mastery in the mod-
ern age of disavowal.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

As a holder of wine, desired object, or inadvertent loss, the shoe-as-oriﬁce

was a receptacle of male fantasies and anxieties in the world of Picking
Radishes. If the presumed subjects of the connoisseurship discourse are male,
the desires and fears are also male-centered. The most poignant expression
of this desire, identiﬁcation with the literati as paragons of male privilege,
can reach absurd proportions in an age when dissipation and chaos, not con-
centration of power and control, were the norm in the body politic. The
literati’s control of and indeed, monopoly over, the written word must have
seemed attractive when runaway wordiness governed the literary world.

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THE CONNOISSEURS AS FEMINISTS

If the lotus obsession was a way for modern men of letters to grapple with
(or to escape from) the nostalgia of loss and the fragility of modern mas-
culinity, the discourse of footbinding in Picking Radishes becomes an alter-
native one to nationalistic history and its implied masculine subject. Yao
Lingxi’s or Zhou Ying’s mode of identification with women from the past,
epitomized in their view of footbinding as antique, set them apart from the
prevalent discourse of women as victims of patriarchy and national shame.
The connoisseurs thus saw themselves as sympathizers of women, even true
feminists.
This diªerence in mode of identification was often expressed in terms of
an overt criticism of nationalist feminism, especially the anti-footbinding
movement. One newspaper columnist whose essay was cited in Radishes,
Lao Xuan (b. 1886), stated his views: “To promote footbinding now is cruel,
lewd, and contrary to humanitarian concerns. But to prohibit it is author-
itarian, oppressive, and ignorant of human feelings.” What he found most
objectionable about the anti-footbinding campaign was its rhetoric: “The
female is the one who feels the immediate and direct impact of binding; she
is imperiled on the spot. . . . Exhortations to give up footbinding should
focus on this immediate fact, not some high-sounding slogans about ‘strong
race’ or ‘strong country.’” Lao Xuan advocated a bona fide woman-centered
agenda that respected a woman’s bodily suªering.45 According to his logic,
which is similar to that of the woman educator Xue Shaohui seen in the last
chapter, footbinding cannot be eradicated by sociopolitical coercion; it
would only die a natural death as its cultural prestige expired. Educate young
girls about the ills of footbinding, but leave the old women alone.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Lao Xuan went on to challenge the premise of the nationalistic anti-

footbinding rhetoric: “I don’t disagree that footbinding has some connec-
tion to ‘strong race.’ But I don’t see that the children born to natural-footed
mothers in Beiping are necessarily healthier than those from footbound
mothers. . . . I’m also sympathetic to the argument that the natural foot fa-
cilitates ‘strong country.’ But I tend to think that the strength of a country
depends on the wisdom and courage of its people—a matter of inner heart
instead of outward form—and especially not on the shape of women’s feet.
The bodies of women on the continents of Africa and Australia, as well as
the Paciﬁc islands, are much more robust than those of Europe, America,
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and Japan. So why do the peoples on these two continents and islands fail
to build a country, and to the contrary have become slaves of the strong
countries and are in danger of extinction?” (CFL: 13). Lao Xuan thus called
into question two founding tropes of national feminism: a genetic deter-
minism that says strong mothers beget strong sons/country, and the mis-
sionary notion that construes the status of womanhood as an indicator of
the advancement of a civilization.
The connoisseur’s identification with the footbound woman is inherently
limited and one-sided even as he claims to be woman-centered and woman-
friendly. The identification of a connoisseur with the object of his desire or
appreciation is motivated by self love. Connoisseurs could not represent
female desires derived outside of heterosexual unions or without references
to men. The problem of shifty voice evinced in Faithful’s interviews with
the elder and Granny mentioned above bespeaks the di‹culties of males
speaking as females. But they could speak for the pitiful woman, which is a
mode that literati had heralded.
The pathos of outdatedness was so poignant that it transcended the con-
cerns of the connoisseurs and found its most eloquent expression in a short
story by a radical writer, the socialist martyr Hu Yepin (d. 1931). Published
in 1929 in the popular magazine Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), “Two
Women in a Small County Town” depicts the psychological anguish of two
abandoned wives in their thirties. Never identified by name, the pair of
friends shared interchangeable identities: as old-fashioned footbound women
in a modern world. On Little New Year’s Eve (the twenty-fourth day of the
twelfth month), the beginning of festivities that celebrated family union,
renewal, and hope, the dejected women tried in vain to drown their lone-
liness in wine.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

The one with a round face recalled that on her wedding night over a decade
ago, her husband called her “empress” and adored her tiny feet. After he left
for a university education in a metropolis, however, he sent pictures and
photos of modern women, admonishing her to change her appearance. Ea-
ger to please, she stayed up for three days, soaking her “porcelain-like feet”
in cold water in the hope of making them grow. She also forsook the tra-
ditional camisole that ﬂattened her breast and “boldly exposed the shape of
her two breasts from under her blouse.”46 In spite of her eªorts, he left her
for a modern woman. Rumor had it that he became a professor at a national
university and served on a lucrative committee in the government; he had
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also fathered a son. She imagined him as having fashioned an “impressive

mustache”—in short a perfect modern man who combined intellectual au-
thority, political power, and progeny thus mirroring the successful talented
scholar in traditional novels. Unlike the beauties in these novels, however,
her investment of early sacrifices did not bring her glory, only a pitiful ali-
mony of thirty dollars a month.
Her friend, a woman with a long face, fared no better. She, too, enjoyed
three initial years of conjugal bliss. In fact, so in love was she that she en-
couraged her husband to go study abroad. “But his advancement means my
downfall.” On his departure night she suªered a cold, but his madman-like
desire was so fierce that she yielded and “satisfied him five times.” This is a
“filthy memory” that would haunt her for life (104, 105). Her sacrifice was
expressed in her bodily and sexual submission, first by binding her feet and
then by submitting to his sexual advances. Even after his betrayal, she con-
tinued to sacrifice by tinkering with her feet, albeit neither the fickle man
nor her own body would perform as she wished. For years she had maneu-
vered to let her feet out, but they looked all the more like deformed stubs of
tulip or bamboo shoot. As the two friends drank themselves into a stupor,
the round-faced woman murmured: “Everything else is easy, but there is noth-
ing we can do about [returning bound] feet [to a never-bound state]” (106).
Significantly, what the women saw as self-sacrifice—the giving of their bod-
ies or the aping of fashion—Hu Yepin interpreted as an act of male aggres-
sion. Referring not only to the madness on parting night, but also to “that
unfortunate and dirty matter” which recurred countless times during the
happy three-year marriage, Hu portrayed sexual intercourse as a defilement
comparable to rape. This stark assessment of sex, ostensibly made out of sym-
pathy with the woman victim, is all the more stunning because it precludes
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the possibility of female sexual pleasure even within the context of a blissful
marriage, no matter how short-lived it turned out to be. Whatever pleasures
she might have experienced she could not keep as memory after the husband’s
betrayal. Hu insisted on erasing memories of her happiness as he scripted
her as the acted-upon with no hope of catching up with the times.
Hu’s foreclosure of any possibility of action or pleasure on the parts of
the women was couched in terms of the stubbornness of the female body,
hence naturalizing their victimhood. In pivoting his story on the physical
impossibility of the women’s letting their feet out, and hence changing their
fate, Hu Yepin dramatized the total dependency of women on men, the only
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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 99
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constancy in a changing world. “We are born female, what could we have
done?” asked the round-faced one. Her friend tried to console her by envi-
sioning a radical alternative: “Some women, didn’t they join the revolu-
tionary party?” “But only because their husbands were revolutionaries?!” the
first replied (104). Hu’s critique is radical, directed as it was to the histori-
cal and present subjugation of women by men, especially by way of the in-
stitution of marriage. “Perhaps in the very beginning male and female were
the same?” asked one woman. “Maybe,” answered her friend. “But all the
women we know suªer more indignities than men. Not to mention that we
suªer because of men” (106). Hence Hu’s “Two Women” is a call to arms
in a gender war. Yet it is a one-sided combat, because the old women, who
had the most at stake, could not act.
The tragedy of “Two Women” must have struck a chord; one contribu-
tor to Radishes cited it several years later in his lament over male fickleness
(CFL II: 37). Despite their divergent political agendas, the socialist revolu-
tionary Hu Yepin and the connoisseurs concurred in their sympathy for the
footbound woman as antique. The male’s sympathy and his admission of
general male guilt are both predicated on a reassertion of male power: he
alone is free to act and take responsibility. The footbound woman, passed
over by a changing world, despite her subjective will and eªorts to remake
her body, appears to be doubly victimized and passive in the final analysis.
In her acted-upon subject position she has to be the spoken-for. The con-
noisseurs and revolutionaries find a fragile common ground in their sym-
pathies for the leftover woman as they vie to speak for her by representing
the female body as the obstacle to her liberation. Neither the connoisseur’s
laissez-faire stance of “let the women be” nor the revolutionary’s denounce-
ment of gender inequality leaves any room for the realization of female de-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

sires and pleasures, from her own body or another’s. If the connoisseurs as
ventriloquists cannot narrate female desires, neither can the anti-connois-
seur revolutionary.

THE BODY IN PAIN: FEMALE SCREAMS

The female voices that appear in Radishes have to be heard against the back-
drop of this hegemony of the male in the discursive ﬁeld as connoisseur,
writer, reader, and woman’s true friend. Although several letters and songs
also appeared under female authorship (marked as such by the gender
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qualifier “Madam,” nüshi), most of the female voices took the form of testi-
monies.47 Pain figured as the predominant concern, indeed the organiza-
tional principle, in these “firsthand” narratives of the footbinding experience.
It is through pain that the female body acquires its textual presence. In a
typical testimony entitled “Painful History of Bending Lotus” (“Aolian teng-
shi”), Madam Axiu registered her complaints with the literati of old, who
so loved the bound foot as “curio that they took to embellishing it with flow-
ery words” (CFL: 255). “But for us, generations of women whose bodies are
being subjected to this [shenshou], it is no diªerent from a criminal being
subjected to the cangue, or worse. As the proverb says of the cruelty of this
act, ‘a pair of small feet, a tubful of tears.’ As one who has personally expe-
rienced this [guolairen], I’m willing to express in words [literally, to give shape
to] the pain of broken tendons and crushed bones I went through then, so
as to awaken all lotus-loving gentlemen of the world” (CFL: 255–56). The
association of maleness with flowery words stands in stark contrast with the
association of femaleness with the bodily experience of pain, a telling state-
ment of the gendered nature of power inequalities.
When the “curio” or “antique” committed her experience to words, she
was by definition contesting her object status. We do not know if Madam
Axiu was a woman or a female author subject.48 As we have seen in the last
chapter, such girls as Cai Aihua did speak at school assemblies—albeit at
the prompting of her brother—and these words were sometimes reported
in newspapers by men. However, it is futile to attempt to discern an au-
thentic female voice or an unmediated female point of view. The import of
Madam Axiu’s testimony is the novelty of the category of “footbound
woman author” and her narratives of bodily sensations. As voices of inte-
riority, female testimonies introduced an element of contest by switching
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the point of view away from the literati’s “ﬂowery words” that constituted
footbinding’s aura. The realism of the female bodily voice was invented as
an antidote to the male voice of privilege.
The subversive potential of women talking back is evinced by Madam
Axiu’s use of “antique,” the main trope of the connoisseurs. As a teenager
in the early Republican years, she attended a girl’s school and was barred
from physical education lessons. “Fellow classmates eyed me as antique and
laughed at me” (CFL: 257). From Tao Baopi to Hu Yepin to Axiu, the trope
of antique changed hands until the recently dated object acquired a speak-

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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 101
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ing voice and ceased to be an object. Tao Baopi’s famous line of “What’s
wrong with admiring what is already here?” does not seem so innocent or
unobjectionable any more.
The female voice tells us nothing new—that footbinding is painful, dated,
and irreversible—nor does it add new vocabulary to the male-initiated dis-
course of antique. But in authoring the inner female body as an alternative
birthplace for words, hence a source for truth and authentic experience, fe-
male testimonies usher in the last stage of the mode of disclosure that signifies
the modern rupture in the footbinding discourse. The dénouement of the
cultural prestige of footbinding, hinging as it did before the nineteenth cen-
tury on textual and visual concealment, is complete.
The language of pain in the hands of Madam Axiu is uneventful, con-
sisting of an overuse of the word pain (teng ) as noun and adjective. Once
she uses a tired simile, “as painful as being sliced by a knife” (CFL: 258) but
in the end simply confesses that “in the humidity and dampness after rain,
no words can give shape to the pain felt by a footbound person” (CFL: 258).
The other two female voices that follow, billed as “self narrations” (zi shu)
transmitted by scribes, are more colloquial and expressive, but fare no bet-
ter in linguistic inventiveness. One Madam Jin Suqing reports a “burning
hot sensation” upon initial binding, and resorts to the same fire imagery
when describing the eªect of tight binding in the hands of grandma: “My
two feet felt more and more swollen, then burning hot to the point of a
continuous piercing pain. I tossed and turned and could not sleep. But I
would rather die than loosen the cloth binder a bit. At times I sobbed be-
cause the pain was so extreme, but the only way is to clench my teeth and
bear it” (CFL: 259–60). Half a month later, she moved to a longer five-foot
binder and started to wear soft-heeled bedslippers. As she was on the brink
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

of success, however, both small toes became pustular. She wiped them with
cotton wool and proceeded to rebind, when “pain permeated my innards
and my whole body shook and trembled” (CFL: 260). Before too long the
pain subsided as the feet slowly turned numb.
Madam Jin’s iron will resulted at least in part from the toutings of an
uncle and other guests at her grandmother’s birthday celebration, where
she met the Zhang sisters with their immaculate small feet. To monitor
her progress, she obsessively measured her feet as she sewed progressively
smaller-sized shoes. If the connoisseur’s obsession with exact measurements,

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THE BODY EXPOSED 102
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as we have seen earlier, signaled the triumph of scientism, Madam Jin’s ob-
session signaled the female delight in her own ability to remake her body.
The pliancy of the body—and a sense of agency—felt by the woman in the
process of binding cut a stark contrast to the stubbornness of flesh and the
futility of human eªort in the process of unbinding seen earlier.49 “The fifth
toe has come closer and closer to the plantar. I measured the distance: 0.4
inch. The crevice on the sole of the foot (zuxin), too, was getting deeper
and deeper. It measured about 0.8 inches. . . . After thirty days of binding,
my feet have become as small as 2.9 inches, a shrinkage from the earlier meas-
urement by 0.9 inch!” (CFL: 260). The narrative ended with her public
recognition among women from several villages.
Madam Jin did not invent new descriptions of pain, but the accumula-
tive weight of the reiterations allows the reader a glimpse into her body be-
neath the skin. Her voice came through as vivid and her incentives credi-
ble. The bearing of pain figures as the most convincing expression of her
agency, and as we hear it told, we begin to realize the extent to which pain
is implicated in the female structure of incentives and desires. We can sus-
pend questions about whether it is an “authentic” voice of a “real” woman.
We hear it as a female voice, one that is distinct from the male connoisseurs,
because the familiar tropes of antique and scientific measurement acquire
new meanings in these narratives of the experience of the female body and
the creativity of pain.
Madam Axiu’s voice inspired imitators because, as one who called him-
self “Repentant Scholar” ( Juefei sheng) noted, “Picking Radishes is com-
prised mostly of poems and songs and precious few are documents of real-
ity [ jishi]. Madam Axiu’s and several others are the only exceptions. They
are our wake-up calls [banghe; literally, a blow and a shout]” (CFL II: 50).
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Both the sobriquet and the blow and shout, a zen prop to enlightenment,
hark back to familiar tropes in late imperial erotic novels. In these novels,
the religious awakening of the repentant male protagonist always serves as
ﬁg leaf for blatant narratives of male desires and sexual quests. Repentant
Scholar’s “Painful Words of the Lotus Hook” in the “Admonitions” section
of the second volume of Radishes (CFL II: 50–57) too, were distinct male
narratives that belong to the same genre of interviews with Granny discussed
above, with the same conﬂation of female desire for her body and male de-
sire for her. The problem of shifty voice is corrected by presenting the fe-
male experience in its entirety as a testimony told to a male relative. This
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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 103
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allows the Repentant Scholar to narrate female experiences of pain realisti-

cally in the third person, the eroticism of which is weakly dismissed by a
formulaic male repentance: “Having heard this, my usual love of the lotus
suddenly dissipated” (CFXB: 51, 63).
There are, in fact, three testimonies of “Painful Words” penned by the
Repentant Scholar, consisting of interviews with his wife, his younger sis-
ter, and a neighbor in the former capital of Beiping.50 His recalling of his
wife’s experience is innovative in its consciousness of the filter of time: “My
wife was born in Tong county, Hebei. Following custom, she had her feet
bound at seven. The pain of that initial stage has all been forgotten after all
these years. But two events are still vivid today.” One is the result of mother’s
carelessness, who pierced her toe with a needle when she was sealing the
binder’s end. For days the girl hobbled with a piercing pain, not knowing
that her left big toe had been sewn to the cloth binder. The second event
was a corrective sitting aiming at reducing the bulging of the arch at age
fourteen. Having sat with a pressing iron on her feet for hours, she would
further restrain the arch with narrow strips of cloth. The torture lasted two
months—but it worked (CFXB: 50–51). The strategy of focusing on these
painful events is indeed eªective, as it evokes the singularity of the female
body through the thread of its internal memory. The residual pain lingers
whenever the middle-aged woman remembers these events. Her body also
remembers, as she nurses her inflamed foot with bean curd skin or vegetable
leaf (CFL II: 51).
Painful words became an industry. Other imitative testimonies ensued,
under the titles of “Afterword to Painful Words” (CFL II: 51–54) or the rep-
etition “Painful Words” (CFL II: 57–59), but in the female first-person voice
and attributed to authors with female names. Such documentation of pain
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

focuses on the pain of unbinding, hence reinforcing the message of “don’t

torture them twice; leave the women alone” reiterated by the Radishes con-
noisseurs. Others also proceeded to interview wife (CFL II: 65–66) or old
servant (CFXB: 59–63), but both the subject matter of pain and its linguistic
expressions have been exhausted. These testimonies sound as tired and old
as the practice of binding itself.
The language of pain was recharged in a narrative that appeared in the
last anthologized volume of Radishes, issued in 1941. In a testimony called
“The Experience of Footbinding,” attributed to an Elder Sister Wang from
Haicheng, descriptions of pain received the precise and taxonomical treat-
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THE BODY EXPOSED 104
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ment of a biomedical discourse, complete with attempts of anatomical nam-

ing of body parts. The female body in pain is described chronologically
through a two-year period, by volume of pain and its duration, as well as
in qualitative terms: soreness (suanteng ) or bloating and snapping pain
(zhang jue teng ) (CFXB: 22–24).
The larger narrative in which this female testimony appeared, “An Over-
view of Footbinding,” is a composite that combines elements from the pre-
vious connoisseurship literature and household almanacs: ethnography, ori-
gin discourse, Confucian morality, utility, Fang Xuan, female testimonies,
tonic recipes, shoemaking instructions, garment-sewing instructions, instruc-
tions for arm and leg movement, chamber arts, admonitions to education
and a productive life (CFXB: 1–43). Although the isolated elements and
data are recycled from discourses of old, this long narrative is distinctly
modern and inventive in its comprehensiveness and the use of biomedical
terminology (CFXB: 10–11). Even more astonishing is the novel assump-
tion that female education and industry are compatible with footbinding.
Having dispensed with matters of deportment, sewing, and sex, the narra-
tor commented matter-of-factly: “after the painful period ended, then you
should teach her how to read and write; give her a considerable education”
(CFXB: 42). Physical exercise such as strolling and tai-chi were recom-
mended. The narrative ended with a timetable outlining the daily routine
of the productive domestic woman, cited from General Zeng Guofan’s fa-
mous family instructions (CFXB: 43).
It is no accident that the narrative opened with a cultural relativist claim:
“Manmade beautiﬁcation: the use of human eªorts to remake the normal
[body]. Examples are transformations in the shapes of skull, teeth, nail, and
nose of native Americans; small waists of European women; footbinding
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

of the women of our country” (CFXB: 1). This assertion of parity between
China and the rest of the world had existed as the underside of the anti-
footbinding rhetoric that is the mainstay of the gigantic nationalist history
since the late Qing. But the tone is diªerent, because China is no longer
defensive about its women’s feet. All pretension of criticizing footbinding is
dropped because it is no longer necessary. Footbinding is history, and every-
body knows it.
The omnipresent narrative point of view and the assumption of the pos-
sibility of empirical knowledge—from both inside the female body and out;

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THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE 105
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from within China and globally—signals the triumph of objectivism which

has ﬁnally transformed the connoisseurship literature by obliterating the par-
tial and backward-looking literati vantage point. Even the subjective bod-
ily experience of the footbound woman can now be described in an objec-
tive tone. The attribution of authorship, “narrated by Madam Lotus
Preservation and compiled by Lotus-Appreciating Scholar” (CFXB: 1), re-
calls a familiar practice of the connoisseurship literature. But the male-script-
ing-female-experience composite voice assumes new meaning in a world
where all that one can play with is narrative voice and perspectives. There
is nothing more to be known about footbinding. Safely dead, it can ﬁnally
be released into the world.

Born of a utopian desire for total knowledge, Picking Radishes constitutes

an archive in an expanded sense of the word. “The archive,” wrote Thomas
Richards, “was not a building nor even a collection of texts but the collec-
tively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable.”51 For an
archive to work—to be comprehensive and manageable—it has to main-
tain clear boundaries. This closure became possible only after footbinding
ceased to be a culturally viable practice in the early Republican period. Yet
the archive can never be completely closed, even after the practice of bind-
ing feet it documents is no longer current. There is always the possibility
of new knowledge from a hidden text retrieved from a dusty attic, a stow-
away shoe brought to light. In between the nostalgic and utopian impulses
of Yao Lingxi and his friends lie the pleasures of disseminating knowledge
about footbinding in Picking Radishes.
Assembled primarily from recycled fragments and old information,
Picking Radishes is nonetheless an extremely inventive text. Part of its
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

inventiveness—its success in generating new textual forms and meanings—

can be attributed to the self-presentation of its modern editors as mimetic
literati. A second reason is rooted in the proﬁt motive that governed the
marketplace of the 1930s treaty ports. Porcelain kilns and shoemakers pro-
duced myriad shoe-shaped objects, often modeled on increasingly fanciful
verbal descriptions. Displayed on the shelves of emporiums, these objects
inspired renewed rounds of poetic eulogies during drinking parties. Through
this word-to-object-to-word generative loop, the archive and the market-
place were littered with superﬂuous words and things which were thoroughly

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THE BODY EXPOSED 106
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modern inventions. Both the words and artifacts are “real”—they are still
preserved in libraries and museums today—but they are not trustworthy.
Neither speaks the “truth” about footbinding in a straightforward manner.
The reality of invented texts, objects, and meanings in and out of Pick-
ing Radishes complicates our tasks as historians. The archive, as a repository
of desires, is not a neutral collection awaiting our exploration. Instead of
posing as disinterested investigators, we should read Picking Radishes first
and foremost to relish the exaggerated emotions and detached artificiality
that structured the male fantasy world of the golden lotus. Citations and
reiteration release new meanings, but we may do well to remember that see-
ing the same information thrice does not make it less erroneous. The temp-
tation is great to take the realistic first-person narratives of voyeuristic males
and footbound women in Picking Radishes at face value, as unadulterated
expressions of male desires and female suªering. But the reality of the foot-
binding experience lies elsewhere, in a yet-to-be articulated space outside
the archive.
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THE BODY CONCEALED

PART TWO
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FROM ANCIENT TEXTS

TO CURRENT CUSTOMS

In Search of Footbinding’s Origins

In the three chapters that comprise Part I, we have witnessed the waning of
footbinding’s aura in a modern, global world. As the bound foot was de-
mystiﬁed and brought into the open for all to see, its images and meanings
were altered by its very availability. Distinctly modern images of footbind-
ing circulated in new textual and visual mediums, acquiring the mantle of
timeless Truth. Most familiar is the prevalent history of the nation authored
by Christian missionaries and Chinese reformers in which the bound foot
symbolized national shame. Equally poignant is the counter-discourse, a nos-
talgic connoisseurship literature which construed the bound foot as a relic
and antique. Both images signal the unequivocal death of footbinding in
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

cultural prestige and as social practice.

In Part II, our focus shifts from narrating the end of footbinding to trac-
ing the transmission and perpetuation of its aura in the late imperial period
(sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries), when it was a customary and val-
orized practice. This exercise begins with an appreciation of the exalted sta-
tus of the written word in the imperial era. In the modern age, multiple ex-
posures of footbinding, especially under the photographic and radiographic
lenses, destroyed footbinding’s mystique. To the extent that these new im-
aging techniques were more powerful in exposing female ﬂesh than was writ-

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ing, we may argue that the demise of footbinding coincided with the de-
cline of the written word as an instrument of veracity.
In contrast, in the late imperial period the allure of footbinding was pri-
marily constructed in written discourses and relied upon the latter for its
cultural prestige and mystique.1 My main argument in part II is that tex-
tual indirectness, in the form of lyricism or objectivism, functioned in a way
similar to embroidered leggings and shoes: as instruments of concealment.
Both shifted the gaze from the raw or bare ﬂesh to the ornamentation of
culture. Instead of depicting footbinding as a concrete bodily and social prac-
tice, Ming and Qing writings worked by inciting imaginations about the
hidden body. The reader was teased to visualize and fantasize about that
which could not be said.
In this and the next chapter we map the parameters of elite male desires
by surveying disparate genres of prose ranging from philological treatises,
a forged palace intrigue, notation books, travelogues, and a manual of taste,
to vernacular plays. Many are academic in method and tone; some are sub-
tly salacious, whereas others are downright pornographic. Taken together,
they served to deﬁne “footbinding” as a subject of male inquiry and desire,
establish the discursive limits of what could and could not be said about fe-
male body parts, and keep the erotics of bound feet alive in male imagina-
tion. This chapter documents writers’ eªorts to comprehend footbinding
by locating it in historical time; the next traces their attempts to domesti-
cate it by a‹xing it to a concrete albeit fantastic landscape.
Instead of condemning these dead Chinese males, our goal is to take the
seduction of their words seriously, seeking to understand how they were so
eªective in perpetuating the mystique of footbinding. At the same time, we
strive to glimpse, however piecemeal, the world of local customs and re-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

gional cultures, as well as female incentives that these writings inadvertently

reveal. Finally, in the last chapter we move from the world of texts to textiles,
thus mapping the cosmology of female desires by placing their bodies— of
labor, decorum, and fashion—at the center of the worlds they made.

DEFINING FOOTBINDING: THE ARCHED FOOT

Before the nineteenth century, the subject of footbinding was taboo in such
o‹cial genres as public history, local gazetteers, and didactic texts. The ma-
jority of Chinese male scholarly writing on footbinding appears in the form
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FROM ANCIENT TEXTS TO CURRENT CUSTOMS 111
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of jottings in notation books (biji; literally, brush notes). Jottings are frag-
mented reading notes, a halfway house between data collecting and system-
atic analysis. Grouped according to topics (e.g., “the arched foot”) they are
sometimes categorized according to encyclopedic schemes but often pub-
lished in random order. Myths, hearsay, and history share the same page and
status. Some notations, such as Hu Yinglin’s, analyzed below, are learned and
serious treatises; others are closer to the fictionalized “small talk” (xiaoshuo)
on the other end of the spectrum. Given its flexible format, jotting is the
prevalent genre in which footbinding can be committed to writing in prose.
All jottings about footbinding before the nineteenth century, a self-
referential tradition, are origin discourses. The prototype is a short nota-
tion by the Song scholar Zhang Bangji (fl. twelfth century). It also happens
to be the earliest extant written reference to footbinding. Zhang asserted at
the outset that “[w]omen’s footbinding [chanzu] began in the recent times;
it was not mentioned in any books from the previous eras.” Zhang, who
completed his book sometime after 1148, was in all likelihood living in an
age of footbinding’s initial spread.2 Later scholars often cited his privileged
contemporary knowledge to bolster the claim that the beginnings of the
practice can be traced to no earlier than the twelfth century.3
Curiously, however, instead of his personal authority Zhang appealed to
centuries-old histories and lyrics: History of the Southern Dynasties; the Yuefu
songs and New Songs from Jade Terrace (both from the Six Dynasties period,
third to sixth centuries); and Tang poetry. The latter three collections of
lyrics, replete with references to women’s bodies, would become the princi-
pal textual evidence to scholars in the subsequent dynasties. Both the Yuefu
and Jade Terrace songs are “full of amorous words,” explained Zhang. “They
depict the stunning beauty of women by visualizing their bodies, and by
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

describing their elaborate ornamentation. They discourse on such body parts

as eyebrows, eyes, lips, mouths, waists, and ﬁngers, but there is not a single
word on bound feet.” One possible exception is a description of a beauty’s
feet by the Tang poet Han Wo (844–923?), author of a famous collection
of amorous poems, The Fragrant Toilette (Xianglian ji). In “Eulogy to Shoes,”
Han included a line that would stir much controversy: “Glowing, glowing,
six inches of succulent ﬂesh” (Liucun fuyuan guangzhizhi).4
Before returning to Han Wo, it is important to note Zhang Bangji’s logic:
if ancient texts, be they poetry or history, fail to mention footbinding, it
means that the practice did not exist in those times. The authority of texts
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derives in part from the reader’s faith that they constitute a complete reper-
toire of knowledge. Zhang thus ascribed enormous rhetorical and explana-
tory powers to the written word handed down from the past. This faith in
texts would be renewed every time subsequent scholars debated footbind-
ing’s origins by citing more texts. Even when scholars considered such body-
related matters as anatomy, dress, or manners, they assumed that their only
entrance to the realm of corporeality in the past was by way of written texts.
The repository of historical truth is presumed to be an archive of texts, not
visual or material cultures.5
The scholars’ faith in texts is not blind. They were all too aware that even
seemingly unequivocal texts are open to interpretations. Does Han’s eulogy,
“six inches of succulent flesh,” denote bound feet or not? Zhang Bangji did
not find it conclusive. Since one Tang inch is shorter than a Song inch, he
reasoned, one can deduce from this line that very tiny feet were eulogized
in Tang poetry. But, significantly, “there is no mention of the arched shape
[ gong, also bow-shaped].” In Zhang’s mind, it is not just the size but a par-
ticular shape that signifies footbinding. Earlier, in discussing a legend from
the History of the Southern Dynasties, he used the same criterion: “The Duke
of Donghun [r. 499–501] of the Southern Qi Dynasty shaped gold leaf into
lotuses and laid them on the floor for his Consort Pan. He made her tread
on them, saying: ‘every step a lotus.’ But there is no word on whether her
feet were arched and small [gongxiao].” Again, footbinding is marked by
small size, Zhang implied, but even more definitive is the arched or bow
shape of the foot.
To most modern minds, footbinding is transparently obvious: we know
what it does and what it looks like. Not so for Song, Yuan, and Ming schol-
ars, who seem perplexed by the definitions and meanings of the mysterious
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

practice. Their search for footbinding’s origins alerts us to its complicated

ontological status, to the di‹culties of defining its essential traits. Indeed,
it would not be an exaggeration to argue that it was only through the ori-
gin discourse that the parameters of footbinding were discursively formed.
Specifically, Zhang’s reasoning implies that by the second half of the twelfth
century two distinguishing characteristics had emerged: small size and an
arch or bow shape. We may deduce that Zhang based his definitions on ob-
serving contemporary practices, but the manner of twelfth-century bind-
ing and the exact appearance of “arch shape,” which varies from one period

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and region to another, are lost to us. In chapter 6, we will make educated
guesses by surveying material remains excavated from tombs—the kind of
materials that lie outside the philologist’s admissible evidence.

OF MYTH AND HISTORY

If Zhang’s faith in the textual archives established one enduring feature of

the origin discourse, about a century later another Song scholar, Che Ruo-
shui, supplied the other: a relentless condemnation of the practice. Che’s
jotting, which appears in a work completed in 1274, bears a striking resem-
blance to the modern anti-footbinding polemics in its rhetorical strategy:

The binding of women’s feet [chanjiao], one does not know when this
practice began. A little girl not yet four or five [sui] is innocent and guiltless,
but infinite suªering was being inflicted upon her. One does not know what
good does it do to have [the pair of feet] bound into such a small size. When
Dai Liang of the Late Han [32–220 c.e.] married out his daughter, she was
[dressed in] a silk upper garment and plain skirt, [holding ] a bamboo box
and [wearing ] wooden clogs. That means one cannot blame [footbinding ]
on the ancients. Or, some say that it started with Consort Yang of the Tang.
But no citations can be found about this either.6

The story of Dai Liang, an erudite who retreated to the mountains to es-
cape o‹cialdom, was culled from two ancient books, History of the Later
Han Dynasty and Biographies of Ancient Sages from Runan (Runan xianxian
zhuan).7 If Zhang Bangji looked to what we would now call the “medieval
period” of the ﬁfth to sixth centuries for textual evidence of footbinding,
Che looked further back to the ﬁrst and second centuries.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Che’s argument that footbinding was not practiced in the Later Han, de-
duced from Dai’s daughter’s bridal attire, rests on the same faith as Zhang’s
in ancient books as a comprehensive repository of knowledge. Likewise, the
lack of “citations” about Consort Yang’s small feet means that attributions
to her were not credible. Che’s way of knowing, similar to Zhang’s and that
of subsequent scholars, works by an incessant impulse to separate history
from myth. History refers to stories that can be collaborated and veriﬁed
with a degree of certainty by textual evidence; myths are singular, isolated
stories that are beyond veriﬁcation. Interestingly, for scholars what were

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judged mythical tales of origins were sometimes found in reliable o‹cial

historical annals, whereas the stories judged more credible first appear in
literary sources.
By the thirteenth century, scholars had relegated at least two stories to
the realm of myth. Their sources varied. Zhang, above, mentioned the Duke
of Donghun and Consort Pan, which hailed from o‹cial history. It gives
no indication of footbinding’s beginnings, we may recall, because there is
no word on whether her feet were both “arched and small.” A second myth,
mentioned by Che, is that of Consort Yang (717–56). The story of Yang,
possibly the most famous femme fatale in history, was transmitted in bal-
lads and tales. She was the favorite of the Tang emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–56)
and was forced into exile from the capital by a rebellion. At the post-station
of Mawei, Xuanzong’s troops mutinied, blaming Yang for their misfortunes
and demanding her death. According to a later legend, a granny chanced
upon Yang’s silk sock by the roadside and made a fortune by charging
passersby for a peep.8 The investment of emotions and voyeuristic value in
a cast-oª sock led to the rather far-fetched speculation that Yang must have
had bound feet. Yet Che was unconvinced because of the lack of contem-
porary citations.
A third origin story, transmitted by the scholar and bibliophile Zhou Mi
(1232–98), identified the originator as Yaoniang, a dancer in the court of
Li Yu (937–78; r. 969–75), the last ruler of the Southern Tang dynasty of
the Five Dynasties period. “Slender and beautiful, Yaoniang was skilled in
dancing. The ruler made a six-foot-tall golden lotus festooned with jewels,
ribbons, and garlands of pearls and gems. Inside the lotus he piled five-
colored auspicious clouds. He had Yaoniang wrap her feet with silk [yibo
raojiao]; he had them rendered slender and small [xianxiao], curving up-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ward like the new moon. In plain socks [suwa] she danced to the music ‘In
the Clouds,’ her posture was as though she were soaring into the clouds. . . .
Later people imitated her, finding arched and slender feet [gongxian] won-
derful. Thus is the origin of footbinding.”9
Yaoniang was a fictional character, but her story was fashioned from cred-
ible historical circumstances. The ruler Li Yu was an avid patron of Bud-
dhism, a religion popular in his court and society. The golden lotus that he
allegedly built for Yaoniang to dance in resembled the bejeweled lotus dais
popular in Tang Buddhist statues (see fig. 10). Southern Tang goldsmiths
and silversmiths were particularly skilled. Furthermore, Li was a renowned
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poet, painter, musician, and choreographer; his queen, Zhou, also a historic
figure, was an accomplished player of the pipa-lute and an innovative cho-
reographer of court dance.10 The Yaoniang story is thus plausible, although
it cannot be substantiated. In the fifteenth century, she would emerge as the
most often cited legend that explained the beginnings of footbinding. In
the absence of plausible citations in the o‹cial histories, a myth performs
the cultural work of conveying the meanings of footbinding in a succinct
narrative and vivid image.
Indeed, the Consort Pan, Consort Yang, and Yaoniang stories are cut out
of the same mold. Taken together, they are more telling than any verifiable
historical sources in suggesting that scholars associated footbinding with male
power and excess, the femme fatale, and the ephemeral sensuality of harem
dancers. The safeguarding of female morality or chastity, so prevalent in
modern minds, was cited in neither history nor myth as a possible expla-
nation. To the contrary, in the origin discourse footbinding emerges as an
alien and morally dubious subject that invites condemnation.

YANG SHEN’S PHILOLOGY:

THE LURE OF THE UNKNOWN

The faith in textual veracity, not to mention the possibility of separating

myth from history, was thrown into disarray by the maverick Ming scholar
Yang Shen (1488–1559). Son of a Grand Secretary and winner of Optimus
at the precocious age of twenty-three, Yang was primed to enjoy an illus-
trious o‹cial career. However, thirteen years later he incurred the emperor’s
rage in a rites controversy involving the emperor’s deceased father. Stripped
of his o‹cial status, Yang was caned and exiled to a remote outpost in the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

southwestern province of Yunnan as a common soldier. He never returned

to the capital, nor was his status restored when he died at age seventy-one
in Yunnan.11
Yet there is a silver lining, as two modern biographers have remarked: “The
thirty-ﬁve years of life in exile aªorded Yang the opportunity to become
one of the most widely read and proliﬁc scholars in history.”12 Yang Shen’s
erudition, independent spirit, and virtually unlimited free time made him
an ideal candidate to shed light on the mystery of footbinding’s origins. Yang
chided earlier scholars for “failing to investigate comprehensively” (weizhi
bokao), resulting in omission of a number of Tang poems on shoes and socks.
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His own examination, in turn, led him to rebut the suggestion that foot-
binding originated in the tenth-century harem of the Southern Tang ruler
Li Yu. Instead, Yang proposed a new theory, tracing the origins to a much
earlier period of the Six Dynasties (222–589).13
Based on one dubious Yuefu poem entitled “Double Bindings” (“Shuang
xingchan”), Yang’s theory provoked debates in the next century, with the
majority of scholars siding with Zhang. This debate will be recounted below;
su‹ce it to note here that Yang’s theory accords with a common develop-
ment in origin discourses: the later the writer’s period, the earlier becomes
the origin. In other words, in a linear progression of time-as-arrow, the dis-
tance between the “present” time of the writer and the time of the reced-
ing origin tends to increase. Indeed, Yang gestured toward a distant origin
as he hinted that one can find references to shoes with “sharp” or pointy
toes (lilü) in texts as early as the first-century-b.c.e. Record of the Historian.14
But Yang rejected one story that circulated widely in the fifteenth century
that placed the origin of footbinding firmly in antiquity. The Shang dy-
nasty femme fatale Daji (d. 1122 b.c.e.?) was a fox, as the story goes, whose
feet had yet to change into human form. She thus wrapped them with cloth
binders. Not knowing the reason for her disguise, other palace ladies vied
to imitate her. Yang dismissed this myth as “pulling the wool over history’s
eyes,” and lamented that some educated people took it for real.15 Hence
Yang shared the scholarly consensus that the existence of solid textual ref-
erence distinguishes “history” from “myth.”
Yang’s search for footbinding’s origins is an integral part of his classical
studies and literary theory. His attempt to locate the practice not in the re-
cent past but in antiquity resonates with the premise of his classical scholar-
ship. In a vivid analogy that construes geographical space as metaphor for
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

temporal distance, Yang expressed his longing for antiquity by compar-

ing his distance from the profundity of the Six Classics to his distance in
exile from the “splendors and riches of the capital.” He located Han schol-
ars in the adjacent terrain of Henan and Shandong, whose proximity al-
lowed them to “get it” perhaps 60–70 percent of the time. Song scholars,
in turn, were residents of faraway provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou whose
comprehension was reduced to a mere 10–20 percent.16 The simplest inter-
pretation of this analogy is that Yang’s veneration of antiquity prompted
him to prefer Han learning over Song learning. This was the premise of Qing
philological scholarship but a bold assertion in Yang’s times, when Song and
Yuan commentaries
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Yang could not have explained his disdain for Song learning in plainer
language: “The Six Classics were composed in Confucius’ gate. Since the
Han times were not far from Confucius, no matter how untalented were
those who transmitted the learning, their readings were still more authen-
tic. Song scholars, on the other hand, were removed from Confucius by one
thousand and five hundred years. Even though they were extremely intelli-
gent, how could they discard previous learning and appeal exclusively to
their own interpretations?”17 Much more than venerating the past is at stake
here. Yang Shen’s attitude toward the past can be understood as a two-part
process: first the recognition of incommensurability, then its playful trans-
gression. If “antiquity” means the lifetimes of Confucius and his disciples,
it is forever lost. No latter-day reader could hope to understand the classics
like the ancients did. The edge that Han scholars had over their Song coun-
terparts was not a function of their abilities or eªorts, merely their relative
proximity to the classical age. In a sense, we who seek to understand the
mysteries of the past are all Yang Shen, the brilliant scholar condemned to
a lifelong exile in Yunnan.
Reading Yang Shen, one gets the sense that he knew only too well that the
origin of footbinding was unknowable and unverifiable; like Confucius, it
was locked in the incommensurable past. This realization, however, enabled
him to be playful and inventive with the present and, as we will see, with
the historical record. Yang’s veneration of antiquity is thus relative, resting
as it does on a dynamic understanding of time and an appreciation for the
here-now: ancient antiquity is forever lost to us; recent antiquity can be ac-
cessed and made relevant to the present by way of “comprehensive investi-
gation.” As one of the subjects of such investigation, footbinding opens a
small window to the past.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

In this dynamic sense, Yang’s veneration of Han interpretations of the

classics is compatible with his contempt for the “return to antiquity” liter-
ary movement that had prevailed since the early Ming. Coining the motto
“Poetry can be found in every person and every generation,” Yang believed
that literature is born of spontaneous and immediate emotions.18 There
could not have been a more forceful statement for the valorization of self-
expression and the present that became the hallmark of late-Ming urban
culture one century after Yang’s death.
Yang’s favorite metaphor for natural emotions is none other than the un-
adorned foot. In the Tang poet Li Bo’s oeuvre, Yang found three separate
eulogies to a “plain-footed
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are white as frost.” When chatting with a decades-long friend, the local lit-
eratus Zhang Yushan, Yang mused: “What propelled Li Bo to turn his head
and gaze at this plain-footed girl not once but thrice?” Zhang responded in
jest: “He surely wrote what came to his mind, didn’t he?” Yang was so en-
chanted with the plain-footed girl that he borrowed Li’s imagery and ex-
pression to compose a poem of his own. As he stated it, his intention was
to express his displeasure with “students of poetry today who are bound by
conventions and rigid imitations. In striving to be beautiful, they appear all
the more clumsy. It is far better to be natural.” 19
Analogy aside, it is hard to tell what Yang Shen thought of a girl with un-
adorned feet, or if he construed footbinding as ruinous contrivance.20 To
such modern writers as Xu Ke, the discourse on unadorned foot was proof
that an indigenous tradition of tianzu did exist. Yang Shen’s admirer-critic
Hu Yinglin, in turn, saw Li Bo’s poems as evidence that footbinding was
absent in the Tang dynasty. The modern critics erred in their anachronism,
whereas Hu Yinglin was unconvincing in assuming poetic allusions to be
straightforward documents of social practice. In contrast, Yang Shen seems
content with insinuations, fragments, and uncertainties.
For all of his diligent reading and notation, Yang’s ultimate objective ap-
pears to be neither disputation nor drawing the line between myth and his-
tory. To Yang, more than other scholars, the search for footbinding’s origins
is a game. His notations are riddled with contradictions, and he oªered no
support for his suggestion that footbinding originated in the Six Dynasties
period. Instead of proving hypotheses and verifying facts, Yang was more
interested in exploring the terms and limits of the philological exercise by
asking fundamental questions about the kind of cultural work that written
texts perform: How do words befuddle, scintillate, or convey the truth to
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the reader? His goal was not to instill certainty but to plant the seed of doubt
in his readers. How much fun it would be, he seems to be winking to his
readers, if everyone realized that the unknown is ultimately unknowable.

HAN FOOTLES: THE MEASUREMENT OF BODY PARTS

Perhaps Yang Shen was playing a practical joke when he eventually took to
forging “ancient texts.” Perhaps he wanted to poke fun at those who ven-
erated old books. Perhaps he was eager to show oª his knowledge of antiq-
uity. One thing is certain: the enigma of footbinding is at the heart of the
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enticement of his often-cited forgery, Han Footles (Han zashi mixin). As if

issuing an open invitation to his readers to be skeptical, Yang presented this
short text in a gray zone between probability and improbability. Even in
Chinese, half of the title is inscrutable: whereas “Han zashi” can be ren-
dered “trivialities from the Han dynasty,” “mixin” is not a recognizable term
although “mi” (secrets) and “xin” (name of the eighth of the ten Heavenly
stems; spicy hot; suªering; a surname) are common characters. In an after-
word signed by Yang, he claimed that he discovered the book in the coªer
of a Mr. Dong, a tribal subprefectural magistrate in Yunnan. A seal inscrip-
tion led Yang to hypothesize that it was brought to the region by an early
Ming o‹cial, Wang Zichong.21 It is not surprising that Wang was a veri-
ﬁable character but Dong was not.
Han Footles narrates the selection of Maiden Ying, daughter of General
Liang, as empress during the reign of Emperor Huan of the Later Han
dynasty (r. 147–67). In his afterword, Yang Shen made sure that his reader
would not miss the climactic scene, which occurs early in the story: “The
episode whereby Granny Wu entered the empress’s chamber and inspected
her body is strange and provocative, albeit too dirty and lewd” (656). This
weak disavowal had the predictable eªect of hastening the reader’s ﬁngers
to turn the pages back to the scene, which depicts the sensory world of the
maiden’s private chamber. The reader gains entry to that space and the
maiden’s body by identifying with Granny’s way of knowing: having ad-
justed to the light and conducted a visual inspection, she supplemented it
with tactile knowledge and quantitative measurements.
The setting: Granny Wu arrives at dawn, when natural light casts a lus-
trous hue on Maiden Ying’s face. She espies Ying’s eyes, eyebrows, mouth,
teeth, ears, and nose, all perfectly proportioned and aligned. Removing a
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

hairpin, Granny loosens Ying’s chignon to measure the length of her hair,
which cascades down to the floor; it is long enough to swaddle around the
hand/arm eight times. The propensity to submit the maiden’s body parts
to quantification will become more pronounced and the measurements more
precise as the erotics of the narrative intensify.
Granny manages to persuade Ying to disrobe after some resistance; Ying
is so shy that she shuts her eyes and turns her back against Granny. Granny
goes about her job methodically: “The body emits a fragrance; her muscles
are laid out neatly; when slapped her skin is so smooth that it does not cling
to one’s hand. Her front is round and her back, flat. Her fatty tissue is built
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like chiseled jade. Her breasts are like sprouting beans; her navel can ac-
commodate a half-inch pearl. Her genitals are protruding, showing oª her
two buttocks. Her vagina is flush with bright cinnabar red, a reddish gold
opal ready to burst into flames.” Reading these signs, Granny Wu concludes:
“This is a virgin who guards her body strictly with propriety” (651–52). Un-
der Granny’s exacting eyes and probing hands, the maiden’s body appears
in its naked physicality, stripped of not only clothes but poetic allusions.
The physiognomy of the virgin’s limbs and genitals is only half of the
surprise Yang had in store for his readers. If Granny’s inspection of the
maiden was “too dirty and lewd” in its suggestive descriptions of the geni-
tals, the subsequent narration of measurements and proportions takes an
opposite tact, but is no less provocative: “Granny sizes up Ying’s body: her
blood embellishes her skin; her skin decorates her flesh; her flesh reveals
the bones. In height she is neither too tall nor too short. From head to toe
she measures seven feet one inch; her shoulders extend to one foot six inches;
her hips are three inches narrower. The tip of each shoulder measures two
feet seven inches to her fingers. The fingers are four inches away from her
palm, like ten young slender bamboo branches. The length of her thigh to
her sole is three feet two inches” (652).22 The tone of clinical detachment
only serves to pique the reader’s imagination, infusing the description with
an erotic charge.
Finally, the crucial measure: “Her foot is eight inches long. Both the in-
step and shank are plump. Her sole is flat and her digits are packed together.”
Then follow two descriptions with curious construction, ambiguous words,
and shifty subjects: “restrain/bind/bend—fine white silk—compress—
sock” (yuexian powa) and “restrain—tie—tiny/concealed/mysterious—
simile—forbidden palace” (shoushu weiru jinzhong; 652). Various interpre-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

tations are possible. If one is inclined to suggest that Maiden Ying has bound
feet, then the lines may read: “Her feet were bound in ﬁne white silk and
dressed in tight socks. The restriction (or binding) was as mysterious as the
depths of the inner palace.” Or, an equally plausible reading evokes tight
socks and inaccessibility, but says nothing about footbinding: “Her feet are
restrained and tucked inside her tight socks of ﬁne white silk. The maiden
was restrained and concealed as the resident of the forbidden palace.” There
are several other possible interpretations.
It seems clear that the possibility of multiple interpretations was intended
by Yang. The open-ended quality of the text is embedded in its mysterious
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title, mixin, and accentuated by deliberate contradictions between Yang-the-

commentator and Yang-the-author-imposter. As commentator, he signaled
his preference for the first interpretation at the end of the afterword: “I have
investigated the origins of footbinding but come up empty. Upon reading
the words ‘restrain—fine white silk—compress—sock’ and ‘restrain—tie—
tiny—simile—forbidden palace,’ it dawned on me that footbinding has
existed since the Later Han period. Once these words escaped my mouth,
even a fast chariot drawn by four horses could not call them back. I thought
that I would mention it here in case some readers will find fault with my omis-
sions” (656). Ironically, Yang’s unequivocal reading only works to fan the flame
of disbelief. For these words are sure to raise a red flag in the minds of read-
ers who recall other descriptions of the maiden’s feet earlier in the story.
The reader does not need a long memory to remember, for example, that
“Both the instep and shank are plump. Her sole is flat and her digits are
packed together.” The meaning of “packed digits” is ambiguous, as it could
refer to either a bound foot or tight sock. Moreover, physicians in modern
times observed that footbound women develop strong buttocks but their
shanks are emaciated from lack of use. A “plump shank” is therefore also a
sign of the absence of footbinding, although we do not know if that was
common knowledge in the fifteenth century. Regardless of the interpreta-
tion we choose to adopt, the novelty of this passage is unmistakable. If Zhang
Bangji helped transmit the knowledge that footbinding is signified by the
arched shape, Yang went further by calling attention to the anatomical eªects
that binding may leave on diªerent parts of the foot.
Even more befuddling is another factual description, “her foot is eight
inches long.” Many subsequent writers, such as Yu Huai (1616–96), read it
as definitive proof that footbinding was not practiced in the Later Han. Yet
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

even such clinical precision is not as unequivocal as it may seem. Yu’s friend
Fei Xihuang (b. 1664), for example, suggested that eight inches on the Han
ruler equaled four Ming inches, and a four-inch foot by Ming reckoning is
a bound foot in his eyes.23 Yang Shen, we may surmise, left openings for
future readers to subvert his own suggestion that footbinding in the past
can be known by anatomical descriptions and measurements.
Upon closer inspection, even such hallmarks of empirical knowledge
as anatomy and quantiﬁcation are not as certain as they seem when they
describe realities in the past and when our only access to the body they refer
to is by way of the written word. In the end, the reader is left face to face
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with the futility with which Yang began his search: a futility that arose from
a realization of the limitations of the word as the conduit of knowledge from
the past. Antiquity, we may recall, is as inaccessible as the splendors of the
capital for the scholar in exile. Instead of riding on the historicist faith that
the distance between past and present can be bridged by painstaking archival
research, factual verification, and logical deduction, Yang Shen dispensed
with the pretension altogether that one can return to the distant capital.
Instead of despair, however, Yang rode into the unknown with optimism
and a sense of freedom, even mischief. In invading the integrity of the
archives as a repository of knowledge and in insisting on a playful reading
strategy, he alerted his readers to the lack of one-on-one correspondence
between text and meaning. In so doing, he changed the reader’s expectations
of the kind of cultural work performed by a text. Subsequent scholars, too
busy to correct his mistakes, seem oblivious to Yang’s main message: that there
is life beyond the search for certainty and authenticity.
Han Footles is a milestone in the origin discourse in spite of, and perhaps
because of, its dubious authenticity and the layers of ambiguities embed-
ded in the text. The experience of reading and comprehending the story is
a lesson in skepticism. Elsewhere, Yang prefaced his own philological exer-
cises with these words: “To believe in the believable, that is no doubt belief;
to doubt the doubtful, that is also a form of belief. Ancient scholars estab-
lished themselves by their propensity to doubt, whereas current scholars work
too hard to dispel their doubts.”24 As the ultimate doubter, Yang toyed with
the very legitimacy of philological investigations: What if ancient texts, in
which we vest so much authority, are in fact modern inventions?
Han Footles demonstrates that seemingly objective quantification may
serve unscientific ends; it may even pique erotic imagination. The fetish of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

numbers and measurements will remain key to the lure of the bound foot
for centuries to come, as we have seen in Picking Radishes. It seems as though
Yang Shen had anticipated those nostalgic connoisseurs from twentieth-
century Tianjin and Shanghai. This is a remarkable feat, for the cultural and
temporal distances that separated Yang from those residents of modern treaty
ports are as insurmountable as those between Yunnan and the capital.

REFUTING YANG SHEN: HU YINGLIN TURNS TO SHOES

Yang Shen’s foremost admirer-critic, Hu Yinglin (1551–1602), did not take

Yang’s
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Han seriously enough to refute it. But he launched the first concerted at-
tack on Yang’s theory that footbinding can be traced to the Six Dynasties,
and in so doing sealed Yang’s canonical status in the origin discourse. Born
eight years before Yang’s death, Hu never met Yang. But he was so enam-
ored with the older man’s erudition and flair that he devoted three of his
own books to correcting Yang’s mistakes and omissions. In one, The Revised
Scarlet and Lead Scrolls (Danqian xinlu), not only did he adopt the title from
Yang, he also quoted Yang’s notations verbatim before oªering his own
learned opinions. It seems as though Yang Shen lived and spoke twice, as
an original and in quotations.
Hu Yinglin’s works constitute the ultimate tribute by an admirer who took
Yang’s stricture of “comprehensive investigation” to heart but found Yang’s
own thoroughness wanting. Together they were recognized by modern schol-
ars as Ming predecessors of the Qing philological movement. Hu Yinglin
was even more marginal to o‹cialdom than Yang. Holder of a provincial
degree, he had, in fact, never served in the bureaucracy. Hu professed dis-
taste for the rigidity of the examination system, preferring to read widely
in history, philosophy, and notations. Son of a successful o‹cial, he decided
to retire permanently to his private library in a villa at the outskirts of his
native city of Lanxi, Zhejiang.25 As such he fit Benjamin Elman’s descrip-
tion of a philological scholar who, sustained by the wealthy urban economy
of seventeenth-century Jiangnan, relied on neither an o‹cial appointment
nor imperial favor for his livelihood.26 This independence allowed him to
depart from the o‹cial curriculum of Song learning.
Indeed, the community of scholars that emerged in Hu’s lifetime changed
the sociological context of the origin discourse. When a new piece of evi-
dence or argument surfaced, it circulated among friends and sooner or later
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

would become citations in another notation book.27 Previously considered

too trivial and private to be spoken of, footbinding’s origins emerged as a
topic of literati conversation. This currency of footbinding as a subject of
informal and scholarly discourses may be a response to its growing popu-
larity as a social practice in the sixteenth century.
The presence of a contemporary audience in part accounts for the location
of Hu Yinglin’s analytic focus in the here-now. If Yang Shen was preoccu-
pied with the inaccessibility of the receding past, Hu assumed a commun-
ion between antiquity and the present. Ancient texts, he believed, could
illuminate customary practices in his own times; conversely, current prac-
ticesEBSCO
inﬂuenced
Publishing his interpretation
: eBook Comprehensive of the classics.
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THE BODY CONCEALED 124
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musings can be combed for traces of social history, yielding fragmentary

but valuable insights on female attire, male-female diªerence, and women’s
handiwork in late-sixteenth-century Jiangnan, as we will see. Above all, Hu’s
notations suggest that footbinding was perceived as a human institution and
hallmark of manmade culture. Moreover, located in the realm of attire and
decoration, footbinding deﬁned femininity by marking the female diªerence.
In fact, it was the styles of female attire and footwear fashioned by Hu’s
contemporaries that led him to question Yang Shen’s theory. Yang’s main
evidence was a Yuefu song entitled “Double Bindings”:
A pair of new embroidered silk bindings;
The insteps as glamorous as spring.
Others know not to sing their praises,
I alone know how lovely are the braces.28

The Yuefu songs refer to an eclectic body of ancient songs that can be set
to music, including imperial ritual incantations and folk tunes. Some hail
from as early as the Han and Wei-Jin periods, whereas others may date as
late as the Tang and Five Dynasties (907–60).29 Yang’s contention that foot-
binding originated earlier than the tenth century hinges on his assumptions
that the binding cloths (xingchan) referred to in this song are women’s foot-
binding cloths.
Hu Yinglin, however, observed that there are two vastly diªerent kinds
of binding cloth. The xingchan-bindings “are what women wore under their
socks, or ‘leg-binders’ [guojiao] in today’s terms.” A crucial diªerence be-
tween leg-binders and foot-binders is that the former were common attire
for males and females before footbinding (zazu) became fashionable for
women. In days of old, the only gender diªerence lay in the fabric: “Men
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

used cloth whereas women used silk, decorated with embroidered patterns
to enhance the beauty. But they were hidden under socks, hence the line
‘Others know not to sing their praises.’” After women began to bind their
feet—whenever that was—leg-bindings became the prerogative of men, as
was customary in Hu’s times (see ﬁg. 11).30 Similarly, he observed that cat-
tail shoes used to be worn by both males and females in antiquity; in con-
trast “today they are fashionable throughout the empire. Yet the wearers are
exclusively male. Since women have bound feet, they would never wear
them.” In short, Hu’s argument is that footbinding gave rise to gender-
speciﬁc footwear.31
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In focusing on diªerences in footwear style, Hu Yinglin subtly altered

the way through which footbinding entered into discourse. Yang Shen’s in-
novative description, in terms of the anatomical parts of Maiden Ying’s
feet, was not pursued by later scholars. The reason, as he himself put it, is
that such a fixation on the body was “too dirty and lewd.” In detaching
the definition of footbinding from the female body and redirecting the gaze
to exterior attire and decoration, Hu Yinglin made the venture more re-
spectable, and more amenable to the methods of philological investigation.
We know the existence or absence of footbinding by noting what women
wear on their feet.
Faulting Yang Shen for not living by his own creed of comprehensive in-
vestigation, Hu found twenty-one new references to female footwear from
the Tang times and before. Since none mentioned “arched and slender”
(gongxian), he concluded that women did not have bound feet before the
Tang. This fixation on shoes, or rather on the textual representations of shoes,
could become excessive. For no apparent reason except to demonstrate that
Yang Shen failed to cover it all, Hu attached a list of 148 notations on one
type of shoes (lü).32

THE QUEEN’S SHOES,

WOMANLY WORK, AND THE FEMALE DIFFERENCE

In refuting Yang, Hu has clariﬁed two cultural meanings of footbinding in

his times. By the sixteenth century, the arched foot was recognized as the
marker of male and female diªerence. Furthermore, it also marked the dis-
tance between past and present, the former being characterized by the lack
of substantive diªerence between male and female footwear. Before turn-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ing to Hu’s attitude toward historical change and current fashion, it is worth-
while here to expound on gender diªerence and the making of femininity
by analyzing Hu’s disagreement with Yang over the interpretation of The
Rites of Zhou and the nature of womanly work.
The Rites of Zhou, which ﬁrst emerged in the mid-second-century b.c.e.
during the Former Han dynasty, describes the administrative structures, laws,
sacriﬁces, rituals, techniques, and customs in the royal state of Zhou in an-
tiquity. The six sections of the book correspond to the six o‹ces and do-
mains of the Zhou hierarchy: celestial; terrestrial; spring; summer; autumn;
winter. The elaborate scheme, wrought of the principles of symmetry and
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hierarchy, is imbued with cosmological signiﬁcance. Although we do not

know the extent to which they were actually practiced in the Zhou dynasty
(1045–256 b.c.e.), these rites were to have an indelible impact on the gov-
ernmental, architectural, and sartorial institutions of subsequent dynasties.33
Of particular interest to philologists searching for hints of footbinding
in antiquity is the sixth section, “Winter o‹ces: records of the scrutiny of
crafts.” A catalogue of the craftsmen attached to the royal court, it describes
the technical procedures and component parts that went into the making
of the litany of material culture: carriages, weapons, boats, clothing, hats,
and shoes.34 Also relevant is the first section, “Celestial o‹ces: domain of
the Prime Minister,” which deals with general administrative matters and
includes the titles of various keepers of shoes and formal gowns. In partic-
ular, Yang Shen’s interest was piqued by the o‹ce of Keeper of Shoes (lüren),
who was in charge of the garments and shoes of the king and queen. He
mused: “Hmm. Ordering craftsmen to make the queen’s shoes—isn’t it a
lewd thing to do? So what good did the virtue of ‘womanly work’ [ fugong,
commonly nügong] do in antiquity?”35 Yang implied that women should
make their own shoes, the charge of womanly work, and failure to do so
would have dire consequences for all.
To illustrate the import of womanly work Yang cited two lines from the
second poem in the classic Book of Songs, which described women cutting
kudzu vine in a ravine and then boiling the fiber. They were engaging in
productive work: “Weaving fine and coarse hemp cloth, / Sewing garments
comfortable to wear.” He concluded: “That was how the Zhou came to pros-
per. When women did not participate in public work [gongshi] and stopped
feeding silkworms and weaving, that was how the Zhou collapsed.” He added
somewhat incredulously: “When the Duke of Zhou institutionalized the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

system of rites, did he really set up an o‹ce making women’s shoes?”36 Yang
Shen’s attitudes toward the Zhou queen’s shoes are curiously contradictory:
on one hand, they belong to a realm so private, so close to the queen’s skin,
that having them made by an o‹cially appointed craftsman is “lewd.” On
the other hand, what the queen—and by extension all women—made with
her own hands is the pillar of public order. Yang’s equation of “womanly
work” with “public work” endows the women’s sphere with enormous pub-
lic and political signiﬁcance.
Hu Yinglin came to the Duke of Zhou’s defense. He began by noting the
anomaly of shoes: all other items in the royal couple’s wardrobe were placed
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under separate, gender-speciﬁc charges. Under the Ministry of State (tian-

guan), for example, the Inner Master of the Wardrobe (nei sifu) oversaw the
preparation and maintenance of the queen’s formal gowns. The king’s gowns
fell under the jurisdiction of the Outer Master. The same with headdresses.
Why did they share one Keeper of Shoes? The puzzled Hu ﬁled away the
question. “Later I examined [sources from] the Han, Tang, and the Five
Dynasties to ascertain the origins of women’s footbinding. Returning to The
Rites of Zhou to study the charges of the Keeper of Shoes, I noticed that the
shoes of the king and queen, as well as those of titled gentlemen and ladies
in and out of the court, are identical in name, shape, and color. It dawned
on me that in antiquity [sandai, the three dynasties of Xia, Shang, and Zhou],
male and female shoes are by and large the same. Therefore it made sense
to have the same Keeper oversee them.”37 Hu’s way of knowing is typical
of philologists: when incongruities stirred his doubts, he went back to ex-
amine ancient texts until he arrived at a plausible explanation.
Yang Shen’s error, according to Hu, is to impute the gendered division in
footwear and the latter’s eroticized meanings in his times back to antiquity,
a bad case of presentism. “For the ancients, [the color and design of ritual]
shoes are strictly regimented. In coordination with the [color and design]
of headdress, they established clear hierarchical rankings.” In fact, Hu main-
tained that the Zhou was doomed by the confusion of status symbols (“pros-
titutes and actors wearing the queen’s attire”) that ensued from the break-
down of hierarchy, not by women’s retreat from textile work. In other words,
shoes are not trivial and private concerns akin to such “lewd” articles as un-
derwear and lower garments, as Yang had assumed. Without thinking too
deeply, Yang lumped the queen’s shoes with the “arched and slender shapes
[gongxian zhuang ] that have prevailed in recent times.” After a long dis-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

course on the o‹ces of the various keepers of shoes and wardrobes, Hu drove
home the point that these items of attire were of public import since they
were intended for ceremonial and public functions, not everyday wear. “If
the queen’s shoes were what women’s shoes are today, surely they would lie
outside the domain of the Inner Master of Wardrobe, and would have been
made by professional tailors.”38
Hu’s complaint, then, is that in his day, women’s shoes lost their public
signiﬁcance because of the prevalence of footbinding. Now produced com-
mercially, female shoes have become, as Yang asserted, artifacts of lewdness.
Hu’s implication seems to be that the female body also experienced a fall
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from grace: no longer a public vessel, it became a conduit of erotic plea-

sures. The value of women’s labor, too, was degraded. Instead of making hemp
cloth, women now either bought many of their everyday shoes from the
market or engaged in superficial decoration, such as adding embroidered
motifs of flowers and birds to their shoes.39 In a commercial age saturated
with footbinding, femininity had become associated with bodily indulgence,
frivolous consumption, and excessive ornamentation. Gaining in textual and
social visibility but remaining unavailable to many who could not aªord it,
footbinding thus attained the height of its erotic potential in the seventeenth
century. The implications of this development for urban women and their
fashion sense will be examined in the final chapter.

CURRENCY OF THE PRESENT:

FOOTBINDING AND FASHION

Hu Yinglin made many casual remarks indicating that footbinding was a

fashionable, conventional, and customary practice in his time. On assess-
ing female beauty, for example, he said: “These days other than the face,
the foot is the most essential determinant.” Furthermore, “even a child to-
day knows to appreciate and desire the arched shape and smallness of the
foot [zuzhi gongxiao].” He betrayed a sense of bewilderment at how fast the
practice had spread and how far present standards of beauty had departed
from those of antiquity. Hence: “In our age footbinding [chanzu] has long
been practiced. If you did not follow, people would make fun of you. But
if you had bound feet during the Six Dynasties, wouldn’t you be seen as a
human prodigy [renyao]?”40 Rather than footbinding’s purported origins,
Hu implied, an understanding of the power of convention is more useful
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

in explaining the spread of the practice. Once customary standards of beauty

shifted in footbinding’s favor, it would spread as a result of emulation.
Another astute insight of Hu’s is that at the inception of the practice, lit-
erary allusions to silk socks (luowa), dainty feet, and so on were instrumental
in changing prevailing standards of beauty, leading to footbinding’s popu-
larity. Following Yang Shen’s lead, Hu examined a large number of Tang
and pre-Tang poems for philological purposes. At the same time, he was
aware that literature was more than sociological data: it changes, not just
reﬂects, expectations and experiences. He remarked: “Even in the early years
of the Song [eleventh century], the majority of women did not bind their
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feet. Then in the Yuan dynasty, poems, ci-lyrics, songs, and dramas all harped
on the subject, leading to its extreme popularity today.” Hu grimly added:
“We have strayed further from beauty.”41
Although Hu placed footbinding in the realm of fashion and ornamen-
tation, he did not hide his distaste for the bound foot underneath the con-
cealment of leggings and shoes. Echoing Yang Shen’s admiration for Li Bo’s
“plain-footed girl,” he remarked that “ ‘plain and clean,’ or ‘plump and beau-
tiful’ were standard praises for women’s feet in the past. Today, you can say
that the bound foot looks good [on the outside], but inside the bodily tis-
sue is dry and petrified, not to mention foul and filthy.” 42 This is one of the
few admissions made before the nineteenth century that “blow the cover”
of footbinding. It exposes a diªerent corporeality than Yang’s anatomical
and quantifying descriptions of Maiden Ying. It also flies in the face of the
preponderance of poetic and dramatic allusions to the eroticized feet, encased
as they were in leggings and shoes. Hu described one fashionable item in his
day that worked as an instrument of concealment: leggings worn on top of
binding cloths that extended up to the knees (xiku), known as “half-stockings”
(banwa).43
Hu’s own theory locates the beginnings of footbinding in the last years
of the Tang, which fell in 907, and the period of Five Dynasties (907–60)
that ensued. His reasoning, far from systematic, rests on the overriding im-
portance he attached to the adjective “slender” (xian). “Slender” feet are di-
ametrically opposed to natural feet: “If they are said to be slender then the
feet are not plain; if they are said to be plain then the feet cannot be slen-
der.” This allowed him to read one couplet by the Tang poet Du Mu (803–52)
as signaling the beginning of the cultural aura of footbinding, if not the so-
cial practice: “Sizing up with a ruler inlaid with gold, shaving oª four
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

fen, / Slender, slender, jade bamboo shoots wrapped in spring clouds.” The
slender bamboo shoots, he implied, are allusions to bound feet, whereas the
spring clouds refer to beautiful socks. He also mentioned poems by Li Shang-
yin (813–58) and in the mid-tenth-century collection Among the Flowers
(Huajian ji; “Slowly shifting the arched sole, embroidering the silk shoe”)
as supporting evidence. Yet Hu immediately planted seeds of doubt for his
own theory, suggesting that “bamboo shoots” might have meant women’s
toes in Tang times, instead of the arched foot as in his time.44
Hu’s clearest statement about the evolution of footbinding came in the
form of a striking comparison: “Both the printing of books by woodblock
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and the binding of women’s feet began around the end of Tang and the Five
Dynasties period; both flourished during the Song, reached extremes dur-
ing the Yuan, and have reached even newer heights today. The ins and outs
of the two stories are extremely similar. It is only that footbinding is a triv-
ial female matter, hence scholars have neglected to study it.”45 Hu’s tanta-
lizing coupling of footbinding and printing placed the former in the realm
of cultural institution and material practice, a most important insight.
If Yang Shen was more interested in probing the boundaries and limita-
tions of ancient texts, Hu Yinglin was more willing to submit to their au-
thority. He expressed hope that his own tenth-century origin theory might
be disproved one day by a more diligent reader: “Books on events in the Six
Dynasties are as boundless as the ocean. Perhaps there is a piece of defini-
tive evidence somewhere that can dispel all doubts.” 46 Until that happens,
skepticism remains the proper attitude. The origins of footbinding, or wood-
block printing, for that matter, may not be pinpointed with precision, but
the trajectory of its social development can be traced in historic time. So if
the quest for origins inspires one to read a few more books and come to bet-
ter understand institutional and cultural histories, then the lengthy philo-
logical exercise would have been worthwhile.
Despite Hu Yinglin’s suggestion of a progressive timeline from the tenth
to the sixteenth centuries, ultimately footbinding signaled to him the rup-
ture of history. Hu’s awareness of the distance between the past and the
present prefaces every statement he made about footbinding as a custom-
ary practice in his time. This urbane, if not downright modern, celebration
of contemporaneity was prevalent in the southern cities in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. The present, for all its imperfections such as
petrified feet, is the best of times and the only time we can know with some
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

certainty.
Hu Yinglin’s sense of historical rupture, celebration of the present, and
placement of footbinding in the realm of wearable fashion ﬁnd their clear-
est expression in the origin discourse of the scholar-poet Yu Huai (1616–
96). Best known as the author of Random Recollections from the Wooden Bridge
(Banqiao zazhi), nostalgic memoirs of the Nanjing courtesan quarters be-
fore the fall of the Ming, Yu’s musings are suªused with an awareness of the
distance that separated attire past and present. In particular, high-heeled
shoes for the arched foot were inventions “unheard of in the past, and reach
their zenith only in the present.” Fashionable ladies from the Suzhou area
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took to increasingly fancy styles: carving the soles out of fragrant wood and
covering them with the finest twill damask, or inserting pouches of fragrance
in the latticed heel so that every step would leave a floral pattern of fragrant
powder on the floor.
Rhetorically Yu called these new styles “dressing the human prodigy”
( fuyao), abnormalities believed to be signs of cosmological disorder. His tone,
however, conveys not moral sanction but pride in the exquisite tastes of his
contemporaries and the fine craftsmanship in the urban centers of seven-
teenth-century Jiangnan. “These are footwear that poets in the Song and
Yuan dynasties failed to eulogize, therefore I am making them known here
so that those in this world who wax lyrical about the fragrant toilette and
jade terrace can take note.” 47 Fragrant toilette and jade terrace refer to po-
etry that takes women and the feminine as its subjects. Once established,
the fashion of high heels was so dominant that three centuries later, as we
have seen, Governor Yan Xishan was still troubled by the prevalence of
arched wooden soles in the interior of Shanxi.

ZHAO YI AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ZENITH

The Qing bibliophile and historian Zhao Yi (1727–1814) enjoyed the last
word on footbinding’s origins. Zhao, whose life coincided with the height
of Qing imperial power and prosperity, was the last philologist whose quest
for footbinding’s origins appeared more academic than polemical, whose
goal was more a quest for understanding than condemnation. From Zhao’s
notation, “The Arched Foot,” it becomes clear that during the century that
separated him from Yu Huai, footbinding had become the normative prac-
tice of Han Chinese women.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

So customary, in fact, that the only noteworthy social historical details

in Zhao’s notation are exceptions to the norm: “As a current custom, foot-
binding is practiced all over the empire. But among the people of Guang-
dong and Guangxi, only those in the provincial capitals imitate it, not those
in the countryside. The same is true for the Luo, Miao, Bo, and Yi peoples
in Yunnan and Guizhou.” The last exception was even more striking: “Fe-
males within the city walls of Suzhou value small feet, but country women
beyond the city gates all work in the ﬁelds in bare feet. They do not bind
their feet. We may say that these peoples each follow their own customs and
[we] should not make blanket statements.”48 These examples of unfettered
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THE BODY CONCEALED 132
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feet underscore Zhao’s awareness of the spatial, cultural, and ethnic diªer-
ences in the Qing multi-ethnic empire, as well as the role played by foot-
binding in making these diªerences visible. Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan,
and Guizhou are in themselves peripheral provinces; they are further divided
into metropolis-rural and Han–non-Han areas. Also noteworthy is that in
Suzhou, one of the wealthiest cities in the heartland, footbinding marked
a conspicuous urban-rural gap.
These exceptions do not detract from the fact that during the course of
the Qing dynasty, footbinding underwent a 180-degree change: from high
urban fashion to customary practice expected of the average woman. Two
deliberate policies of the Manchu state might have inadvertently contribu-
ted to its popularity among non-elite families: the futile early-Qing eªorts
to ban footbinding as a signpost of Han Chinese identity and the eighteenth-
century promotion of the cotton industry in rural areas.49 Its seeming om-
nipresence notwithstanding, the notable exceptions mentioned above led
Zhao to conclude that in its eighteenth-century heyday, footbinding was a
multiple, not uniform, practice: one should not oªer any “blanket state-
ments.” That footbinding is a localized, situated practice is a remarkable in-
sight. If footbinding is not one practice but many, it becomes increasingly
di‹cult to presume that its beginnings can be traced back to one point of
origin. Although Zhao maintained the faith that ancient texts are reposi-
tories of knowledge about past practices, he was all too aware of the futil-
ity of the quest for singularity and certainty.
Zhao’s notations on footbinding are systematic summaries of existing the-
ories and evidence, and as such provide a convenient closure for the philo-
logical quest. All previous explanations, he contended, can be reduced to
three: that footbinding originated in the Five Dynasties (907–60); that it
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

already existed in the Six Dynasties (222–589); that it began in the Qin-Han
period (221 b.c.e.–220 c.e.). The Five-Dynasties theory, we may recall, was
suggested by the thirteenth-century scholar Zhou Mi, developed by Hu
Yinglin, and emerged as mainstream opinion by the sixteenth century. The
strongest support for this theory, Zhao pointed out, was a negative one: there
is no persuasive evidence for the existence of footbinding in the preceding
Tang dynasty. Among the myriad pre-tenth-century poetic and encyclo-
pedic references, there was scant mentioning of “slender and small” (xian-
xiao) feet, or of “arched and slender” shoes (gongxian). Zhao’s assumption

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is a familiar one shared by Zhang Bangji, Che Ruoshui, Yang Shen, and Hu
Yinglin: if footbinding were indeed practiced in a certain age, then it must
have left traces in the written archives. Above all, Li Bo’s eulogies of the
“plain-footed girl” was positive evidence that footbinding was not in vogue
in Tang times (655).
The most outspoken advocate for the second theory, that footbinding ex-
isted in the three centuries before the Tang, was Yang Shen. Zhao Yi cited
Yang’s evidence, the Yuefu song on leg-bindings and Han Wo’s poem on
“six inches of succulent flesh.” He added a few other notations, most no-
table being the story of Consort Yang. The last theory, pointing to the Han
dynasty, we may recall, was also proposed by Yang Shen, and found its most
direct evidence in his description of Maiden Ying in Han Footles. Zhao Yi’s
assessment of both theories is that, convincing or otherwise, they are note-
worthy because they come with textual support ( jieyou suoju). But he pro-
ceeded to weigh one text against the other: Li Bo’s eulogies of the plain-
footed girl constitute definitive, positive evidence (queyou ming ju), whereas
the texts in which Consort Yang’s story appeared are untrustworthy forgeries
(656).
Zhao Yi’s methodical reasoning confirmed that the centuries-old tenth-
century theory was indeed the most persuasive. His summation of foot-
binding’s origins: Han Wo’s “six inches of succulent flesh” and Du Mu’s
“Sizing up with a ruler, shaving oª four fen” poems were written in a time
before footbinding emerged as an actual practice. But when poets harped
on the long and the short of feet, we may surmise that “the valuing of slen-
der and small [xianxiao] feet was gradually gaining ground in prevailing
customs.” It was not until after the Tang fell, in the Five Dynasties (907–60)
period, that footbinding (zajiao) became a bodily practice. Zhao’s caution
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

that footbinding as an aesthetic ideal is not to be confused for the actual

practice of binding feet and that the ideal preceded the practice is remark-
ably astute.
Also noteworthy are Zhao’s views of antiquity and textual veracity. Zhao
cited two pieces of support for his chronology: Tao Zongyi’s Notations from
Resting the Plough (Chuogenglu) and the Yuan writer Bai Ting’s (1247–1328)
notation book Quiet Words from Deep Water (Zhanyuan jingyu).50 Although
these authors did not furnish solid proof, neither support can be dismissed
as groundless conjecture because “being Song and Yuan sources, they are

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not yet distant from the Five Dynasties. These authors must have seen or
heard clues that are now lost” (656). This view of the inaccessibility of an-
tiquity recalls Yang Shen’s analogy about the capital and Yunnan.
All three origin theories Zhao selected for commentary belong to the realm
of verifiable history. He did not find the origin myths about last rulers and
their femmes fatales even worth mentioning. Convincing or not, the exis-
tence of textual evidence establishes the validity of a theory or claim. The
texts he considered acceptable evidence are confined to histories, notation
books, encyclopedias, and poetry. Consistently left out of not only Zhao’s
consideration but also the philological tradition itself is the sizable number
of references to footbinding in fiction, drama, and vernacular songs, the gen-
res most instrumental in perpetuating footbinding’s aura.51

THE BODY DECORATED AND THE BODY REVEALED

The location of Zhao’s entry “The Arched Foot” in his notation book is as
informative as his sociological and analytic insights. Zhao placed the arched
foot in two social and cultural contexts: bodily decoration and deportment,
both informed by an acute awareness of gender diªerence. Immediately fol-
lowing “The Arched Foot” is a notation on the staining of ﬁngernails with
red pigment from the garden balsam blossom, allegedly a cosmetic device
originating with Chinese Muslim (Hui) women and widely practiced in
Zhao’s eighteenth century. The procedure is strangely reminiscent of the
binding of feet: the petals are ground and mixed with alum, an astringent
used in footbinding; the paste is applied to the nails and secured with strips
of cloth; after three to four overnight applications the red pigment would
stay until the nails grow out.52
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If varnishing ﬁngernails was always known as a female practice, another

article of decoration, a fresh flower as a hairpin, was worn by men in days
of old. The distances between past and present, as well as between male and
female attire, that had informed the origin discourse of footbinding also struc-
ture Zhao’s account of hairpin flowers. In Zhao Yi’s time, it had become an
exclusive female decoration. The top three candidates from the palace exam-
ination, however, paraded the streets of Beijing and had gold flowers pinned
to their hair, a symbolic gesture of remembering past customs.53 Footbinding
had been viewed as a form of female ornamentation (nüzhuang ) since the
Ming if not earlier, as evinced by its classification in encyclopedias (see fig.
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11). Zhao Yi’s association of the arched foot with dyed fingernails and hair-
pin flowers suggests that this view was still current in his time.54
Yet the body is not merely a passive template waiting to be decorated. Be-
ing the innovator he was, Zhao opened a new vista from which the origins
and meanings of footbinding can be viewed: the body in motion. The body
does not always figure in discourses of footbinding’s origins. Yang Shen first
called attention to the corporeality of the practice by his anatomical descrip-
tions and fetish of measurements. The Maiden Ying that Yang conjured
with literary flair, however, is still and passive, more an object under inspec-
tion than a volitional agent. Hu Yinglin averted his eyes from the naked
body altogether, choosing to locate footbinding in the realm of fashion-
able footwear. Zhao Yi returned footbinding to the realm of the body by
searching for its origins in the history of manners and gestures. The three
adjacent entries on the arched foot, fingernails, and hairpin flowers are sand-
wiched together between a series of notations on sitting, bowing, and other
postures that marked the diªerences between past and present, male and
female.
Four issues related to conduct, attire, and furniture are of particular in-
terest to Zhao: What did the ancients do with their shoes and socks in
sanctified spaces? When did boots become formal footwear for imperial au-
diences? Did ancient women prostrate themselves to show respect? What
was the posture of repose for ancients: did they kneel or sit? Zhao’s inves-
tigations into the first two questions led to the realization that the bodily
expressions of piety and lewdness are historically contingent. In antiquity,
people sat on the floor instead of chairs, and when stepping onto the floor-
mat, they would take their shoes oª. Zhao asserted that for ancients, the
shedding of shoes was a sign of routine respect. The gesture of supreme re-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

spect, required for an audience with rulers, was the removal of both shoes
and socks, exposing the leg-binders underneath. We have seen that Hu
Yinglin argued that these leg-binders (xingteng, xiefu; see n. 30) were fash-
ioned by both males and females in antiquity and were not to be confused
with foot-binders. Observers in the eighteenth century, Zhao wrote, were
likely to frown on the removal of socks as an act of “deﬁlement” approaching
“obscenity.” How diametrically opposed are customs in antiquity and the
present!55
The Tang dynasty was a pivotal period in the culture of footwear and
piety, according to Zhao. In stately sacriﬁcial functions, the removal of shoes
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THE BODY CONCEALED 136
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and socks was still expected, but o‹cials began to keep their shoes on in
routine audiences with the emperor. Furthermore, in the second half of the
Tang, leather boots became increasingly common formal courtly wear. Orig-
inally a form of non-Sinitic military attire introduced by the Warring States
King Wuling of Zhao, leather boots did not catch on in the south but be-
came standard everyday wear in the north. Ironically, after boots gained re-
spectability, shoes became “lewd attire,” being associated with bodily pri-
vacy, and the removal of socks became unthinkable rudeness. Fashion trends
are indeed as changeable as the blowing of the wind, Zhao mused.56
Zhao Yi made no direct inference from the shedding of socks to foot-
binding. But it is tempting to speculate that as bare feet ceased to be the
sign of utmost piety during the Tang, and as formal attire called for the en-
casement of feet in leather boots, the new aesthetics of concealment res-
onated with the ﬁxation, even eroticization, of female socks and shoes in
Tang poetry. When the cultural preference for concealed feet became cou-
pled with the aesthetic ideal of slender female feet, also eulogized in Tang
poetry, the aesthetic and ritualistic preconditions for the practice of bind-
ing feet were established. Seen in this light, Li Bo’s praises of the plain-footed
girl are throwbacks to a receding past, whereas Han Wo and Du Mu were
fantasizing about the fashion of the future when they ﬁxated on tiny em-
broidered slippers.
The body that matters to the modern footbinding discourses is either the
crippled or the erotic body. Footbinding did alter a woman’s posture; the
shifting of her center of gravity produced a mincing gait—not unlike that
produced by high heels—which was eulogized as “lotus steps” in poetry.
But Zhao Yi made the useful reminder that eroticism aside, the material
and spatial environments are also crucial to a woman’s sense of body and
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

space, and that these conditions, like fashion trends, changed with the pass-
ing of time. In other words, her gait and anatomy—the eroticized female
body—is not the only body that matters. The gestures and motions of the
ritualized body and the social body, in short the constructive eªects of bind-
ing, are also important aspects of the story that have to be told.
In The Rites of Zhou one expression of respectful greeting for women is
the “solemn bow” (subai), during which a woman joins her two hands in
front of her chest and lowers her forearms. A centuries-long debate since
the Song, as vexing as footbinding’s origins, centers on the motion of her
legs. Was she supposed to also bend her knees in a kneeling gesture? Zhao’s
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answer hinges on a historic change in domestic furniture. In antiquity, when

people sat on floor-mats, “kneeling” and “sitting” were similar postures, with
the bent leg from the knees down touching the floor. Sitting, a posture of
repose, means resting the hips and buttocks on the heels of the two feet,
which is how a Japanese today would sit on the tatami mat. In kneeling, a
less stable posture, the waist and hips are suspended in air. Hence a sitting
woman greeted others by slightly lifting her upper body into a kneeling pose,
Zhao reasoned. Later, low platform beds (chuang ) were introduced for sit-
ting and sleeping, and it was no longer so convenient for women to kneel
when sitting on them. They thus stopped kneeling when greeting guests.57
Again, even a gesture as instinctive as sitting is historically and culturally
contingent.
The history of manners has to be sought in the history of material cul-
tures. Zhao Yi narrated but did not date changes in domestic furniture and
their profound eªects on womanly deportment. Sarah Handler, a historian
of Chinese furniture, has studied an early third-century Han tomb paint-
ing depicting a feast. “At that time it was common practice for people to sit
on mats upon the floor, as low beds and platforms were honorific seats used
by the elite and on ceremonial occasions.” The canopied bed, elevated and
festooned with silk curtains, reached its zenith as ceremonial prop in Tang
Buddhist art but its use in domestic homes is less well documented. By about
the tenth century, “it became the practice for the Chinese to sit on chairs
at high tables rather than upon mats or low platforms” (see fig. 12). This de-
velopment had an indelible impact on interior space, leading to loftier pro-
portions, walls instead of screens as spatial dividers, and popularity of hang-
ing scrolls as wall decoration.58
It is hard to resist the suggestion that without chairs, footbinding might
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

not have materialized. For the ﬁrst time, people sat with their legs hanging
down instead of tucked under, relieving the heel of the foot from bearing
the weight of the entire upper body. It is not so much that women had to
remove their footwear when sitting on a mat that “prevented” footbinding,
for Zhao Yi has informed us that socks were seldom removed except as a
gesture of extreme piety. But a shift in posture facilitated by high chairs made
footbinding ergonomically possible. Furthermore, the very posture of sit-
ting on chairs facilitates a display of the sitter’s feet. If they are so visible,
they might as well be decorated according to fanciful suggestions from Tang
poetry.
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THE BODY CONCEALED 138
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It is less clear if changes in interior space had an impact on the rise of

footbinding. The partition of domestic space by more permanent walls in-
stead of screens might have heightened a sense of domestic enclosure, which
in turn facilitated the realization of the pre-existing ideal of female seclu-
sion.59 To modern minds, the safeguarding of female chastity was the very
raison-d’être of footbinding. Yet curiously, none of the philologists con-
sidered seclusion or morality a plausible explanation. It did not even occur
to them that footbinding had any connection with Confucianism. Not
only was footbinding absent in the Confucian classics, the practice was also
never mentioned, let alone promoted, in any Confucian didactic texts for
women.60 To the contrary, in the philological writings we have examined,
footbinding appears as perplexing and morally dubious, associated more with
the dangers of sexual license than moral steadfastness.
In short, the tenth century—the last years of the Tang empire and the
tumultuous Five Dynasties period after its collapse—emerged as something
as close to the origin of footbinding as we can locate in knowable history.
There is no smoking gun, but generations of scholars have sifted textual ev-
idence, weighed one probability against another, and used their contem-
porary knowledge of footbinding to slowly build a compelling narrative.
This narrative makes a distinction between the idealization of slender feet
and its spread as a social practice, and locates the cultural meaning of the
practice in the contexts of fashion, manners, and material culture. During
the tenth century, the aesthetic preference for slender and small feet per-
petuated in Tang poetry, the rise of concealed feet as a measure of decorum
due to changing fashion trends, the availability of chairs that eased pressure
on the feet, a new interior architectural space partitioned by walls, perhaps
enhancing the appeal of domestic seclusion, all conspired to render the bind-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ing of feet not only desirable but also feasible.

QIAN YONG: FROM PHILOLOGY TO SOCIAL CRITIQUE

If Zhao Yi had the last word on the quest for origins by placing footbind-
ing in the context of the body of decorum, three decades later another
scholar, Qian Yong (1759–1844), heralded a new—modern would not be an
exaggeration—origin discourse. Qian’s notation “On Binding Feet” (“Guo-
zu”) is a long entry made up of six parts. He echoed the chronology sug-

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FIGURE 1. These feet are for walking. (“Women with ‘Golden Lilies,’” in John Mac-
Gowan, Men and Manners, facing p. 249.)
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FIGURE 2. Imprint of a bound foot, showing the four folded digits and heel. This sizable foot
measures 22 cm (8.8 inches) from toe to heel. The four digits were folded underneath, but the
metatarsals were not bent, as in extreme forms of footbinding. The woman’s body weight was
distributed evenly on the toes (orteils) and heel (talon). Dr. J.-J. Matignon’s 1899 book, which
introduces Chinese culture by way of superstitions, suicide, self-immolation, eunuchs, foot-
binding, infanticide, abortion, pederasty, and beggary, encapsulates the European fascination
with the grotesque and pathological in the Extreme Orient. (J.-J. Matignon, Superstition, crime,
et misére en Chine, p. 205.)
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A B

C D

FIGURE 3. The bound foot exposed: photographs in medical reports. (A) X-ray pho-
tograph of an extreme arched foot. ( J. Preston Maxwell, “On the Evils of Chinese
Foot-binding” [1916], facing p. 396.) (B) X-ray photograph of a let-out foot. (C) The
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cleavage on the underside of the foot. (B and C: H. S. Y. Fang and F. Y. K. Yu, “Foot-
binding in Chinese Women”; reprinted from Canadian Journal of Surgery 3 (April
1960): 195–202, by permission of the publisher. © 1960 Canadian Medical Associa-
tion.) (D) Contrast between the naked and the shod foot. (F. M. Al-Akl, “Bound Feet
in China,” [1932], p. 547.)

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FIGURE 4. Pedagogy of the truncated foot. Wood or plaster models of the bound foot
were often used in rallies organized by the natural feet societies, fueling the sensation-
alist exposure of female body parts. This wooden model and matching shoe were used
by the Visual Education Department of the Baptist Missionary Society in Fujian prov-
ince. (Reproduced by permission of the Government of the HKSAR from the collec-
tion of the Hong Kong Museum of History.)
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2
1

A B

FIGURE 5. Evolution of wooden soles, 1830s–1930s.

(A) The progressive ﬂattening of the arch, shown in a chart with captions by Hu Yanx-
ian, a native of Beijing and a contributor to Picking Radishes (Caifeilu). Hu’s captions
label the shoes as follows: (1) 1830s style; (2) 1860s–1870s style; (3) 1880s–1890s Shanxi
style; (4) 1850s–1860s Jiangnan style; (5) 1890s–1900s northern style; (6) 1920s–1930s
current style. (B) 1830s style high-heeled shoes. Hu Yanxian explained that his chart
was based on antiquing and interviews with elders:
I once discovered a pair of (1) at an antique stall [shown in (B)]. The uppers are covered
with all-over embroidery, the design of which is old and simple. Among the motifs are four
animals, perhaps a tiger, lion, elephant, and monkey. The shoe is about four inches long
but neither slender nor pointy. Upon consulting with many old men, I realized that this
is a very old style. It is not very elegant when judged by today’s aesthetic standards.
I have also seen style (2) in antique stores. I was told that it is a more recent style than
(1). The heavy and clumsy look is shed with (3), which is slender, narrow, and delicate.
The heel of (4) is like a wedge and extremely tall; the tip of the shoe curves upward. An
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

old man said that this style was not seen in the north. Since the embroidery is elaborate
and refined, it must be southern. Style (5) is common in the north in the recent decades.
Style (6) is the most “reformed.”
In sum, the older the sole, the higher is [the arch]; the more recent it is, the flatter. As
time went on, the arched shoe [gongxie] gradually lost its arch shape. Recently, some shoes
have done away with wooden soles altogether. Indeed footbinding is very popular, but the
sole of the shoe is now as flat as the earth. (CFL: 227; CFJHL: 130–31)

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14 13

2
3

4 12

7 8
6 11

9
5
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FIGURE 6. (OPPOSITE) A drawing of northern-style Kun shoes from the 1920s

by Hu Yanxian, who names and describes the parts of the shoe as follows:
“(1) moongate or temple gate [the tongue]; (2) ladder rung (mostly made of
dark strings in parallel lines; some in crisscrossing lines); (3) mouth-face (the
cloth facing underneath the “ladder rung,” made of either white cotton or
white satin); (4) mouth-tip (sometimes decorated with a colorful silk knot-
ted sash); (5) front heel tab (made of cloth or silk satin in various colors, this
was about a half-fen [0.05 inch] thick and served to soften the noise of the
wooden sole); (6) border piping (this was always white and half- to one-fen
thick); (7) waist block (ribbon of various colors, marking the middle-back
area of the sole); (8) center sole [dixin] (place to attach a bell; this part is almost
flat in the current styles); (9) back heel tab (same materials as front heel tab);
(10) storage area for perfumed powder (with incised floral patterns on the heel);
(11) inner high-heel [ligaodi] (made of iron, wood, cloth, or bamboo); (12) heel
lift (in various patterns, shapes, colors, and lengths); (13) heel lift loop (some
are attached to the vamp, not the lift); (14) shoe laces (some are doubled, in
fours; mostly red or green).”
In the age of the anti-footbinding movement, the arch became progres-
sively flatter as the regimen of binding became more relaxed. But this did not
detract from the fashion statement that the reformed Kun shoes were sup-
posed to make. Hu observed:
The embroidery on the vamp tends to concentrate on the tip of the toes and the
edge. The older the style, the bigger the embroidered area. Shoes a hundred years
old are covered with all-over designs. The older the wooden sole, the more arched;
the more recent, the flatter. Heels a hundred years old look just like the modern
[Westernized] high heels.
The tip of Kun shoes comes in all kinds of styles: some curve up like a hook;
some are as sharp as an awl; some are very long and pointy, extending far beyond
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the actual toes; some are short.

The heel lift can vary from two to eight inches in length. Some are practical
while others are decorative. The former is made of cloth, seldom silk, so that it is
not slippery. After the shoe is fastened on the foot, the heel lift would be turned
up and secured under the leg of the pants to prevent the heel of the shoe from droop-
ing. Some heel lifts are purely decorative in function. These delicate tabs trail at
the back of the shoes and sway gently as the wearer moves her steps. They are indeed
nice ornaments. (CFL: 225–26; CFJHL: 130)

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FIGURE 7. The making of Tianjin-style Kun booties, ca. 1904–11: A–C show “live
sketches” (shiwu xiesheng) of three Kun-style booties, 1904 and after, belonging to Bai
Jinbao, a Tianjin courtesan famous for her slender feet; D–E show the components of
the booties. (CFJHL: illustrations between pp. 86 and 87.)

(A) Side view of Bai Jinbao’s booties, “waist-piece” decorated

with peonies. The lower part of the vamp, faintly decorated
with floral motifs, is called a “curved-piece.”
(B) Bai Jinbao’s booties showing the arched wooden sole and
heel tabs, waist-piece decorated with butterfly and melon
A
vines.
(C) Bai Jinbao’s booties showing the bamboo heel stiªening,
waist-piece decorated with double coins and peaches.
(D) Uppers: decorated waist-piece and uncut curved-piece.
Painted motifs on the waist-piece and curved-piece are the work
of professional craftsmen. The drawings on the shaft are bigger
B and on the latter, more delicate. The more expensive uppers are
made of satin; the ordinary ones are made of a starched and pol-
ished cotton fabric called “Jingpiao.”
Craftsmen in this profession are all male. They use an appren-
tice system. Those in training start by drawing the waist-piece
and graduate to the more refined curved-piece. After decorated
curved-pieces went out of fashion, the craftsmen concentrated
on the waist-piece.
C
When women make their own shoes, they mostly use embroi-
dery; they do not decorate the uppers by drawing. If you see a
pair of booties that is not painted but decorated with embroi-
dery or gold couching, it is from a woman’s hand.
(E) Wooden soles and small heels.
All booties are attached on wooden soles [mudi] covered with
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

white cotton cloth. Sometimes a small wooden heel [xiaodi], also

covered with cloth, is added to the sole to form the “outer high
heel” [wai gaodi, in contrast to an “inner high heel,” li gaodi].
D The wooden sole comes in diªerent sizes; the small heel varies
in shape. Normally it is shaped like a truncated oval; occasion-
ally it looks like an apple [see bottom two drawings here, also
bootie on the left in B].
Professional wooden sole carvers are all men. Vendors would
call them out in alleys; they are also male. They also sell heel
stiªening [xue zhugen]. It is made of strips of bamboo sheath
covered with cloth, like a raft [see inside of bootie in C]. When
stitched onto the heel area of the bootie, the stiªening prevents
eBookitComprehensive
from drooping.
E
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5
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4
3

1
G

D C

A
H F

E 6 7 8

2
G
D

C
A
B

FIGURE 8. Styles of socks in the early twentieth century. Drawing and

captions by Hu Yanxian (CFL: 228; CFJHL: 132). Only the bottom
views are shown here because the shafts are identical in shape; they
diªer only in decoration.
(1–2) Casual socks, 1920s. These simple socks can be made from scraps in
ﬁve minutes. Take a piece of rectangular cloth whose length is twice its
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

width (proportional to the length of the foot), fold the two diagonals (B,
C), and sew the two seams together (EF; BF). Left as is, the side D becomes
the opening of the sock. Because the cloth is cut on the bias it conforms to
the shape of the foot when worn. (3) Kun socks with full padded sole. The
sole never extends to the tip, or else it would be uncomfortable. (4) Kun
socks with half padded sole. (5) Socks with padded heel. Women whose
heels are fat prefer this style. (6) Socks without padded sole. This style is
only suitable for those with narrow feet and small heels, or else the sock
would look stuªed. (7) Socks with cutoª tip and heel. Good for hot sum-
mer days and those with sweaty feet. (8) Socks with recessed sole.

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FIGURE 9. Playing with footwear fashion, ca. 1905–10: a pair of

Shanghai entertainers with feet bound in the more relaxed mod-
ern fashion. The cross-dressed “he” wore male cloth shoes while
the “she” of the pair wore modern-style socks and ﬂat Mary Janes
decorated with pom-poms. Her narrow cigarette-pants, which
accentuated the ﬂat, modern silhouette of her feet, represented a
sensational style that emerged during the waning years of the Qing
dynasty. (Image from the collection of Lewis Stein.)

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FIGURE 10. The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Guanyin).

The big-footed Bodhisattva appears in a lilting dance pose
on a golden lotus in this gilt bronze statue from the Tang
dynasty (618–906). Could this image have inspired Yao-
niang, or the creation of her myth? (The Avery Brundage
Collection, B60B661. © Asian Art Museum of San Fran-
cisco. Used by permission.)

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FIGURE 11. Leg-binders and binding cloths from a Ming encyclopedia. In

this dictionary of common words and phrases, a pair of leg-binders (guo-
jiao) is pictured underneath a pair of kneepads (A, illustrations at center
top). Both are items for traveling, as are the parasol, palanquin, purse, and
raincoat
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arrow bag, all unmistakably male objects. In contrast, on another page (B,
illustrations at top right), a pair of ribbon-like binding cloths (jiaobo) appears
underneath a face towel, along with three square patches of face powder,
two rounds of rouge, and three balls of fragrance, suggesting an association
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FIGURE 12. Tomb mural depicting the landowner Zhao and his wife, rest-
ing their feet on footstools, Dengfeng, Henan, 1099. (Su Bai, Baisha Song
mu, plate 22.)
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FIGURE 13. Feet-washing festival, Tonghai county, Yunnan province. The captions of
this lithograph, which appeared in an 1887 issue of a popular pictorial published by
the Shenbaoguan in Shanghai, play on the slippage between the bald heads of the
gawking monks (visible on the lower righthand corner) and the bare feet (hidden under
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

water but suggested by the piles of loosened binding cloths) of the tiny-footed women.
According to the writer, every spring during the Third Month, women from the vicin-
ity of Tonghai county in Yunnan province would flock to the pond in front of a cer-
tain temple on the western corner of the city to wash their feet. When finished they
would sacrifice an animal to thank the gods for granting their wishes. Then they would
file away like the doe in the Buddhist scriptures who left lotus blossoms with every
step she took. When asked, “Why aren’t you ashamed?” the women replied, “We’re
praying for good fortunes in our next lives.” (“Xijiao dahui” [A big gathering of feet-
washing], signed by the artist, Fu Jie; Dianshizhai huabao no. 127, Guangxu 13 [1887],
eighth month, 11th–20th day [zhongyuan]), 51b–52a; from the collection of Nancy Nor-
ton Tomasko.)

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FIGURE 14. A Yunnan woman displaying her layered footwear fashion, ca. 1910–20.
On this postcard, a Han woman appears relaxed but composed in front of a visiting
French photographer in Mengzi, a French railway depot in southern Yunnan. Of par-
ticular interest is the complex layering of fabric on her feet: the (invisible) wrapping
of binding cloth; white socks; crisscrossing wide ribbons accentuating the bent arch;
soft “sleeping slippers”; and an outer pair of embroidered cotton shoes that are secured
by shoe laces around the ankle. The narrow legs of her white pants, decorated with
bold geometric patterns in contrasting colors, were gathered under a shaft-like anklet
secured by narrow woven ribbons. Both the conspicuous display of textiles and the
digniﬁed expression on her face suggest that the binding of feet was associated with
status and wealth in this area as late as the 1910s. (From the collection of Dr. Régine
Thiriez.

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B C

FIGURE 15. Early Ming footwear: (A) slender shoes with pointy tips, (B) one of a pair
of ﬂat, unpadded summer socks, and (C) a binding cloth. (From the collection of the
Chinese National Silk Museum, Hangzhou.)
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

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FIGURE 16: Flat-soled female shoes for bound feet, thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.

SIZE OF FOOTWEAR
DIAGRAM NAME AND DATES PLACE (L, LENGTH; W, WIDTH; H, HEIGHT)

Huang Sheng Fuzhou, Fujian L: 13.3–14 cm (5.3–5.6 in.)

(1227–43) W: 4.5–5 cm (1.8–2 in.)
H: 4.5–4.8 cm (1.8–1.9 in.)

Madam Zhou De’an, Jiangxi L: 18–2x2 cm (7.2–8.8 in.)

(1240–74) W: 5–6 cm (2–2.4 in.)
H: 3.5–4.5 cm (1.4–1.8 in.)

Madam Qian Yu Wuxi, Jiangsu ?

(d. 1320)

Yuan Dove Cave, L: 21 cm (8.4 in.)

(before 1362) Longhua, Hebei W: 5 cm (2 in.)
H: 5 cm (2 in.)

? (Ming) Yangzhou, Jiangsu ?

Madam Li Nancheng, Jiangxi ?

(1538–56)

Madam Sun Nancheng, Jiangxi L: 13.5 cm (5.4 in.)

(1543–82) W: 4.8 cm (1.9 in.)
H: 2.5 cm (1 in.)
Soles: 1.5 cm (0.6 in.) thick
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HEIGHT OF DESCRIPTION OF
WOMAN FOOTWEAR REMARKS SOURCE

? 6 pairs of shoes; Huang died at age Fujiansheng bowuguan,

16 pairs of socks seventeen, hence the Fuzhou Nan-Song Huang
smallness of her feet. Sheng mu.

152 cm 7 pairs of shoes; Jiangxisheng wenwu kaogu

(5 ft. 1 in.) 7 pairs of socks yanjiusuo and De’an xian
bowuguan, “Jiangxi De’an
Nan-Song Zhoushi mu
qingli jianbao.”

? Zhou Xun and Gao Chun-

ming, Zhongguo lidai funü
zhuangshi, p. 305; Zhou
and Gao, Zhongguo yiguan
fushi dai cidian, p. 704.

? Embroidered lotus, Found in a package Zhao Feng, ed., Fangzhipin

peony and plum of Yuan documents kaogu xinfaxian, p. 162.
blossoms on green and textiles hoarded
silk tabby. Lined in a cave.
with white silk tabby.
Sole stitched with
hemp threads into
lozenge pattern.

? Zhou and Gao, Zhongguo

lidai funü zhuangshi,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

p. 304.

? Yellow brocade Li was ﬁrst wife of Jiangxisheng wenwu

vamps Zhu Yiyun, Prince gongzuodui, “Jiangxi
Yixuan of Ming. Nancheng Ming Yixuan-
wang Zhu Yiyin fufu
hezang mu.”

? Yellow brocade Sun was second wife Zhou and Gao, Zhongguo
vamps of Zhu Yiyun, Prince lidai funü zhuangshi, pp.
Yixuan of Ming. 298, 306.
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FIGURE 17. The curled-toed socks and shoes of Huang Sheng (1227–43).
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

(Fujiansheng bowuguan, ed., Fuzhou Nan-Song Huang Sheng mu, plates 62–63,
p. 45.)

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1 3

FIGURE 18. Empress Xiaojing’s shoes. The drawing shows three pairs
of shoes found in her tomb: (1) cloud-tip ﬂat shoes, found in a box
of jade ornaments and shoes that belonged to Empress Xiaoduan
and Empress Xiaojing; (2) phoenix-head ﬂat shoes, one of four pairs
found in Xiaojing’s co‹n; (3) transitional phoenix-head high-heeled
shoes, found in a box of Xiaojing’s shoes and children’s clothes at
the southern side of her co‹n. Apparently shoes like (3) were made
by attaching cylindrical heels to shoes like (2). (Zhongguo she-
huikexueyuan kaogu yanjiusuo et al., eds., Dingling, 1: 122.)
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

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A
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

FIGURE 19. “If the shoes fit, you must acquit”: two court scenes from a popular
Shandong drama, Wang Dingbao Borrows to Pawn (Wang Dingbao jiedang).
Adapted from the northern ballad “The Embroidered Shoe” (“Xiuxieji”), the
drama depicts the poor student Wang Dingbao’s troubles with shoes. His cousin
and fiancée Spring Orchid lent him her wedding attire so that he could pawn
the items to pay his way to his exam in the capital. Ruan Li, who desired Spring
Orchid, accused him of stealing (A). His wise and brave fiancée defended him
in court, proving that she was the rightful owner of the shoes by slipping them
onto her feet in front of the judge (B). (From a set of three New Year prints by
artists in Yangjiapu, Weifang, Shandong; from the collection of Gao Jianzhong,
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A B

FIGURE 20. Patterns for children’s shoes in the eighteenth-century compendium by

Tanmian daoren, Precious Mirror of Feminine Virtues (Kunde baojian): (A) pattern from
Kunde baojian, 1777 edition, 8.38a (reprinted with permission from the Harvard-
Yenching Library); (B) pattern from Zhengshan kunde baojian, nineteenth-twentieth-
century edition 4.39a (from the collection of Don J. Cohn). As noted in the text, the
Zhengshan kunde baojian is a hand-done replica of the printed original. That the two
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

are almost indistinguishable attests to the copyist’s skill and the fact that he or she
had access to the original.

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B
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

FIGURE 21. Embroidery designs for booties in Precious Mirror of

Feminine Virtues. (A) Generic cloud motifs and ﬁrst half of cloud-
and-bat designs for the shaft of booties (Kunde baojian, 1777 edi-
tion, 9.49b–50a). (B) Second half of shaft booties and appliquéd
cloud designs for shoes (Kunde baojian, 1777 edition, 9.50b–51a;
see also Zhengshan kunde baojian, nineteenth-twentieth-century
edition, 5.42b–44a; (A) and (B) reprinted with permission from the
Harvard-Yenching Library).

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FIGURE 22. Fashion cycles of Tianjin footwear, 1894–1911: arched-sole styles (1894–1911)
are shown in A–F; a ﬂat-soled style (1897/8–1911) is shown in G (CFJHL: illustrations
between pp. 87 and 88). The original captions have been rearranged into outline form
with new headings and occasional comments by the present author.

(A) Arched sole, stage 1: 1894 (style A).

The “double footwear” style (fulu):
Outer shoe [taoxie], with wooden sole that retains the
classical arched shape to facilitate walking.
Soft-soled slipper [ruandi xie, not visible in this drawing],
sometimes worn between binding cloth and outer shoe all
day. If this slipper was not used, the wearer would remove
the outer shoe and change into soft-soled slippers [or
sleeping-shoes, shuixie] at night.
Legging [kutui’er] with stirrup strap and edged with
houndstooth stitching covers the outer shoe.
Leg-binder [tuidai] secures the legging at the ankle.
A long skirt covers all but the tip of the outer shoe. The
top of the foot is bulged; there is a crevice in the instep;
and the tip of the toe dips slightly downward.

(B) Arched sole, stage 1: 1894 (style B).

The layered “bootie” (xuezi) style:
Soft-soled slipper [or changing slipper, huanjiao xie] on top
of binding cloth.
Bootie-liner [xue dengzi] on top of soft-soled slipper,
usually made of blue [gangkao se] cotton. The slightly
ru›ed edge of the liner peeks out from the bootie.
Bootie on top of bootie liner. Bootie is made of three parts:
Waist-piece [xue yaozi, the shaft], decorated here with
chrysanthemum ﬂower and leaves;
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Curved-piece [xue wanzi], the lower part of the vamp

that meets the curved sole;
Moongate [ yueliangmen, the tongue], a small triangular
piece made of white cotton or silk.
Leg-binder secures the ankle.

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FIGURE 22 (CONTINUED)

(C) Arched sole, stage 1: 1894 (inside style B).

Two styles of bootie-liner:
1 (upper figure). Stirrup bootie-liner which resembles the stirrup
legging, made of printed cotton cloth [indigo with white
flowers here].
Changing-slipper inside bootie-liner is usually red, occasion-
ally purple.
Binding cloth [guojiao, zuchan] peeks from underneath
changing slipper.
Small drawing at upper left: The back of the changing-
slipper showing heel-tab.
2 (lower figure). Plain bootie-liner with cut-oª toe and heel,
made of blue [gangkao se] imported cotton fabric.

(D) Arched sole, stage 2: 1898.

The layered “bootie” style.
Changes from 1894:
The tip of the bootie is more curved.
Moongate tongue changed from long oval to pointy triangu-
lar shape.
Bootie decoration:
Tiny embroidered or painted ﬂowers on tip of curved-piece
vamp next to moongate tongue.
Waist-piece shaft either decorated with embroidered or
painted motifs or plain.
If waist-piece is plain, curved-piece would be either red or
purple.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

If waist-piece is decorated, curved-piece would be turquoise

blue.
Changing slipper exposed after bootie liner is shed:
Mostly red in color, occasionally green or purple.
Edged in black.
Shoelaces in red, shown crisscrossing on the arch of the foot
and around the ankle.
Heel lift at the back, usually white.
Worn on top of binding cloth [depicted as six horizontal strips]
to bed at night.

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Arched soles, stage 3: 1902.

(E)
The layered bootie style.
Changes from 1898:
The bulge becomes flatter.
The tip of the toe curves ever so slightly upward, but surface
is flat.
The leg-binder creeps up, reaching almost the knee.
Undecorated bootie in vogue; especially enticing are
same-colored waist and curved pieces.
Some waist-pieces double-trimmed on the upper edge.
The flatter bulge and toes reflect a more relaxed binding style in
response to the anti-footbinding edict issued by the Qing court, as
do the plainer footwear styles, but there is no relaxation on the
meticulous attention lavished on the fashion of layered footwear.
The changing slipper:
Some feature cascading thin strings at the toe area, some do not.
Simplified shoe laces.
Heel lift disappears.
Tiny sock—a new item—worn between changing slipper
and binding cloth.

(F)Arched soles, stage 4: 1908–11.

Simpliﬁed layers: The “inside-out” shoe style.
Changes from 1902:
Women middle-aged and older stick to booties; younger women
vie to wear shoes.
Outer shoes are shaped like the former “changing slippers” but
with wooden soles.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Older women stick to changing slippers; younger women skip it

and wear three layers: binding cloth, socks, shoes. At night the
younger woman takes oª the outer shoes and keeps the socks on
as sleeping slippers.
The new shoes (upper figure):
Plain or decorated with stitched or embroidered motifs at the tip.
Tip decorated with pom-pom made of silk floss.
Most fashionable look is pink pom-pom on lapis blue shoes.
The new socks (lower figure):
White cotton.
Sometimes decorated with stitched black motifs but often plain.
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FIGURE 22 (CONTINUED)

(G) Flat sole style, 1897/8–1911.

Shoes are worn over socks. Although the shoes are ﬂat-soled, the
feet are still tightly bound. The trend is to gradually let the feet
out; the three-inch golden lotus is no longer necessary.
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FROM ANCIENT TEXTS TO CURRENT CUSTOMS 139
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gested by Hu: “Since the Yuan and Ming periods, footbinding has been prac-
ticed in gentry and common families. It seems as though feet cannot be left
unbound, for it supplements the face in establishing a female’s beauty.” His
interest, however, lies not in locating the origins in history but in using the
past to condemn a living practice.
The present, in Qian’s mind, leaves much to be desired. In the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, footbinding had become a craze es-
pecially in the north. Qian confirmed Zhao Yi’s suggestion that footbind-
ing was a localized practice with significant regional variations. The smallest
feet were found in the northern provinces of Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong, and
Shaanxi. The mothers had become experts in miniaturization, encouraging
girls to begin walking at the nominal age of two to three. When the girls
reached four or five their feet would be “blocked by strips of cloth” (yi bu-
tiao lanzhu) so that they would cease to grow in length and size. By the age
of six or seven, the feet would be “segmented” (yicheng pianduan) and “di-
minished in size” without the usual binding process. It is di‹cult to ascer-
tain what he meant by “segmented,” or the diªerence between blocking and
binding. Qian’s point, however, that footbinding was so prevalent in the
north that northern women had developed special binding methods, is well
taken. In contrast, in the south footbinding was less pronounced. In such
provinces as Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan, Hubei, Yunnan, and Guizhou,
“not all daughters from elite families have bound feet.”
In the heart of Jiangnan, in the four prefectures of Suzhou, Songjiang,
Hangzhou, and Jiaxing famed for silk and cotton production, female feet
were the biggest. According to Qian, this is because mothers had too much
sympathy for their daughters’ pain and delayed binding until seven and eight.
“By then the feet are already grown, as the mothers knew full well. But with-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

out thinking too deeply, they bound their daughters’ feet even more tightly
so that they would become small. The daughters, screaming and crying from
pain, would be whipped. The neighbors could not bear to listen.”61 The
economic historian Li Bozhong has argued that from the seventeenth to the
ﬁrst half of the nineteenth centuries, cotton spinning and weaving were so
lucrative that daughters from the Jiangnan countryside could earn 70 to 80
percent of the daily wages of a male hired hand. A peasant woman made
about 3.6 shi of rice annually if she performed textile work for 130 days out
of the year, enough to feed herself. If she doubled her workload to 260 days,

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THE BODY CONCEALED 140
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she would bring a considerable cash income to the family. The importance
of female labor to the domestic bursary contributed to an improvement in
women’s status in family and society.62 In his anecdotal remark, Qian made
an implicit acknowledgement of this economic fact, but attributed the per-
sistence of footbinding in spite of the women’s economic contributions to
the mother’s mindless adherence to convention.
Even more important than what Qian said in his ethnographic account
is how he said it. Whereas Zhao Yi’s descriptions of exceptional areas ap-
pear in the form of a random list, Qian’s survey of the regions of the em-
pire is systematic and explicitly comparative. Although an awareness of
north-south diªerence in the styles of footbinding existed as early as the
seventeenth century, as we will see in the next chapter, Qian was the ﬁrst to
adopt an omniscient viewpoint to produce an ethnographic survey. Having
divided up the empire according to a geographical schema, he then com-
pared the units for the allegedly representative size of bound feet. The as-
sumption was that the author knows; he travels from one region to another
and has a means to measure and aggregate data in each region. The empire
(later nation) is thus envisioned as a sum of comparable parts. This way of
knowing would structure the anti-footbinding discourse in the age of nas-
cent nationalism.
Previous philological treatises were all negotiations of the distance between
antiquity and the present, and Qian’s was no exception. But his interest was
so strongly focused on the present that he opened with the assertion: “Foot-
binding of women is mentioned neither in the classics nor histories” of an-
tiquity, let alone the suggestion of its attractiveness. In contrast, “today, every-
body follows the custom, and every family binds its daughters’ feet. It seems
as though unless you have small feet, you cannot be a person, you cannot
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

be a female” (23.14a, 15b). Footbinding was essential to deﬁnitions of wom-

anhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as such the degen-
eracy and corruption of womanhood was complete. Qian ended his sum-
mary of theories about footbinding’s origins with a social sneer and a moral
indictment: shoes for bound feet were invented for palace dancing and as
such were “attire for mean people” ( jianzhe zhifu).63
Although stating the absence of footbinding in the classics is an old trope,
Qian’s emphasis is not the authority of the classics as repository of knowl-
edge but the possibility of political intervention. If footbinding is not sanc-
tioned by ancient texts, it can and should be stopped. He made his inten-
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tions clear in the end: “The reason I have gone to such lengths is because
this matter is crucial to the well-being of all under heaven. The search for
origins is not simply an academic exercise” (23.16a). In fact, Qian was the
ﬁrst philologist to suggest an action program: Have the local authorities
issue a prohibition compact. Have prominent families, as well as educated
and genteel households pledge their allegiance to the “Manchu way” of un-
fettered feet, which he pointed out was in accordance with antiquity. Pros-
titutes, actors, and illiterate families can all be spared. In ten years’ time, the
prevailing custom can be reversed (23.15b).
Qian’s program is interesting, for it happens to be exactly what the local
natural feet societies that sprang up in the last decade of the nineteenth cen-
tury tried to do. Furthermore, in suggesting that illiterate families can be
left alone, he showed an understanding of the cultural dynamics that pro-
pelled the spread of the practice: lagged emulation. If we can change the
elite cultural ideal, we can intervene in reforming the practice. This, too,
was the strategy of the missionary and nationalist reformers during the early
stage of their campaigns. Indeed, in rhetoric and action program Qian Yong
had anticipated the modern anti-footbinding movement.

THE UNFETTERED, LABORING FEMALE BODY

In denigrating footbinding, Qian articulated a new deﬁnition of woman-

hood that was at odds with prevalent popular standards. “In terms of fe-
male virtue, the most important is a calm and obliging disposition; second
is a sedate and digniﬁed appearance. The size of feet should be irrelevant.”
The way she walked is also important: “Regardless of the size of the feet, or
whether she uses a lift or not, the most valuable is a small ﬁrst step and slow,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

deliberate footsteps. . . . If she stumbles in walking, showing all kinds of

ugly postures, what good would smallness do?” (23.15a). A “lift” (gaoxie) is a
wooden block that ancient dancers wore on their soles for a tapping sound.
Women in Qian’s times supplanted it at the heel area inside the shoe to cre-
ate an illusion of smallness. Qian’s remark bespeaks the single-minded ﬁxa-
tion on footbinding in the nineteenth century. So prevalent was it that Qian
fully endorsed the aesthetics of dainty and deliberate steps that footbind-
ing was supposed to foster.
Qian’s ideal woman is one with a mature laboring body, an instrument
in the service of the dynasty or the state. “In antiquity there were the ideals
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of dingnan and dingnü,” referring to adult males and females ﬁt to be con-

scripted by the state. Footbinding is detrimental to the formation of these
ideal subjects, leading to the downfall of the state. Dingnü, the robust adult
woman, signals Qian’s insistence that female bodies are given to both pro-
ductive and reproductive labors (23.16a). The articulation of the uses of fe-
male bodies is one of the most interesting products of discourses of foot-
binding. The seventeenth-century writer Chu Jiaxuan has suggested that
an integral and symmetrical female body was perfect for the service of the
patriarchal family.64 Qian Yong, however, was the ﬁrst to author the mod-
ern discourse that the female body, once liberated, was to be an instrument
of the state.
To underscore the public import of female feet, Qian merged the origin
discourse with dynastic history, inventing a zigzag narrative that oscillates
around the pivotal ﬁgure of the femme fatale. The Southern Tang, which
practiced footbinding, was conquered by the Song, which did not practice
it. When the Song began to bind, it was conquered by the Yuan; when the
Yuan began to bind . . . and so on. Overcome by wishful thinking, Qian
contradicted his earlier remark of “every family binds its daughters’ feet” to
proclaim that the Qing dynasty, which prohibited footbinding, would surely
last unto ten thousand generations (23.16a).
The integrity of the female body and national fortune is conjoined be-
cause of the public import of maternity. “When women have bound feet,
their heavenly and earthly bodies are out of sync. The boys and girls they
give birth to are bound to be weak. When that happens, everything falls
apart”(23.16a). This is a shrewd prognosis. What Qian Yong had anticipated
is perhaps not the collapse of the Qing imperium per se, but the reasons at-
tributed to that downfall by anti-footbinding reformers. With this argument
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

for the importance of motherhood to the national pursuits of wealth and

power, the philological search for origins became virtually indistinguishable
from the tianzu discourse examined in chapter 1.

The search for origins is the most prevalent way by which scholars could write
about footbinding in a respectable manner. What has been called “philol-
ogy” in this chapter for the sake of convenience is a bit of a misnomer. It
is undeniable that Che Ruoshui, Yang Shen, Hu Yinglin, and Zhao Yi were
erudite and respected scholars, albeit Yang and Hu were marginal to o‹cial-
dom. It is also true that the methods they used largely follow those of main-
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stream philology: comprehensive investigation, skepticism, and the authority

of textual evidence. Yet the subject of footbinding, shrouded in taboos and
deficient in textual allusions, is incongruous with the philological approach
to truth and certainty.
Unlike such serious investigations as the authorship and dating of clas-
sical texts, footbinding remained a dubious subject in formal scholarly
disputations before the nineteenth century. Yang Shen let us into the mind-
set of his sixteenth-century contemporaries when he suggested that having
an o‹cial managing and making the Zhou queen’s shoes was “lewd.” Hu
Yinglin’s rebuttal of Yang confirmed that since the advent of footbinding,
female footwear had become charged with erotic connotations and direct
descriptions of feet were too provocative to enter respectable discourse.
So strong is this taboo against exposed feet that as late as the eighteenth
century, Zhao Yi described the contemporary view of taking oª one’s socks
as “defilement” bordering on “obscenity.” If it was di‹cult to write about
naked feet without sounding too lewd, it might also have been just as taboo
to look at them in the bedchambers. Surely, it would be an exaggeration to
say that no man had ever laid his eyes on them. In all likelihood, the stronger
the taboo, the more insistent voyeurs would become in unwrapping the
binding cloths of wives, concubines, or prostitutes.65 But it is important to
note that the search for footbinding’s origins was conducted with averted
eyes as well as on the margins of decency and scholarship. It is an attempt
to find explanations in defiance of not only the unknowable but also the
unspeakable.
In naming the unspeakable, the philologists established the parameters
and definitions of footbinding. In the process of searching for its origins, they
wrote a coherent subject into existence. We have already seen how the arched
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

or bowed shape (gong ) emerged as the deﬁning trait of footbinding in such

a process. The variety of other names used to describe footbinding alludes to
either the desired shape (slender [xian] and small [xiao, xi] ) or the swaddling
(chan, za, guo) required. A bound foot is known by its exterior shape, size,
or the packaging; none of the names provide any clue to the ﬂesh underneath.
These names in themselves served as instruments of concealment.
Without exceeding the bounds of decency, the origin discourse focused
the reader’s gaze on female body parts. The citation of a cluster of lyrics from
the fragrant toilette tradition in notation books and their status as admissi-
ble evidence gave these provocative poems a degree of respectability. These
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lyrics, like the vernacular plays and other prose writings discussed in the next
chapter, played no small part in perpetuating the erotic appeal of footbind-
ing through the centuries. Although almost all of the philologists who wrote
about footbinding found it deplorable or inexplicable, in recycling these ma-
terials they inadvertently perpetuated the cultural aura of the practice.
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THE EROTICS OF PLACE

Male Desires and the

Imaginary Geography of the Northwest

In stark contrast with philologists who perpetuated the mystique of foot-

binding with downcast eyes, less academically inclined male writers from
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were unabashed in their fascina-
tion with the subject. In travelogues, notation books, vernacular plays, and
songs, they depicted the bound foot as an alien object that is alluring but
dangerous. We will see in this chapter that the visceral appeal of this image
was part and parcel of an exotic landscape called the Northwest. More than
a geographical location, the Northwest was a cultural imaginary in which
indecent male desires could ﬁnd concrete and socially acceptable expressions.
By tracing ﬁve recurrent tropes—female competition; the bureaucrat’s
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

journey to the Northwest; the courtesan (and her maids) from Datong; north-
south diªerences; and the fashionable female pilgrim—this chapter maps
the cultural and social unevenness that structured both the prevalent image
of footbinding and male desires for it. We begin with writings adopting a
distinctly masculine point of view and shift to those incorporating female
points of view toward the end of the chapter. The former presupposes the
male privilege to size up, grope, judge, and rank women whereas the latter
showcases women’s interior sense of body-self and the usefulness of footwear
fashion to their self-presentations to the world.

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FEET CONTESTS IN THE WILD WEST

In the last decades of the Qing dynasty, when the aura of footbinding be-
gan to dim in the coastal cities, the northwestern city of Datong in Shanxi
retained its centuries-old reputation as the mecca of footbinding. Datong
boasted its own style of lotus shoes, whose arched wooden soles seem more
curvaceous and embroidered motifs more risqué than other regional styles.
The plunging topline of the vamp, an exercise in visual drama, directed the
viewer’s gaze to the tip of the wearer’s toes.1 Even more spectacular were
Datong’s “Feet Contests” (saijiao hui) held every spring and autumn, the
seasons of temple fairs. The writer Li Hong, who published martial arts novels
under the pen name Huanzhu louzhu (Master of the Returned Pearl Pavil-
ion), recounted:

In the past, footbinding was a popular folk practice in northern Shanxi. Every
eighth month, feet-airing festivals were held in areas around Datong. Long
wooden benches, aligned like staircases of a grandstand, were placed in fair
grounds or open squares. Hundreds upon thousands of women sat there, show-
ing the twin hooks under their skirts. Any passer-by could savor the sight and
make comments. Ladies from respectable families [liang jia guixiu] mingled
with others; their slippers were sometimes festooned with pearls and made of
embroidered fine silk. These shoes were so delicate that they did not even fill
one’s palm, and the workmanship was exquisite. Profligate men took advan-
tage of the situation, and debaucheries recurred during those days.2

As with the origins of footbinding, the beginning of these aªairs was shod
in mystery. A mid-nineteenth-century encyclopedia recorded that in Zhang-
jiakou, a border town just south of the Great Wall, respectable women with
tiny feet were allowed to show oª during a “Tiny-Feet Festa” (xiaozu hui)
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

around the third and fourth months. Likewise in nearby Xuanhua and Yong-
ping, Zhili (present day Hebei province), during the ten days before and
after the Qingming festival, women from opulent and deprived households
alike decked themselves out in their ﬁnest and sat by their front gates, proudly
displaying (“airing”) their feet. Qingming, ten days after the spring equi-
nox, brought families outdoors for tomb-sweeping and picnics. As if em-
boldened by the advent of spring, passers-by could judge, rank, and even
touch the feet without reproach from the women’s fathers and husbands.3
In the 1930s, a Japanese ethnographer, Nagao Ryuzo (b. 1883), mentioned
similar gatherings in Xuanhua, Yongping, and Ruzhou, in Henan province.
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0 100 200 km

(SUIYUAN) Zhangjiakou
Xuanhua Lulong
Baotou (Yongping)
Yello
N w River Beijing
Datong (Beiping)

BOHAI
GULF
HEB E I

S
MOUNTAIN
SHANXI (ZHI LI )
Shouyang
Pingding r
Yuci ve

ANG
Pingyao

Ri
low
Jiexiu IH
TA

Yel
iver

Huo Xian (Huozhou)

Hongdong
Fen

SHAANXI Houma
Red Rock Village Wenxi

Puzhou

Xi’an
Map Area

Wang Jingqi’s westward journey, 1724

Jingshui Railroad (Beijing–Suiyuan), built 1909–22;
renamed Pingshui Railroad, 1927
Reported sites of feet exhibitions in 1880s–1930s

The Northwest: Reported sites of feet exhibitions,

the Pingsui Railroad, and Wang Jingqi’s westward journey.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Nagao, a former employee of the Southern Manchurian Railway, compiled

his monumental record of customs in China by interviewing sojourners in
Fengtian, the capital of Manchukuo, and Beijing. It is unclear if the infor-
mation about the feet contests was veriﬁed.4 Local sons educated enough
to be enlisted in the editorial committees of gazetteers, however, seemed re-
luctant to allow their native place to be associated with such an unseemly
custom. Hence gazetteer “reports” of feet contests were often couched in
terms of a denial of rumors perpetuated by a misinformed outsider.5
Feet contests allegedly took various forms and were sighted in regions far
removed from the Northwest. According to an 1887 pictorial, in Tonghai
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THE BODY CONCEALED 148
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county of the southwestern province of Yunnan, women from local villages

and afar gathered by a pond in front of a temple every Third Month for a
“Feet-Washing Festival” (xijiao dahui). Believing that this act of devotion
would bring them good luck in their afterlife, the captions suggested, the
women carried on “in front of hordes of spectators without a bit of em-
barrassment or shame.” Instead of a competition, the viewer was treated to
a rare display of the forbidden flesh in the name of piety (see fig. 13). The
words for “bare feet” (xianzu) and “washing feet” (xizu) resemble each other
in shape and sound.6
Indeed, semantic slippage is the common denominator uniting disparate
accounts of feet contests or displays. First sai (to compete) mutated to sai
(to air under the sun; sometimes a synonym liang was used). Then jiao (feet)
traded places with jia (armor). One often-cited legend traced the origins of
feet festivals to an armistice between the Khitan-Liao and Song armies in
1004. Having laid down their arms, the soldiers aired out their armor be-
fore putting it away. Somehow people in posterity got confused and took
to airing women’s feet in the open.7 It seems as though playing with words
lifted taboos surrounding women’s bodies, creating a carnivalesque atmos-
phere on the page. In precious few other spaces could women be imagined
as exhibitionists, vying to attract the male gaze in public. Indeed, if feet con-
tests are signified by a willful self-display of female bodies, writers in the
1930s observed, women in areas throughout China could be said to enjoy
occasions that are “feet contests in reality albeit not in name.”8 Did women
from Datong or Tonghai really deck out to air or wash their feet in public?
There is no conclusive evidence. Feet contests belong to the realm of urban
myths which everybody talks about as if they were present but no one seems
to have actually seen.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

MYTHS OF ORIGINS

The connoisseur Yao Lingxi was skeptical about the reliability of reports
of feet contests if not the events themselves. He traced the glut of accounts
to a serial discussion in a Shanghai tabloid, Fengren, in the 1920s instigated
by its editor, Gong Dafeng, and a writer named Hengsan, both Yao’s
friends. The passages reprinted by Yao were replete with ethnographic de-
tails: the favorite grounds for the contest in Datong was the temple of
Guandi, the God of War; women who used high arched heels to create an
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illusion of smallness shied away for fear of mockery; in nearby Weizhou

(Zhili) women stood on stones carved for the occasion that were as tall as
the spectators’ shoulders, and so on. Empiricism aside, in Fengren feet con-
tests figured first and foremost as instruments of conversion: one o‹cial
had loathed small feet so much that he founded an anti-footbinding soci-
ety in his teens. Later, when stationed in Datong he chanced upon a feet
contest. So enamored was he that he took one such beauty as his concu-
bine. Yao was dismissive of the authenticity of such stories, saying that
Hengsan had never been to Datong and Gong, who had traveled there,
reported only hearsay.9
Yao preferred a diªerent kind of mythmaking, concocting a three-staged
history of female self-display that is suªused with nostalgia. The golden age
of feet contests was the Ming dynasty, also the golden age of footbinding
according to Yao. When small feet constituted a sign of status and prestige,
women loved showing oª their feet. Yao located the agency only in the
women: “Feet contests in those days were no diªerent from beauty pageants
in Europe and America today: women took the opportunity to eye each
other and learn new tricks; young girls took the opportunity to goad each
other; men took the opportunity to feast their eyes.”10
During the golden age, feet contests were part of a naturalized land-
scape where human actions and desires were punctuated by seasonal
rhythms. “The climate in the northern borders lagged behind that of the
heartland. The shriveling chill lingered as late as the third month, as the
wind wiped up dust against one’s face.” Busy in anticipation, women em-
broidered slippers behind closed doors and away from each other’s prying
eyes. Finally, when spring arrived in full force in the middle of the fifth
month, sisters and neighbors brought out their stowed-away slippers and
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

rode donkey carts to the countryside, resting their feet on carpets red as
gibbon blood and feasting from picnic baskets. It was prime mating sea-
son: profligate men fluttered about like butterflies; the women sometimes
took out mirrors and flirted with their suitors not by direct gaze but by
way of their reflections.11
This primordial scene of sexual license suªered a decline when the moral
authorities cracked down. In the second or degenerate stage of Yao’s his-
tory, women were domesticated and took to sitting outside their homes on
the day of the contest. The shy ones hid their faces behind curtains, ex-
posing only their feet by resting them on benches. No longer could they
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THE BODY CONCEALED 150
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mingle freely with men. Yet the standards of the contests were still high:
even those who boasted of three-inch feet enjoyed no guarantee of being
selected Optimus. A final stage set in after the establishment of the first Re-
public in 1912—and the growth of railroad networks. Although Yao did not
mention it, the completion of a railroad from Beijing westward to Zhang-
jiakou (1909) and Datong, later extended to Baotou in Suiyuan province
(1922), opened the northwest interior to the speedy, modern ways of the
coastal metropolis.12 Feet contests fell out of favor and disappeared entirely
upon the success of the Northern Expedition, which reunified China and
established a second Republic in 1927.13
In other words, according to Yao Lingxi, by the time the bulk of “ethno-
graphic reports” of feet contests appeared, the custom had already fallen
prey to the march of progress. His own “history,” with its fanciful details
about blood-red carpets and flirtatious mirror images, is almost certainly
a fabrication. Its chronology fits too neatly into his pathos of nostalgia—
footbinding as the haunting of modernity—discussed in chapter 3, and the
details are too fictitious to warrant verification. Yet can we dismiss altogether
the numerous accounts in notation books since the nineteenth century or
the weight of persistent disavowals in local gazetteers? Surely these tanta-
lizing stories, kept alive for over a century, had the power to inspire imita-
tive behavior in life.
Suspended between doubt and certainty, feet contests in modern China
are less an ethnographic event or tourist attraction than an invitation to won-
der.14 Whether they were true or not is less important than the kind of vi-
carious pleasures they aªorded readers in the 1920s and 1930s. The interior—
only beginning to be penetrated by speedy travel or the ideology of foot
liberation—remained in the reader’s imagination an elemental place rife with
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

sexual energy, far removed in time from the treaty ports where they resided.
However untrustworthy, reports of feet contests convey a diªerent veracity
in their tone of ethnographic realism, one that anchors the alleged female
desires to self-display and male desires to gawk and narrate in a distinct
northwestern landscape.
The rest of this chapter probes the prehistory of feet contests by focus-
ing on the erotics of the Northwest as a place in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries: how geography structured male desires of and fantasies
about the female body in three disparate texts: a manual of taste, a journal,
and a collection of vernacular plays.15 What twentieth-century observers
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have subsumed under “feet contest” is an amorphous and centuries-old cul-

tural phenomenon wrought of four elements: male eyesight; male privilege
to travel, judge, and narrate; competition among women; and female self-
presentation. This chapter traces how they constituted the cultural imagi-
nary of Shanxi—and Datong especially—as the embodiment of both the
sublime and the mundane aspects of footbinding.
My thesis is that men’s experience of footbinding was by definition an
encounter with a body not their own. Mediated by sensory perceptions, the
pleasure was always ephemeral and elusive. Therein lies the impulse to a‹x
it to the concrete coordinates of a place and to submit it to writing. In con-
trast, to a woman the binding of feet was first and foremost a corporeal aªair
directed to oneself. Toward the end of this chapter and in the next we will
see that although no less sensual, this experience was mediated not by the
geography of place but by the materiality of the things that women made,
wore, exchanged, and consumed.
Since as early as the seventeenth century, travelogues by scholar-o‹cials,
novels, and popular songs have told of a bureaucratic journey to the North-
west that led an unsuspecting traveler to an amorous encounter with beau-
ties with tiny feet. In these stories the temporary suspension of inhibition
as well as the inversion of gender and sexual norms dramatized by feet con-
tests are integral to the wonder of the Northwest. Also prevalent is the
juxtaposition of the civil and the military, the former symbolized by the em-
broidered slippers and the latter, by various martial elements associated
with feet contests as we have seen: the airing of armor, martial arts novels,
and the temple grounds of Guandi the God of War, to name a few. In much
the same way, the unabashed behavior of tiny-footed village women was
both alluring and dangerous—lurking behind the refinement of their craft
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

was a threat of violence and death. As will be seen in the stories that follow,
domesticity and concealment turned inside out unleashed a desire that, like
the women, could not be easily contained.

THE COURTESAN OF DATONG

Perhaps it is no accident that Datong ﬁgured as the birthplace of feet con-

tests in many modern accounts. In popular imagination, the city had been
the home of northern beauties since the Ming emperor Wuzong (reign name
Zhengde, r. 1506–21) raided virgins for his harem from Datong and Xuan-
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THE BODY CONCEALED 152

hua.16 Legends embellished through time play an important role in the iden-
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tity and image of the city. More importantly, the allure of a place—any
place—solidifies only upon comparisons with other, less memorable places.
Hence in stories about Datong courtesans, the narrator-arbiter had to be a
seasoned traveler with a bird’s-eye view: a masculine subject position. The
narrator typically appears as a traveler along a route of towns stretched out
on a synchronic landscape, much like the “profligate men” going from door
to door during a feet contest. If modern reports of feet contests operate on
an exaggeration of female agency in self-display—at the same time that the
women were being pinned to a place—in earlier adventure stories the power
and mobility of the male scholar appear in full force. From this perspective,
feet exhibitions are less contests of female skills than of male knowledge and
tastes.
The seventeenth-century maverick writer Li Yu (ca. 1610–80), no stranger
to the itinerant lifestyle, revealed the terms of male contests in clear relief
in an essay “Hands and Feet” (“Shouzu”): “Having traversed all four corners
of the empire, I have come to see that in terms of having the smallest feet
that are not burdensome [lei], and having the smallest feet that are still func-
tional [yong ], it is hard to top Lanzhou in Shaanxi, and Datong in Shanxi.”
Li’s comparative knowledge was presented with the immediacy of personal
experience: “The feet of Lanzhou women measure at most three inches, some
even smaller. Their steps are agile and quick—like flying—sometimes out-
pacing even the men. Yet when you remove their socks and fondle the feet,
you tend to feel the hard and soft parts in equal proportions. By chance you
may discover feet so soft that it feels as though they are entirely boneless,
but they are rare in Lanzhou. In Datong, however, the majority of courte-
sans are like that. Lying in bed with them, it is hard to stop fondling their
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

golden lotus. No other pleasures of dallying with courtesans can surpass this
experience.”17
Li Yu’s comments appeared in his Casual Expressions of Idle Feeling (Xian-
qing ouji), a collection of three hundred short essays presented in eight sec-
tions: writing plays, staging plays, feminine beauty (literally, “voices and
faces”), houses, furniture, food and drink, ﬂowers and trees, health and plea-
sure. Li’s no-nonsense advice on a breathtaking array of subjects has led many
to consider the book, ﬁrst published in 1671, a manual of taste or a guide
to everyday sensuality for the status-conscious reader in the urban culture
of the time. The average reader would have found more useful knowledge
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THE EROTICS OF PLACE 153
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from the later sections than the first three. Comments on courtesans’ feet
served a diªerent purpose: advertising the author’s authority as a connois-
seur of women in part to secure future employment.18 Specifically, they were
part of the section on “Feminine Beauty,” which follows “Writing Plays”
and “Staging Plays,” areas in which Li enjoyed a justified reputation as both
a practitioner and a theoretician.19 Together they comprise a guide to se-
lecting and training household entertainers and, by extension, concubines.
These standards of artistic and corporeal accomplishments were not intended
for wives.
Li mentioned that a wealthy patron engaged his service to “procure [lit-
erally, size up] concubines” (dai yi guiren xiangqie) in Yangzhou.20 No doubt
he had potential patrons in mind when he boasted of his expertise in such
matters: “When in the capital I told many people about [the secret of Da-
tong courtesans], but they were incredulous. One evening two courtesans
showed up at a banquet, one a native of Shanxi and one, Hebei. Neither
had much face to speak of, but both had extremely small feet. I challenged
the unbelievers to test the feet for themselves, and as expected, Shanxi beat
Hebei handily. Stiªness and softness made a world of diªerence.” Li’s own
newly acquired actress-concubines, Miss Qiao and Miss Wang, whom he
proceeded to educate using the methods he outlined, may have served as
models for the sections on acting and feminine (read concubine) beauty.21
Modern readers are likely to be incensed by Li Yu’s objectification of
teenage girls as well as the system of concubinage he both practiced and ex-
ploited for employment. I intend to neither defend nor condemn. Instead
of an emotional and moralistic response to the text, I prefer to oªer an ana-
lytic one by focusing on its singularity. The two essays “Hands and Feet” and
“Shoes and Stockings” constitute the only unabashed statement of appre-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ciation of bound feet in prose-essay from the seventeenth century. All other
essays on footbinding take the form of either a morally neutral origin dis-
course or condemnation, as we have seen in the last chapter.22 Li Yu’s unique
and inﬂuential voice as an essayist—Patrick Hanan has called him “the best-
selling Chinese author of his time”—thus deserves a hearing.23 His obses-
sion with stylistic invention as a writer might have emboldened him to break
a generic taboo; his devotion to taste as an expression of the self may in turn
account for the unapologetic tone of his connoisseurship. The attitudes and
standards of appreciation of bound feet he revealed, however, had resonance
among urban readers of his time.
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SEDUCTION OF THE EYES:

LI YU’S AESTHETIC OF FUNCTION

At the heart of Li’s connoisseurship of feet is what I would term an “aes-

thetic of function,” which gives pride of place to agility of movement, not
size. Feet bound so small that they crippled are a “burden” (lei), whereas
properly bound feet, although small, serve their “usefulness” or “function”
(yong ) in altering the gait and enhancing the grace of the woman. His pref-
erences are dictated in part by the requirements of performance in singing,
dancing, and acting, and in part by his love of naturalness. Hence he par-
odied a “Miss Carry,” whose feet were so tiny that she had to be carried
around, as a “clay ﬁgurine” that would cost no more than a few coppers
from the street vendors, not the thousand pieces of gold that her patron had
allegedly paid. “The Creator gives us a pair of feet so that we can walk. When
ancient poets waxed lyrical on beautiful women . . . they emphasized that
a woman has to be able to walk on her bound feet, so much so that it feels
as though she would walk right into a painting.” Miss Carry bespoke a ﬁxa-
tion on size that had gone terribly wrong. In a competitive environment,
the pursuit of extreme beauty had grown so excessive that it became not
only unnatural but outright anti-human. The aesthetics of function was an-
tidote to a fetish of measurements in vogue in the seventeenth century.
Incredibly, Li Yu has stood our modern sensibility on its head: In his times
the binding of feet for both respectable wives and concubines was such a
conventional practice that to bind was “natural,” and not to bind was un-
natural for these classes of women.24 Furthermore, among women who did
bind, the diªerence between “natural” and “unnatural” hinged on a subtle
gradation of options, a spectrum that the connoisseur has to navigate with
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

faculties of eyesight, smell, and touch, as well as discernment. Li’s advice to

the potential client: “The best way to ‘test’ a woman’s feet is none other than
asking her to walk about back and forth. Observe if her motion is agile or
stiª, natural or forced, and you get a very good idea. A pair of feet that is
bound straight is agile, if crooked it would be di‹cult to move about. If
properly balanced [zheng ], the pair of feet is natural, if lopsided [wai] it is
contrived. Feet that are straight and well-balanced in shape are not only beau-
tiful and conducive to walking, they are also far less likely to be foul. Pu-
trid smell stems from a contrived artiﬁciality.”25
Li Yu was brutally honest. For all his emphasis on female agility, he did
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not cover up the fact that the women were pinned down, lined up, and sized
up as objects of desire that can be bought and sold. It is thus all the more
intriguing that his deﬁnition of “natural beauty” requires the woman—
having been rendered an object and commodity—to gaze back. In a pre-
ceding essay on “Eyebrows and Eyes,” Li made a subtle revelation that al-
tered the terms of the connoisseurship of “sizing up” (xiang ) when he
discussed how much of a woman’s heart, intelligence, and fortitude—her
interiority—was revealed in the shape of her eyes, the proportion of black
and white, and the way she moved her eyeballs. Movement of the eyes, in
turn, was integral to her gait. Instead of fetishized body parts, Li Yu pre-
ferred a full body in movement; his erotics of place is wrought of a simul-
taneity that situated the woman’s body and his sensory faculties in the same
space and in real time. Therein lies the singularity of his connoisseurship
in the context of his time.
This simultaneity required careful choreography on the part of the man.
To catch her natural eye movements, suggested Li, the connoisseur has to
reverse the social hierarchies of active/passive and high/low; physically trad-
ing places with the woman: “Stay passive and wait for her to move; lie low
so that you can watch her from below. When the body turns, the eyes would
naturally follow. No one can sway her body while the eyes remain ﬁxed. Let
her walk back and forth in a succession of half-steps, while you look at her
by going around her eyes. Without her moving her eyes deliberately, you
would see them move. This is one way. Furthermore, a woman is shy and
tends to cast her eyes downward. If I stand taller than she is, and she looks
down, there is no chance that I would see her eyes. So I put her in an ele-
vated place, either on a set of stairs or in front of a pavilion, and watch her
as her body descends. Since she cannot go any lower, she would have to
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

swirl her eyes to avoid my gaze. . . . The diªerence between class and vul-
garity, or beauty and the lack thereof, lies in how naturally her eyes move.”26
Agility and naturalness of a woman’s bodily movement, knowable from the
same in her eyes, deﬁned “class.”
The nature of the encounter remained economic, if one wants to be crass
about it, but the terms of the game have changed. Li Yu has let us into a
sophisticated dance of seduction in which a shy beauty “gazes back” by try-
ing to avoid the gaze. No longer were the women lined up like dolls await-
ing selection, like contestants of feet exhibitions on benches or grand-
stands. Compare Li’s passage with modern accounts of feet contests or other
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seventeenth-century essays on the meat market-like scene of procuring girls,

and the diªerence that Li’s aesthetics of function makes is obvious.27 The
modern distinctions we make between “object” and “subject” seem too di-
chotomous and mechanistic to capture the dynamic relationship between
these women and their viewer. From within her object status the woman
exercised a form of subjectivity; to be an “object” properly she was to have
interiority and agility, as well as the ability to gaze and to return a gaze nat-
urally (while pretending to be too shy to do so).
Having discoursed on “naturalness” as a choreographed dance between the
viewer and the viewed, Li Yu proceeded to oªer tips on playing with the
artiﬁce of fashion that would further the pleasure of the eyes. This is done
not by manipulating the body—tightening the binding cloth—but by ma-
nipulating the viewer’s gaze. Hence “the fashionable colors for socks are white
and pink; for slippers a darker red. Now midnight blue [qing ] is also in vogue.”
Most notable is shoe design: “High-heeled slippers can make small feet look
even smaller, slender feet look even more slender.” Yet big-footed women des-
perate to win feet contests often sought to deceive, and true winners took to
wearing only ﬂats. Li recommended, “No need to give up on high heels al-
together, just do not go to extremes. Women with slightly large feet should
wear thick instead of thin soles; if too thin the shape of the foot would be
exposed.” Decoration is also important; most clever was the recent fashion
of festooning the tip of the slipper with a pearl no larger than a grain.28 These
remarks highlight the extent to which footbinding was implicated in the com-
petitive and anxiety-ridden regime of fashion in the seventeenth century.
The message from all of Li’s practical advice is clear: With ample money,
enough leisure, and a little help from Li Yu, any master can learn to enjoy a
concubine as alluring as the legendary courtesans of Datong. By way of an
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

aesthetic of function, the erotics of Datong as a place was unhinged from its
geographical moorings and became portable. Embodied in a well-groomed
concubine who seemed to have walked out of a painting, the joys of Datong—
unsurpassed in the empire—found their way into every patriarch’s house.

WANG JINGQI’S WESTWARD JOURNEY

The trope of an amorous bureaucratic journey found an unlikely hero in

Wang Jingqi (1672–1726), a ﬁfty-two-year-old private advisor seeking em-
ployment from the powerful Nian Gengyao (d. 1726), general of the West-
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ern Armies. In the second month of 1724, Wang set out on a westward jour-
ney from Zhili (modern Hebei) that would take him past the Taihang Moun-
tains, through a string of towns and villages along the Fen River in Shanxi
and across the Yellow River into Shaanxi, before arriving at the ancient cap-
ital of Xi’an, Nian’s headquarters (see map, p. 147).29
Wang Jingqi went down in history as the unlucky man who incurred the
Yongzheng emperor’s wrath in the first of four literary cases during the em-
peror’s short reign. The prime target was General Nian, once Yongzheng’s
favorite, whose arrogance and power became too threatening.30 On the eve
of his arrest, Nian had supposedly burned his papers, but carelessly left Wang’s
missives, bound into two thin books, in a pile of loose papers. Incensed by
Wang’s disrespectful remarks about his father, the Kangxi emperor, Yongzheng
scribbled on the cover of the first book, “Seditious and wild to the utmost!
To my extreme regret I did not see this earlier. Save it for another day. A man
of his ilk will not be allowed to slip through my fingers.” Thus Wang and
his son were executed in 1726, and his wife exiled to be a slave; his brothers,
nephews, and relatives within the five mourning grades all received their due.
A full two centuries later, after the last emperor, Puyi, vacated the palace in
November 1924, inventory takers from the Palace Museum found Wang’s first
book and a small portion of the second in a locked box in Maoqin Hall in
the palace.31 Twice forgotten, the text has thus miraculously survived.
To modern eyes, Wang’s missives, published as Jottings on My Westward
Journey (Dushutang xizheng suibi) in 1928, are less about sedition than se-
duction. Wang, who won a provincial-juren degree in 1714, seemed more
adventurer than scholar in temperament and taste. His extant assortment
of about thirty-five entries, mostly scripted on the road and bearing dates
ranging from the sixth of the second month to the twenty-eighth of the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ﬁfth month, 1724, includes a few letters, prefaces, and poems—requisite pub-
lic genres for the bureaucrat. More unusual are anecdotes about high
o‹cials, prostitutes, women bandits, and soldiers, dotted with lewd and scat-
ological humor. There is, for example, the story of a Yangzhou male pros-
titute, Wang Sizhong, who rose to become Assistant Prefect (tongpan), cour-
tesy of a bribe on his behalf by his lover. Or Vice Minister Zhang Pengge,
whom Kangxi had likened to an actor. Among Zhang’s riotous deeds, be-
sides putting makeup on his face: one day he returned home from his morn-
ing audience at court; still in his ceremonial attire, he headed straight to a
serving woman and pushed her onto her bed, stripped her naked, placed
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her feet on his shoulders, and proceeded to penetrate her when his wife
showed up with a whip. Adding insult to injury, the serving woman’s feet
were each “over one foot long.”32
Often these stories bear the mark of those swapped with boisterous friends
over a jug of wine at dinner. Wang Jingqi delighted in exposing the unseemly
underbelly of bureaucratic life, especially among holders of the metropolitan-
jinshi degree (Presented Scholars) in high o‹ce: not only the corruption but
also the unspoken hankerings and corporeal desires that no amount of sym-
bolism or toggles on the ceremonial court robe can tame. He oªered these
stories to Nian probably without a second thought, assuming that the gen-
eral would ﬁnd both truth and comic relief in them.33 He also probably
thought that no one outside Nian’s close circle would set eyes on them. It
is in this spirit of men’s locker-room humor, camaraderie, and competition
that we should read the stories of Wang’s encounter with the Datong cour-
tesan Lightning Steps (Buguang) and the three mysterious ladies from Red
Rock Village.
Lightning Steps came to him as a surprise, the recommendation of an
innkeeper at Houma, a town that Wang did not name as one of the ten fa-
mous gathering places for prostitutes in Shanxi.34 Wang admitted that “by
nature I loved whoring” until an illness in 1721 forced him to restrain him-
self. But while on the road, he gave in to the lure of the unknown. At once
fragile and virile, Lightning Steps announced herself as a contradiction.
Taken aback by her haughty air, Wang went on a verbal oªensive: “Since
you are already lost in the world of wind and dust, shouldn’t you lighten
up? You have to hang out with vulgar people all the time, so why make it
di‹cult on yourself ?” She thought for a moment, then threw back her head
and laughed, “You seem to know who I am.” Glancing at Wang’s bow rest-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ing on the wall, she turned the table on him. “Why would a gentleman carry
this around?” He said, “I heard that you are a skilled archer. May I have the
pleasure?” She stepped into the backyard, planted a rod on the ground,
stepped back scores of steps, and hit the target three times. The verbal and
physical dueling set the tone for the night. Lightning Steps sang a bitter
song she composed, accompanied by the pipa-lute, and told Wang about
her betrayal by a jinshi-degree holder from Jiangnan (the Yangzi delta re-
gion; literally, south of the river). She sang another song, and they were both
in tears. Wang Jingqi and Lightning Steps lit a lamp, sat up and chatted
until dawn, then bid their tender farewell.35
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The journey that took Wang to this encounter with the Datong courte-
san was similar to those of Li Yu some fifty years earlier: a bureaucratic jour-
ney through a synchronic string of towns for livelihood and adventure. Light-
ning Steps made her entrance in a way that we have come to expect from
Li’s connoisseurship: with agility, etched in her name and dramatized by
her archery demonstration. Also familiar is the contrast between her civi-
lized and martial personas, an aesthetic we have identified in the feet con-
test reports. But Wang’s bantering, not to mention all the tears, bespeaks a
seduction of a verbal and sentimental nature, in contrast to Li Yu’s flirta-
tious gazes and groping for bonelessness. Lightning Steps is dramatically
diªerent from the Datong courtesan we have met in one crucial aspect: Wang
did not once mention her feet. Wang was no prude and had in fact an ex-
cessive interest in women’s feet, as we will see. But for him the Datong cour-
tesan stood for another erotics of place, not as the embodiment of sublime
pleasures but as the perpetual victimized other of Jiangnan.
Being a southerner himself ( Wang was a native of Hangzhou), Wang
Jingqi was attuned to the northern diªerence embodied by Lightning Steps
from the start. He couched his first impression of her in terms of a local
mountain, Gushe, which appeared in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi as the
dwelling place of a deity whose skin is bright and translucent as ice and whose
countenance is fair as a maiden’s.36 Surely, “the deity of Gushe Mountain”
was a standard allusion for a beauty, and Wang’s use might have meant noth-
ing more than literary showmanship. But it was the first of a string of signs
that betrayed Wang’s sensitivity to north-south diªerences in geography, cul-
ture, and distribution of power.
The courtesan was equally sensitive to the unevenness of place. Most strik-
ing were the three songs that Lightning Steps wrote and sang, which Wang
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

recorded verbatim. Set to the tune of “Taotao ling” in the tradition of

“Zhenggong diao,” they are full of reiterative locution (dingdingdongdong )
and auxiliary words (er, wu), creating a crisp diction that sounds harsh to
southern ears. Lightning Steps, twenty years old, sounded apologetic about
her northern upbringing. Daughter of a military o‹cer who died while sta-
tioned in southern Yunnan, she returned home at age nine to Datong with
her birth mother, a concubine, and the ﬁrst wife. When her birth mother,
too, passed away, Lightning Steps was sold to a brothel. “What I have just
sung for you is a vulgar sound of the north, please do not laugh.”37
It was in her betrayal by the Presented Scholar that the Datong-Jiangnan
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diªerence assumed the unequal exchange of local-metropolis. The scholar,

who remained unnamed, traveled north to await an appointment. He made
a detour to Datong, hoping to call on a friend who was serving there but
was rejected. Lightning Steps, then sixteen, fell in love with him although
he was destitute. Over the curses of her foster mother at the brothel, she let
him move in with her and pledged herself to him. After one year, he had
to make his way to the capital, and she ﬁnanced the trip with all that she
had saved up. Two years later, when he still had not sent for her, she tracked
him down, a newly appointed magistrate in Henan. He had these words to
say: “As an o‹cial, of course I cherish my name and integrity. Why would
a lofty magistrate take a whore as concubine?”38
Wang Jingqi was so moved by Lightning Steps’s spiteful song that he shed
tears, lamenting that, “I, too, am at the end of the line.” His sympathy is
indicative of his own marginal existence in the male o‹cial world: although
a southerner, he toiled on horseback in the north. Although his father served
as Vice Minister in the Ministry of Revenue and his elder brother was a Pre-
sented Scholar, Jingqi’s juren degree was too meager to land him a formal
bureaucratic post.39 In Westward Journey he reiterated resentment against
Presented Scholars: “Alas, this xx-scholar was down and out when Light-
ning Steps gave him money; she earned every cent of it on her bed. He used
this money to gain his appointment, to travel to his post, to feed his par-
ents and wife, and to procure another concubine. . . . I don’t know what
kind of heart is his. I call him xx-scholar instead of his real name. How come
this man can be a Presented Scholar? Isn’t it pathetic?”40
As Wang Jingqi headed for Wenxi, his next stop on the road, Lightning
Steps fretted that the authorities were cracking down on prostitution so re-
lentlessly that she would have to return to Datong. Datong for the courte-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

san was not a portable garden of pleasures, but a place on a loop, a home
that oªered no solace and no way out. The physical and social mobility that,
by contrast, ﬁgured as the hallmark of the southern scholar’s privilege was
to become even more pronounced in Wang’s next adventure.

RED ROCK VILLAGE: THE DOMESTIC IN THE WILD

After Wenxi, Wang Jingqi journeyed to Dashiutou, some forty li down the
road, where he was stricken with bouts of hernia. He sent oª the slower
contingent of his servants with a horse-drawn cart carrying the bulk of his
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luggage, planning to catch up with them after a rest. A gust kicked up a

sandstorm by the time he set out with a lone attendant; they missed the
o‹cial road and overshot by some twenty li to the south. Debilitated by a
second hernia attack, Wang rode into a village about one li to the east and
saw a south-facing door of a house ajar. Someone by the road told him he
was in Red Rock Village.
Neither the sand in his eyes nor the excruciating pain in his entrails could
dull Wang’s keen ethnographic observation. Behind the open front gate a
sizable compound presented itself, with five south-facing rooms, two east-
ern rooms to their left, and a stable on the west housing four horses. Three
women in the middle room, the most private and elevated space in the com-
pound, scurried to hide in the side building upon seeing the invasion of two
strange riders, screaming, “What do the guests want?” The master of the
house appeared, an old man of about seventy by the name of Li, who fixed
his gaze on Wang and after a pregnant moment said, “Ah, a Mr. Scholar
[guanren] from the south!” Wang’s southern origins, which he denied ear-
lier in self-pitying sympathy with Lightning Steps, announced his status
without his uttering a word.41
Wang’s attention to the interior architecture—indeed, the domesticity—
of the Li household is rivaled by their fascination with his outsider’s privi-
leges as a southerner. His first physical contact with the three women oc-
curred in tandem with a noisy negotiation among themselves over sanitation.
Wang was pinned to his saddle by pain and could not dismount. The three
women rushed to hold and guide him to their middle room upon the beck-
oning of Old Li. The elder woman called out, “Baby Jade, go get your pil-
low and coverlet.” Baby Jade hesitated, “Maybe Mr. Scholar would find them
too dirty, what to do?” The elder retorted, “Are you afraid that they would
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

mess up Mr. Scholar’s clothes? The kang-platform bed is very cold. No mat-
ter how dirty the bedding, isn’t it better than putting him on straw mats
made of reed?” On the verge of passing out, Wang felt the bedding under-
neath, and evidently heard the conversation, but did not give the women
his characteristic scrutiny.
Old Li was about to borrow a stove, ﬁrewood, and a cake of tea from a
neighbor to make a jug of tea. Before leaving with Li, Wang’s attendant whis-
pered to his master in a lilting Wu dialect from the heart of Jiangnan: “You
are not in the pleasure quarters; these beauties are from a respectable house-
hold. My master should be careful with his loose mouth, for you never know
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how unruly these people out west can be.” He left Wuyi tea, a delicacy from
Fujian, on the table before taking oª to catch up with the horse-drawn cart.
Hangzhou natives, famously picky about their tea, were likely to ﬁnd tea
brewed from cakes stiª as a brick unpalatable. This episode exposed not
only how Wang was addicted to certain southern comforts, but also how
both master and attendant were acutely aware of their linguistic and cul-
tural diªerences while traveling in the north.
Wang began to wake up, and saw that the elder woman, who was hold-
ing a baby, had eyebrows and eyes “as pretty as a picture.” The younger one,
Baby Jade ( Yuwa), was a bit over twenty. The youngest, no more than six-
teen or seventeen, was particularly bewitching. “The twin arches of all three
are smaller than three inches.” He addressed the elder woman as “Wife Li,”
who told him that Baby Jade was her daughter-in-law and Little Cloud (Xiao-
yunwa), her daughter. The verbal exchange broke the ice, and soon Wife
Li was insisting that hernia can be cured only by a massage. She ordered the
two to “serve Mr. Scholar” ( fushi guanren), which we may note is an hon-
oriﬁc used by prostitutes or maids; “to serve” carries a connotation of tend-
ing to the corporeal comforts and pleasures of the master. Wang was placed
on his back on the kang. Baby Jade sat on the edge and held one of his hands;
Little Cloud crouched from behind with her back leaning on the western
wall (thus facing east) and held his other hand. They then proceeded to mas-
sage the spots where he felt pain while taking turns to wipe the sweat from
his face.
Wang did not fail to note that Old Li returned with the stove and was
pleased with the attention his women gave the visitor. Li was solicitous him-
self, soon leaving again to buy steamed buns. The reader may begin to no-
tice Wang’s meticulous recording of the coming and going of people. This
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

narrative strategy marked the boundary of the domestic place while ani-
mating the interior by human movement and action. Amidst the ﬂurry of
activities, the southerner—the perpetual outsider—alone remained still at
the center of the room.
Noticing the pot that Old Li had left on the stove, Wang remarked that
it was so huge that it would take ages for the water to boil. Wife Li laughed,
“Mr. Scholar, don’t be surprised. All the men in this place are stupid; not a
single exception!” Wang asked whose baby was this, and was told that it was
Baby Jade’s. He inquired, “Is it your grandson or granddaughter?” Li
sighed, “Every boy born in this village is ugly; every girl is fetching. She is
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THE EROTICS OF PLACE 163
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a girl.” Her husband, son, and son-in-law were all so ugly that even their
wives loathed seeing them. They worked outside the village, leaving the
harem-like household in the hands of the women.
The ﬂirtation turned overt when Baby Jade verbalized the south-north
diªerence: “Mr. Scholar, are there mismatches in the south?” Wife Li started
to reminisce about a similar conversation with a Scholar Shen, a southerner
who came through under circumstances similar to Wang’s. All of a sudden,
the two younger women gazed at each other and exclaimed, “Why, Mr.
Scholar has really soft hands!” and held his hands up to show to Wife Li.
Wang went along, “You ladies don’t seem to have stiª hands yourselves?”
Wang’s attendant returned, announcing that the cart was waiting at the en-
trance of the village. Wife Li invited the servant to the side wing with a jug
of tea. Wang wasted no time in asking Baby Jade, “Since you loathe your
husband’s company, it must be quite a chore having to deal with him those
long nights when he is around.” And she replied, “I hate it whenever my
husband returns. His whole body reeks of mud and sweat, stinking you to
death. I have nothing to say to him, and sex is not what we’re about. My
mother-in-law has often told us that southerners are soft and lovely; hear-
ing their voices and glancing at their smiling faces, you cannot bear to let
them go. I and my little sister-in-law have never met a southerner, and we
have often prayed that we would be born in southland in our next lives. To-
day ﬁnally we managed to lay our eyes on a southerner, and indeed my
mother-in-law is right!”
The seduction was conducted in tandem with a discourse on chastity. Ear-
lier, Wife Li insisted that despite the charm of village daughters, for several
hundred years Red Rock Village had never seen an unchaste woman. Now,
Little Cloud chimed in with a secret: the Scholar Shen whom Wife Li re-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

membered so fondly was a lost traveler who knocked on their door some
twenty years ago and was invited to stay in this same room. A native of Jia-
xing, at the core of Jiangnan, he served as a private advisor for the magis-
trate of Pingyang. He became very cordial with Wife Li, got her husband
drunk, and after everybody fell asleep went over to knock on the eastern
wing door. Giving in to temptation, the young Wife Li rose to open the
door. But the brightness of a starry sky put a chill in her, stopping her in
her tracks. She often told the story to the two young women, warning them
to guard against temptation.
The segue to the topic of chastity is odd in the middle of a ﬂirtation that
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is showing no sign of abetting. Wang asked, “Since your mother never had
sex [wujiao] with Scholar Shen, how come she misses him so deeply after
twenty years?” Baby Jade said, “Why do we need to have sex [ youjiao] to re-
member? We, too, will never forget Mr. Scholar in our hearts.” When Lit-
tle Cloud got oª the kang to sip tea, Wang started to fondle Baby Jade’s
breasts. Baby Jade said, “Mr. Scholar is wrong.” Little Cloud chimed in with
a doggerel before returning to her former position on the kang: “Blue sky,
bright sun, a face with two sides, / Living, lively, how wrong can it be?” As
Baby Jade got oª the kang to kindle the charcoal on the brazier, Wang pat-
ted Little Cloud’s buttocks and tugged at her foot. It was stiª as iron and
immobile as a rock. Wang loosened her with words: “By chance I meet you
and have no other [improper] thought. I am so fond of you that I just want
to play with you a bit. Why do you use your mighty power [shenli] to shut
me out?” Little Cloud relaxed and placed both feet on Wang’s knees. Un-
expectedly Wang slipped oª her shoes. Little Cloud changed color, saying:
“Isn’t Mr. Scholar afraid that I would be angry?” Baby Jade mocked Little
Cloud’s doggerel: “Blue sky, bright sun, a face with two sides, / Living, lively,
how afraid can he be?” The three eyed each other and laughed.
Wang asked, “Jade Lady and Li’l Lady, do you want to be reborn in the
south [alt., do you want to give birth to a southern fruit]?” Little Cloud ad-
mitted, “Indeed the thought has crossed my mind.” Baby Jade said, “Wouldn’t
it be my great fortune if I get to be Mr. Scholar’s maid-concubine in my
next life?” Little Cloud: “How dare I want Mr. Scholar. I’d be happy to be
Mr. Scholar’s maid-concubine.” Wang: “I’m an old man with white hair and
beard, what does Li’l Lady see in me that makes her so devoted?” Baby Jade:
“Whenever we meet local men we treat them like pigs and dogs. After our
meeting with Mr. Scholar today, we won’t be able to forget.” Little Cloud:
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

“Not just the two of us; mother would also place you in her heart and at
the tip of her tongue after you leave.”
Wife Li entered and began to urge Wang to leave. She and Baby Jade left
to fetch good water for a farewell cup of tea. Seeing that he was alone with
Little Cloud, Wang forced her to lie down with him, “frolicked with her,
stopping at nothing.” Little Cloud responded in kind without resistance.
“But she guarded her genitals with her hands, saying: ‘Deﬁnitely not here.
I have too much strength in my hands and do not wish to hurt Mr. Scholar.’”
Wang oªered Little Cloud pieces of gold he had tucked inside his boots,
but she refused: “I’m a woman and have no way of spending it. Don’t let
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THE EROTICS OF PLACE 165
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others see it lest they have evil thoughts.” She caressed Wang, on the verge
of tears: “We will probably never meet again. Even a brief encounter like
ours is destiny. Please keep Little Cloud in your thoughts. Maybe we will
be together in our next lives.”
Baby Jade returned and divulged a secret. Both her father-in-law and her
husband were horse thieves. Of the nine women in the village, three were
in the Li family, and all three practiced martial arts since they were young.
Although there was no livelihood in Red Rock, Wife Li had made a pact
with the other village women that they would not prostitute themselves. In-
stead, they donned male attire and became bandits. But they promised each
other to leave southern men unharmed. Wang started to feel the gravity of
the situation, but could not bear to leave the two ladies. Little Cloud voiced
a standard line of the sacrificial woman: “Mr. Scholar has ten thousand miles
of future ahead of him. Do not throw it away for two women.”
Wife Li returned, sent the two younger women to pack a bag of grapes
for Wang, and revealed yet a deeper secret. “Both of them want you to stay,
and you don’t seem to want to leave either. But you can’t linger. Even I, a
middle-aged woman who is like dead ashes and dry wood, still find your
voice and laughter irresistible. How could the two of them resist, being so
young?” Seeing that Wang did not move, Wife Li pulled him up: “So you
think the two are charming? They are in fact women who would kill with-
out batting an eyelash. If you sleep with them, how can they let you go? If
they ambush you on the road and kidnap you, are you strong enough to
fight them?”
They bid their farewells in the courtyard. Wife Li urged, “Mr. Scholar,
please hurry.” Baby Jade explained: “Not that my mother-in-law wants to
be rude to Mr. Scholar. Mr. Scholar likes it here, and the two of us can surely
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ﬁnd someone to serve you in bed. There are no unchaste women in this vil-
lage, and if there were, she would not come from our family. We know that
Mr. Scholar is full of passion, but the circumstances do not allow us to keep
you here.” Little Cloud added: “Now please hurry, Mr. Scholar. We will come
to your cart to see you oª.” Wife Li warned: “Make sure that you go as far
as Niudu Village before resting. There is no friendly territory between here
and there. Be careful; be careful.” All three saw him oª by the cart. Little
Cloud held on to the curtain of the cart. “If Mr. Scholar passes through
here again, make sure that you stop for tea.” As he hit the road, Wang over-
heard Wife Li telling the two: “I have always told you how wonderful south-
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erners are. Now that you have seen one, wouldn’t you think about him day
and night?” They disappeared behind the closed door.
When Wang arrived at Niudu Village, it was past midnight. There he
found that one of the women had slipped a blank journal bound in red satin
and inlaid with gold into the package of grapes they had given him. He
sighed, “How strange, just like the dream of Huai’an.” A popular story, the
dream of Huai’an tells of Chunyu Fen, who fell asleep under a scholar tree
(huai) and dreamed that he married the princess of a kingdom of Huai’an
and was appointed the magistrate of Nanke. Having luxuriated in life’s riches
for thirty years, he woke up to ﬁnd that the kingdom was but a large ant
hole by the root of the tree and Nanke, an even smaller hole beside it.

EROTICS OF THE NORTH AND SOUTH:

DUELING MALE AND FEMALE DESIRES

Wang recorded his encounter with the three women in his journal on the
thirtieth of the second month, 1724. Following the convention of porno-
graphic novels, Wang appended an afterword of remorse and warning. Ad-
monishing himself, he admitted to twelve mistakes, which included letting
a woman touch him and not suspecting that such bold behavior contradicts
the mores of a respectable family. Although he seemed to suggest that the
women initiated the ﬂirtation, he also put the blame squarely on himself
for giving in to his lust, which blinded him to the repeated warning signs.
At the same time, he held on to his conviction that all three women were
virtuous in intention and behavior, “they are motivated by sincerity, stop at
righteousness, and guard themselves with propriety.” He believed that he
was saved by the women’s virtues.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

It is hard to read this story today without a foreboding sense of dramatic

irony. We know that Wang was to be executed a year later and would not
take up Little Cloud’s invitation for tea. Did she hold him dear in her heart
the rest of her life? Did the three women talk about Wang as they robbed
other men—northern men, stupid and ugly like dogs and pigs? Were they
really bandits, warriors with bound feet? How much social and geographic
existence did they have outside of Wang’s head? This last question is im-
portant; whether we interpret the ﬂirtation and seduction as social custom
or male fantasy— or both—in the early eighteenth century depends on how
believable we ﬁnd the story. The key to an attempted answer lies in our recog-
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THE EROTICS OF PLACE 167
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nition of a tension between the ethnographic concreteness of Wang’s nar-

rative stance and the ephemeral eªect of his writing.
The thick description of sites, sounds, and sentiments is characteristic of
Wang—as we have seen in the Lightning Steps story—and is also evident
in other entries in Westward Journey. Wang had keen eyes and ears. His de-
scription of a place is always precise and graphic, replete with cardinal di-
rections and measurements. The mapping of his lost bearings, the Li house,
and Little Cloud’s eastward-crouching position on the kang are good ex-
amples. With economy Wang evoked the pictorial cosmology of a place,
revealing the patterns and structures of a macrocosmic order that frame hu-
man actions and are in turn animated by the latter.42 The pictorial quality
of place is also wrought by a vivid musicality of tones and voices: the dic-
tion of Lightning Steps’s northern songs, Baby Jade and Little Cloud’s dog-
gerel, and the colloquialism of the dialogues.
Also characteristic of Wang’s prose is his awareness of his corporeal pres-
ence in space. Immobilized by pain, first on his horse and then on the kang,
Wang’s narrative was propelled by his gradual awakening: first his ears, then
eyes, then hands and fingers, and finally his mind. In this progressive ped-
agogy of the senses, the Li house assumed a layered and dynamic existence,
unfolding its secrets to the visitor gradually but ever so partially. A full com-
prehensive view was possible only in the beginning, when the narrative
opened with Wang walking through a door ajar. The longer he stayed, the
less he knew and the less he trusted his sensory faculties. The narrative ends
with the three women disappearing behind a closing door. At the end of an
intimate and disarming encounter, the Li residence and Red Rock Village
retain their alterity, with the exotic and untamed stereotypical character of
the Northwest further mystified.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

This alterity accounts for the dreamlike quality of the episode, one that
permeates the Red Rock narrative, even without Wang’s overt reference to
the “dream of Huai’an” at the end. The elusiveness of Wang’s experience
stands in tension with his precise and vivid ethnographic observations. The
Northwest as a dreamlike landscape recurred in Westward Journey. Later, in
a poignant scene entitled “Remembrance of things seen on the road,” Wang
opened with his desire to see for himself the reality of courtesans from Shanxi
and Shaanxi in situ, having heard of their fame and experienced a few—
out of their place—south of Beijing. But his desires were dashed by strict
anti-prostitution policies then in force. After he entered Shaanxi at Tong,
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he heard that in slightly oª-track areas about one to eight li from inns and
thoroughfares, women gathered in circular settlements (bu) called “picture
houses” (huafang ). Riding on horseback with a local guide, he found a be-
witching scene that rattled his senses so much that he could not judge which
prostitute was superior.43
Even more surprising, “on the way I saw respectable women [liang jia nüzi]
riding on stallions with gold bit on the reins and brightly colored saddle
cushions. They covered their faces with light gauze. No one had feet bigger
than three inches; nor did they have rouge and powder on their faces. But
their colors, bodies, air, countenance [taidu], smiles, and facial expressions
are out of this world.”44 Similar to Li Yu, Wang located beauty in some-
thing as elusive as a woman’s air and movement of her body. The ladies’ op-
ulence created an erotic presence that was dense and moist, accentuating
the barren and arid landscape. The contrast recalls a similar depiction by
Yao Lingxi of the golden age of feet contests in Datong. Like Yao’s nostal-
gic recollection, Wang’s brushing encounter with ladies on horseback as-
sumes a dreamlike quality, like the fluttering gauze on their faces. The more
he sought the reality and fixity of pleasures tied to a specific place, the more
elusive the place became. However memorable, the pleasures of a foot con-
noisseur were ephemeral.
The reader is left with unanswerable questions: How did Wang know that
these women were from respectable families? And surely he did not mea-
sure their feet to ascertain that they were no bigger than three inches? But
empirical veracity was the last thing on his mind. The pleasure of writing—
and reading—about footbinding in the Northwest was aªorded by the se-
duction of the senses and the suspension of belief: in short the suspension
of the mind which created a sense of wonder. The erotics of place is thus
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

inseparable from the pleasures of the text.

In a subsequent entry, Wang recorded a conversation in Puzhou with a
Student Chang, who corroborated much of what the three Li women had
told Wang. A prolonged drought coupled with corrupt bureaucrats had
bankrupted all local families; women with no shame turned to prostitution
whereas women with a sense of righteousness became “rouge bandits.” They
would rob only wealthy passers-by, taking no more than twenty to thirty
percent of their goods, and they would not kill lightly. A gang of twenty-
some rouge bandits led by nine woman warriors lived in Red Rock, and the
three Li women were their leaders. Wife Li, nicknamed “Flash of Light,”
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was quick as lightning when wielding her long spear on horseback; Little
Cloud was “Cloud of Snow,” feared for her snow-white muscles and the
snow-white flash of her fifty-catty knife blades; Baby Jade was an archer who
could pull a heavy bow and shoot long-distance arrows, a “divine-shouldered
bowman.”45 Although the specificity of names and deeds adds a historical
heftiness to the three women, in itself it does not “prove” their reality out-
side of Wang Jingqi’s head and text. It will remain a mystery to us. What
rings true from Westward Journey is the poignancy and futility of male and
female desires that structured the cultural imaginary of unevenness between
the north and the south.
Student Chang’s information about the rouge bandits enhances the men-
acing alterity of Red Rock as a place. Central to the erotics of the North-
west, as we have seen in the reports of feet contests and Lightning Steps’s
prowess in archery, is a sense of lurking danger cloaked in sweetness: the
very allure of female sexuality according to the bedchamber arts tradition.
This tension was epitomized by a martial arts tradition whose practitioners
were bewitching girls who would not hesitate to kill. Wang’s initial fixation
on a limited, southern sign of the three women’s femininity—their tiny
feet—led him to misread a more complex and menacing northern femi-
ninity. This misreading in part accounted for the belated awareness of the
danger he was in.
Wang’s lust for flesh and skin was matched by the three women’s relent-
less romanticizing of the south, which assumed an airy, imaginary hue—
their own erotics of the south as a counter-discourse. Wife Li’s remembrance
of Scholar Shen, compounded by Baby Jade and Little Cloud’s repeated
promises that they would never forget Mr. Scholar’s sound and face, reduced
the southern man’s corporeal presence to a fantastical one. In a gender re-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

versal he lived in his sensory and desiring body and was, in fact, troubled
by his body. The women, in turn, lived in their heads, a surrealistic world
of secondhand mental images and anticipated memories of the south.
Scholar Shen’s and Wang’s bodies served as visceral conduits to a place that
the northern women had not visited and would never see. They thus
fetishized the scholar’s body, making it a synecdoche of a utopian order they
could only hope to enter in their next lives.
Wang’s lust began with the eyes—he was enticed by the women’s pretty
faces and bodies. The size of their feet was a key marker of their beauty. His
physical assault began with Baby Jade’s breast, advanced to Little Cloud’s
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buttocks and then feet, and further took the form of his removing her slip-
pers. Wang was fascinated by the layering of female footwear. In an entry
that imitates the style and content of philological investigation heralded by
Yang Shen and Hu Yinglin discussed in the last chapter, Wang inserted his
own observation: “[Besides the binding cloth] women in the Northwest often
wear soft slipper-socks [ruan xiewa] next to their skin; perhaps it is the same
as what people call ‘soft slippers’ [ruan xie]. Even matters as trivial as this
should be subjected to the [Confucian demand of ] ‘investigation of things’
[gewu].”46 But just as male desires were kindled by a progression of sensory
priorities, the women held onto a hierarchy of privacy of body parts: breast,
yes; feet, yes; undressed feet, yes when pressed; genitals, no. The genitals re-
mained the last frontier of female propriety.
Echoing Li Yu’s aesthetic of function, a pair of bound feet was by no means
an impediment to movement in Red Rock Village. The three leaders had
feet smaller than three inches, as we have seen; another bandit, Jueyun’er,
was said by Student Chang to have feet only two-and-some inches. She
donned leather shoes and could run alongside horses.47 In a later entry, Wang
supplied more ethnographic information on how the northern diªerence
was epitomized by ways of binding feet: “In Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Hebei,
girls start to bind their feet at age two to three. Their feet are naturally slen-
der and small, and they do not bind into an arch shape. They laugh at arch-
shaped [gongxing ] feet, calling them ‘goose-head feet’ [etoujiao]. In these
areas, I have seen women with very tiny feet, measuring only 2.7 or 2.8 inches
on the ruler. The sole of the foot is ﬂat. Those who call the bound foot
‘arched foot’ [gongzu] are uninformed outsiders.”48 The term “arched foot”
was a euphemism for footbinding, as we have seen in the last chapter. Wang
alerted us to regional variations in name and style, if not in “natural” bodily
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

endowment as he alleged.
The footbound women warriors of Shanxi were in control of their bodies
if not, ultimately, their destiny. When Wang tried to fondle her foot, Little
Cloud denied him access to her erotic body by stiªening her muscles into
an iron pellet. But in the end, the erotics of the south that provided a fan-
tastic escape from their impoverished lives could be sustained only as long
as they kept up with Mr. Scholar’s game of seduction. The memento one
of them had long prepared for the day, the blank journal bound in red satin,
was a material expression of the woman’s secret longing: Wang might not

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have realized that red satin decorated in gold is a fabric reserved for mak-
ing wedding shoes.49 For all of their agility and fertile imagination, marry-
ing a scholar who could write was the women warriors’ only way out of Red
Rock Village.

PU SONGLING’S VERNACULAR PLAYS:

LOCAL TONGUE AND THE UNEVENNESS OF PLACE

Both privileged southerners, Li Yu and Wang Jingqi were attuned to the al-
terity of Datong and the north-south diªerence embodied in a pair of bound
feet. Datong and Shanxi acquired a diªerent air when the writer himself
was from the north, albeit not a local. In his vernacular plays (liqu, literally
popular songs), the Shandong native Pu Songling (1640–1715) presented
diªerent pictorial and social cosmologies of footbinding and the erotics of
the north. Pu, a prolific writer famous for his collection of nearly five hun-
dred tales, Records of the Strange from Liaozhai (Liaozhai zhiyi), wrote a
series of less-well-known song-prose, of which fifteen are extant. These “ver-
nacular plays” are diverse in format and style: three are dramas with desig-
nated roles, others are looser compositions wrought of unrhymed prose,
rhymed prose, and tunes popular at the time.50 Dotted with colloquialisms
in the dialect of Zichuan, Pu’s hometown in the northeastern province of
Shandong, the ballads have a prosaic quality that evokes neither competi-
tion nor mutual fantasy between north and south. Instead, they bespeak a
mundane materiality and a subtle unevenness in the local landscape that
footbinding has come to be an unremarkable part of.
The pleasures of Datong and the beauty of its courtesans received iconic
treatment in one vernacular play, “Song of Blissful Clouds, Revised and Ex-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

panded” (“Zengbu xingyun qu”), adopted from legends about the adven-
tures of Ming emperor Zhengde, or Wuzong. Bored by bureaucratic rou-
tines, the emperor slipped out of the capital alone, disguised as a military
o‹cer. His destination:
Shanxi tops the thirteen provinces,
What a scene in the city of Datong!
The men are pretty without peers,
And the women, oh so exquisite and romantic.
Such outstanding talent, all dazzling.

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Three thousand in the pleasure quarters of Xuanwu yuan [Court of promoting

martial virtues],
Each one rivals the fairies in the sky.51

For three months he dallied in the courtesan quarters, won the heart of Fo
Dongxin (Even-the-Buddha-skips-a-heartbeat), and dueled with a local
ru‹an, Dragon Wang, son of a Minister of War. Finally, Zhengde revealed
his identity, had Wang executed, and made his triumphant return with his
new consort.
This long play sustains audience interest primarily by way of dramatic irony:
a shabbily dressed emperor determined to have fun at the expense of his un-
witting companions. Pretending to be oblivious to the ﬁne arts of whoring,
he made one faux pas after another. In a play that extracts comic relief from
the villain’s snobbery, status distinctions embedded in the minutiae of every-
day life—in speech, dress, and bodily movement—are magniﬁed for the
audience to savor. Toward this end footbinding serves as a useful rhetorical
device. Its main function is to mark status distinctions among local women,
not north-south diªerence as we have seen in the writings of Li and Wang.
The theme of female competition is announced early on, in a scene of
the emperor’s entrance into the pleasure quarters:

All the beauties look like fairies,

The tips of their feet peeking out from curtains.
Intent on seducing men,
Their musky bouquet envelops your heart.
One by one they stand by the door, greased coiªure and powdered face,
Throwing you a smile and a glance.
Even if you are an immortal,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Would you remember the magical grottoes and mountains? 52

The twin themes of brothel women competing for male attention and men
adjudicating the latter’s ranking is perhaps as old as whoring itself, but the
tantalizing scene of women lining up behind curtains with their feet peek-
ing out may have anticipated the late-Qing and early Republican feet con-
test accounts discussed earlier.
The aesthetics of feet mediates two kinds of contests among women in
the Datong pleasure quarters. The ﬁrst is status ranking among courtesans.
Fo Dongxin, the exquisite courtesan who would be at home in Li Yu’s cos-
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mopolitan world, was introduced as having “tiny, tiny gilded lilies, no more
and no less than three inches.” Later, a vernacular song coveys her full-body
glamour in motion:

Ascending the small pavilion to meet the military man,

She blossoms like a ﬂower.
One smile of the red lady is worth a thousand pieces of gold.
On top she wears a padded red jacket,
At bottom, a green silk skirt with gardenias,
Slender embroidered slippers, only half a zha in size.
With a face that greets an immortal she faces him,
Oh my, this lady is beautiful.53

A zha is a handy measure in Shandong dialect, the length between the thumb
and middle ﬁnger of an outstretched hand. “Half-a-zha,” or “not even half-
a-zha,” a standard expression that recurs in Pu’s vernacular plays, is the lo-
cal equivalent of “three-inch golden lotus.” In the hierarchy of the Datong
brothels Fo Dongxin belonged to the highest class, signiﬁed by her ability
to entertain her suitors with an elegant Kunqu aria. Further down the scale,
a wineshop waiter told Zhengde, one could save money by calling on girls
who were “a bit heavy with the bottom board” (diban chen xie), which he
explained is “feet a bit on the big side” in local parlance.54
In a more sophisticated choreography of agility and taste that recalls Li
Yu’s aesthetic of function, footbinding marked a second distinction among
brothel women: between courtesans and maids. Unwilling to entertain a
shabby military man, Fo Dongxin initially sent her maid, Golden Stool, to
Zhengde in her stead. Golden Stool hiked upstairs on her large bound feet,
“one step deep and the next step shallow, / her legs quiver as her heart pon-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ders.” On her way to curtsy to Zhengde, she tripped and fell ﬂat on her
face. When Zhengde looked up he saw “A ‘slender gilded lily’ half a foot
big, / Nostrils like a chimney above the stove.” But what gave her away were
her clothes:

An old jacket cut into a vest,

Showing big patches and white stitching.
A chestnut brown cotton skirt, billowing like a tent,
A ripped kerchief, colors faded.
Shoes made of coarse purple cotton cloth, a ﬂower pinned on top,
A chignon smaller than a jujube nut.55
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The second maid, Jade Dais, also failed to convince because “unable to
change her Meixiang way of walking, she opens her legs wide. Like a horse
galloping, a donkey hitting the trough, she runs upstairs with a ping and a
pong.”56 “Meixiang” was a generic name for maids. Contrary to our mod-
ern expectations, the ability to run signiﬁed not freedom but inferiority.
Surely the size of feet mattered, but more subtly it was the grace of foot-
steps and the fabric of footwear that marked the diªerence between servant
and mistress. The clumsiness of the maids, etched on their bottom-heavy
names, betrayed their lesser upbringing and doomed them to subservient
status. In another play, a Shandong proverb conveyed the assumption that
it was not unusual for maids to have bound feet, but it was not to be taken
too seriously: “Xiao Lamei binds her feet.” Xiao Lamei is another generic
name for maids. Locals immediately understood it to mean: “a pro-forma
performance” (you kuaikuai zoushi liao; literally, a bit lumpy would su‹ce).57

TWO KINDS OF FEMALE LABOR

Another vernacular play, “Immortals with Riches and Honor” (“Fugui

shenxian”), seems to have scripted or anticipated Wang Jingqi’s journey
twenty-some years later in its four basic elements: a westward journey of
a Mr. Scholar down on his luck; his seeking shelter from a strange, all-
female household; the seduction of a beauty with bound feet; a denoue-
ment in which the amorous encounter was revealed to be illusionary or de-
ceptive. In the case of “Immortals,” a Scholar Zhang ran afoul of the law.
A fox spirit, Shi Shunhua, rescued him and lived with him conjugally for
ﬁve years. When Zhang became homesick, Shi sent him back to his wife.
But he killed a ru‹an the night after he returned home. Shi again came to
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

his rescue and delivered him to a ward in Shanxi. After much travail, Zhang
was reunited with his son in the examination hall, where both captured
high honors.
In “Immortals,” footbinding marks a third female diªerence, that between
Shi the fox spirit and Zhang’s mortal wife, according to a variant of the spec-
trum of burden-function (lei-yong ) that Li Yu had proposed with his aes-
thetic of function. In a bifurcation that parallels the bifurcation of female
sexuality into temptress and saint, the “function” of footbinding is split
between the provocation of the senses and the economic productivity of
the body. Fox Shi’s temptress charm is signiﬁed by her bound feet in much
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the same way as with the Datong courtesan. When she ﬁrst appeared, Scholar
Zhang gasped:

There she is, a fairy from heaven,

Only eighteen, such a tender age.
An apricot-yellow jacket,
Over her lazy waist that rivals Xiaoman.
Her long skirt ﬂutters,
A pair of tiny gilded lilies,
Whenever her foot shifts, the silver ﬂower hairpin trembles.
A blossom of white peony that can walk,
As if her face can only be found in a painting. (emphasis mine) 58

( Xiaoman was a concubine of the Tang poet Bo Juyi, who immortalized

her willowy waist in a poem.)
Later, when she went to seduce Zhang, who was sitting in bed reading a
book, Shi Shunhua’s presence was announced by the sounds she made as
she walked:

Suddenly, a string of jade rings chimes ding-dong,

Is it the trembling of the bed curtain hook?
Someone is inside the room,
I hear her high-heeled slippers lightly resting.

Shi’s agility was highlighted in a later rescue scene in which she appeared to
snatch Zhang away from the two guards who had taken him prisoner. With
Zhang in tow, she leaped onto a mule: “The lady lifts up her skirt, tilts her
small foot upward to step on the stirrup, and mounts the saddle before
Zhang.”59
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

In contrast, Zhang’s wife, Madame Fang, was stationary, a posture that

beﬁt a chaste wife. Her domesticity was symbolized by a second “function”
of footbinding: economic productivity. Hence when she saw her long-lost
husband, “ping-g-g she drops the embroidered slipper in her hand,” which
she has been sewing, and “one can hear the scu›e of her gilded lilies as she
hurries” to the door.60 That both wife and temptress had bound feet is in
itself unremarkable. It is the use to which their feet were being put that
marked subtle distinctions in female social roles and status. In a similar scene
of bifurcation of female labor in “Song of Blissful Clouds,” emperor
Zhengde fell victim to a practical joke. Instead of the courtesan quarters he
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was led to a spinster’s hall, where the old women spun cotton, made soles
for footwear, and mended old clothes.61 In Pu’s vernacular plays, the erotic
body of the temptress was associated with the consumption of fashionable
clothes, whereas the productive body of the domestic woman was associ-
ated with sewing. Furthermore, among the latter a hierarchy of female la-
bor was expressed in the fabric and nature of the garments: respectable wives
embroidered and made their own shoes; spinsters under public care spun,
stitched sheets of cotton into soles, and mended old clothes.

THE MUNDANE MATERIALITY OF FEMALE BODIES

Pu Songling’s use of bound feet as a marker of unevenness in female bod-

ies, function, and status is perceptive if not altogether intentional. “Im-
mortals with Riches and Honor” is adopted from a tale in Liaozhai zhiyi,
“Zhang Hongjian,” which made no reference to footbinding at all. Shi was
only described as “a beauty” (liren), her goodness signiﬁed by her acts of
loyalty in rescuing Zhang.62 There is no room in this long but sparely told
tale for peripheral details or rhetorical embellishment. More curious is “Song
of Tribulation” (“Molan qu”), a vernacular play twice as long as “Immor-
tals” and based on the same Zhang Hongjian story. The reduction of ref-
erences to feet to perfunctory remarks in this longer play can be explained
by diªerences in genre and theme between the two vernacular plays. “Tribu-
lation” is a drama written for three designated role types: male lead (sheng ),
female lead (dan), and clown (chou); the plot, replete with dramatic twists,
is propelled more by dialogue and action than storytelling. Furthermore,
“Tribulation” is more of the Scholar’s tale than the fox spirit’s; Zhang’s
personal drama is set in the context of rural immiseration in the north, and
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

fascicles 29–35 focus on Zhang’s bureaucratic career and military exploits.

In this virile tale, as if the lure of women’s feet would be distracting, Pu
Songling expunged line by line any mention of them in the seduction, rid-
ing, and homecoming scenes.
From the absence of footbinding in “Zhang Hongjian” we may infer that
a pair of bound feet was so customary in Pu Songling’s world that there was
no need to single it out as the site of exceptional beauty or virtue. Its per-
functory existence in “Tribulations” reinforces this impression. As Judith
Zeitlin has observed in her insightful study of the Liaozhai tales, “bound
feet, those man-made fetishes that had become the locus of the erotic imag-
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ination in late imperial China, are transformed into a natural and immutable
proof of true femininity.”63 The matter-of-fact existence of bound feet in
the local landscape is even more pronounced in the vernacular plays, in which
references to them are often made by dwelling on the materiality of female
body and its labor. As a result, the binding of feet appears in a prosaic and
less erotic guise.64
This diªerence in emphasis between the tales and the plays is epitomized
in the way the filial daughter Sanguan is revealed to be a cross-dressing avenger
toward the end of the tale “Shang Sanguan”: “When they move Yu’s [San-
guan’s] corpse to the courtyard, his stockings and shoes feel hollow. When
the footwear is shed they see a plain slipper [xie] the shape of a hook. So he
is a she.” The same episode in the vernacular play “Song of the Cold and the
Dark” (“Hansen qu”) lavishes attention on the material accouterments on
her body: “Old Wang [the magistrate] rises to examine [the corpse]. He has
her shoes taken oª, and pulls out a bundle of cotton wool. Then a pair of
gilded lilies comes to light. She wears a midnight blue Taoist robe, her legs
are wrapped in felt stockings, and her shoes are filled with cotton wool. Her
body is tied up in ropes, a leather belt tightens on her waist and on it a leather
knife sheath hangs.” The quotidian quality of bound feet is emphasized by
highlighting the mundane materiality of her body. If the stripping of feet, a
taboo subject, aªords the reader momentary flights of fantasy, the exposure
of cotton wool (mianhua taozi, a local expression for ginned cotton) returns
his imagination to the tediousness of women’s textile work. The fluªy balls
of cotton, the tentlike robe, felt stockings, and belt add bulk to her body, re-
minding the reader that this is a body of production, not eroticism.65
That footbinding was a mundane and customary practice for prostitutes,
wives, and often their maids in early-Qing Shandong is most evident in the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

play “The Pleasures of Marriage” (“Qinse le”), where it ﬁgures as a part of

the female toilette and as a token of exchange. Told in monologues and songs
by a bride in ﬁrst-person, this most provocative of the vernacular plays nar-
rates her psychological state before, during, and after her wedding. Even in
this provocative ballad, Pu Songling refrained from fully exploiting the erotic
potential of bound feet. One of the songs of the bedroom scene describes
the foreplay:

That man I know is young in age,

But his face looks mature.
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Refusing to stay still,

He caresses my face before fondling my feet.
Fooling around in a hundred ways,
He bites my cheeks lightly.
My hand letting go for a second,
And my pants become undone.66

The fondling of feet was serious flirtation; the only episode in the disguised
emperor Zhengde’s adventure that hints at the erotic potential of feet is one
in which he teased a tiny-footed maiden who oªered him water by a well
by “squeezing the tip of her toe.”67 But the seduction of feet ends here; it
figures neither in the bride’s sexual fantasies nor the groom’s action in “The
Pleasures of Marriage.”
Instead, footbinding appears most frequently in the play as an essential
part of a well-groomed woman’s toilette. The prospective bride sang:
Hearing that mother-in-law is coming to inspect [xiang ] me,
I redo my coiªure and bind my feet anew.
Brush on rouge,
Apply powder and pin a flower [in my hair],
Tidying myself up, fresh as a flower.

Tending to the hair and feet is shorthand for techniques of adorning one’s
full body. The same sensitivity to the term of self-presentation was evident
the morning after her wedding night. Rousing herself out of bed in a daze,
her limbs were so listless that she wondered:
Where did my soul go?
How am I to comb my hair and bind my feet?
Forcing my attention to the dressing table,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Piling my hair to the left and to the right but it comes undone.68

The rearrangement and tightening of the binding cloth reestablishes order

and control after dishevelment.
The term “tidying up,” or zaguo (literally, swaddling and binding; also
zagua) in Shandong dialect, is used by both males and females to refer to
the daily management of the body and its social image.69 It implies not only
the importance of personal hygiene, but also the social nature of adornment.
In contrast to the male connoisseur’s overriding concern with ephemeral
pleasures, the recurrence of “tidying up” in Pu Songling’s vernacular plays
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suggests other seventeenth-century perspectives on the body-self, especially

those of a woman: the body had a physical presence and a material heft, the
binding of feet required assiduous maintenance, and doing it right was in-
tegral to the presentation of the female self to the world. Furthermore, za-
guo connoted self-respect and respect for the solemnity of social intercourse;
as such it was a measure of the woman’s moral discernment and worth.
The moral import of zaguo is evinced by an exchange between the two
protagonists in “The Wife and Her Mother-in-Law” (“Gufu qu”), a ver-
nacular play about a ﬁlial young bride, Shanhu, and her overbearing mother-
in-law. One early morning, when Shanhu tended to the shrew, the latter
eyed her face and cursed, “You are done up [zagua] like a witch [yaojing ].”
The word yaojing, often used to name a temptress, also named her crime as
one of over-ornamentation. From that day on, “Shanhu rose every morn-
ing, day after day she piled her hair into a coiªure neither beautiful nor ugly,
draped on a garment neither clean nor dirty, and changed into a pair of shoes
neither too new nor worn out.”70 Her moderation in attire, which involved
more di‹cult choices than if she were to dress to stand out, announced her
moral fortitude. In particular, a pair of shoes neither too new nor worn out
implied a calculated control over one’s own body and its image.

TOKENS OF EXCHANGE

Besides being parts of a routine toilette, the artifacts associated with foot-
binding also mediated a woman’s place in her world by serving as tokens in
economic, ritualistic, and sentimental exchanges. In one play, a matchmaker
was enticed by the reward oªered by a magistrate: “He promised to ‘tear’
[lie] me a half-foot piece of binding cloth [banchi bu de guojiao]. Let me go
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

make the rounds. If I manage to make this match, having gotten this piece
of cloth, besides ‘tearing’ it into foot binders I may even have leftovers for
a pair of insoles.”71 So conventional was footbinding that a length of bind-
ing cloth served as currency in a business transaction. The verb “to tear”
suggests that this seldom-discussed item of intimate female attire was made
of plain-weave cotton, for which ripping would have left an edge straighter
than cutting with scissors. But the meaning of “half-foot piece” is am-
biguous. Since “half a foot” was hardly long enough to bind feet, it is likely
to refer to the width.72 The consumption of binding cloth, not to mention
the frequent need to replace the insoles of shoes, recalls the emphasis on
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daily maintenance in the discussion of footbinding-as-toilette. Small feet

might indeed have been spectacular objects of desire for men, as Li and Wang
suggested, but for the women who needed to putter around on them, it was
the materiality of body and footwear that consumed attention.
The materials for binding feet were but a fraction of the products of the
sewing woman’s hands. Textile objects mediated other social or familial rela-
tions for women besides business transactions. In another play, Fan Hui-
niang, a bride from a powerful old family of scholar-o‹cials in Shaanxi, vis-
ited her new mother-in-law and elder sister-in-law at the Qiu family manor
for a formal gift presentation: “Elder Sister sat down with her, and [Hui-
niang’s] maid made the presentation: for mother-in-law, embroidered slip-
pers, pillow ends, and four bolts [duan] of silk [chitou]; for Elder Sister, em-
broidered slippers, pillow ends, and two bolts of silk.”73 Standard northern
pillows are shaped like an elongated rectangular box; “pillow ends” (zhending )
refers to a pair of embroidered squares, about seven by seven inches each, that
adorn its two ends. Often of red silk embroidered with elaborate patterns of
flowers, butterflies, chubby babies, and operatic figures, they symbolized the
young woman’s wish for an amorous and fertile marriage. Both slippers and
pillow ends made discreet references to the sensuous pleasures of the boudoir.
As such they were standard bridal gifts to the women of her marital family;
these specimens of needlework skills were received without fanfare.
But delicate negotiations over the bolts of silk fabric ensued. The Qiu
were a small landlord family who ran a family farm. They were well-oª
enough to rent their property out to tenant families, but the patriarch had
been kidnapped by bandits, and the family fell upon hard times. The Qiu
second son, an outstanding student, caught the attention of Huiniang’s fa-
ther, who arranged for an uxorilocal marriage. The status consciousness of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the Qiu women was palpable:

Elder Sister said, Oh, but we can’t accept the fabric. . . .

Our family cannot even oªer you a glass of water,
My brother is causing enough di‹culty at your house.
My mother would be saddened if she accepted your silk.
Go ahead and show them to mother,
See what she says.

As if on cue the latter resisted: “It’s all reversed! / How come your parents
have to go to such trouble?” Both mother and daughter acknowledged the
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unevenness or the reverse ﬂow of the exchange: they should be giving her
gifts, if only they could aªord it.
Huiniang refused to budge:

My father said, Two bolts [pi] of tabby silk [chou], two bolts of gauze [sha],
Let Mother make an outﬁt.
How dare I take it back?
If I do, my father and mother would scold me.
This is nothing really precious anyway.

Thus the rhetoric of ﬁliality and humility allowed Huiniang to prevail over
her mother-in-law. But Elder Sister held out: “Mother may accept, but I
absolutely cannot.” Huiniang switched to a rhetoric of moral economy: “El-
der Sister, please accept them. In the future I’d have many occasions to beg
your help.”74 With this promise that the unequal exchange will be redressed
in the course of time, Elder Sister gave in.
Later, Huiniang dispensed generous gifts of a three-foot length of red satin
and two hundred coppers (qian) to each of the tenant wives—domestic help-
ing hands for the landlord family—who scurried over to pay respect.75
We get the impression that four bolts of silk represented a generous and,
strictly speaking, unnecessary, gift to a mother-in-law. The verbal negotiation
transformed the excessive gifts from a reminder of their already obvious sta-
tus inequality to a token of sentimental give-and-take, a reciprocal exchange
to be realized in the future. Huiniang’s rejoinder that the gifts were man-
dated by her parents notwithstanding, this material and sentimental ex-
change between the bride and her new marital female relatives was a private
aªair between the women.76 The negotiation of a gift comprised of such
ﬁnished products as slippers and pillow ends and raw materials of uncut
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

fabric bound the women into a symbolic loop of production-consumption

of each other’s labor.
In sum, in Pu Songling’s vernacular plays, the ﬁgure of the Datong cour-
tesan, the erotics of the north and northwest, and the trope of the west-
ward journey are mapped on the axes of bodily labor and mundane mate-
riality. In lavishing attention on the bodies and things of plebeian men and
women, Pu conveyed an unsentimental reality of footbinding that is rad-
ically diªerent from those of Li Yu and Wang Jingqi. Although written by
a man, the plays come close to illuminating female perspectives on the bur-
dens and utilities of footbinding in the early-Qing period. The functions
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of footbinding exceeded the sensual seduction that Li and Wang ﬁxated

on: it aªorded women a “natural” feminine identity, a medium for self-
presentation, and a means of negotiating the social gradations and un-
evenness that overarched their lives. The undeniable erotic charge of foot-
binding coexisted with female concerns for ritual propriety, self-adornment,
and the mundane business of having to live in a body. Within the bound-
aries of male-authored discourses and tropes, Pu Songling thus opened a
window into the footbound women’s cosmology of place, which was con-
stituted by the density and tactility of things they produced and consumed
corporeally.

FASHION, STATUS, AND FEMALE ANXIETY

The vernacular plays also documented intense female anxieties in a world

of economic disparities coupled with heightened status awareness.77 From
the import of eyesight to Li Yu’s connoisseurship of women and Wang’s prac-
tice of it, we have already gleaned the growing emphasis on visuality in this
environment. In particular, dress constituted a medium of not only private
pleasures but also social negotiations over status ranking and gendered iden-
tities. In a visually oriented society, the surface of female bodies—especially
the adorned bound foot—acquired signiﬁcance as “social skin,” a bound-
ary between self and others as well as between social classes. Highlighting
the increasingly sensory, especially visual, terms of social intercourse, the
historian Kishimoto Mio has called the visceral awareness of social un-
evenness that permeated Ming-Qing society “status sense” (mibun kankaku).
Everyday life became anxiety-ridden as dress, vehicles, and terms of address
came not only to signify social diªerence but also to constitute it.78
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Status anxiety aªected men and women diªerently. Surely the wayward
students, small landlords, and struggling merchants had their share of wor-
ries and envies. But social unevenness had a more visceral impact on women
because it was inscribed on their bodies for all to see. To show that they
were desirable brides, moral beings, or bearers of the status of their fami-
lies, women subjected themselves to constant scrutiny: hence the frequent
use of the verb “to size up” or “inspect” (xiang ) in the writings of Li Yu and
Pu Songling. In an age saturated with visual messages, it was incumbent
upon the women to “tidy themselves up”: to dress right, to perform cor-
rectly, and to look the part. The opportunities for female adornment and
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THE EROTICS OF PLACE 183
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self-presentation thus came with a ﬂip side, the tyranny of visual scrutiny
and sartorial correctness.
The opportunity for social climbing and fears of being exposed culmi-
nated in anxieties about posing. The impostor syndrome must have been
so familiar to Pu Songling’s audience that one of the surest ways to draw a
chuckle was to joke about ugly feet. Really big, never-bound feet brought
far less comic relief than poorly bound feet, the owner of which suªered a
litany of names: “Half-squeezed-foot” (ban lanzi jiao); “Half-blocked-foot”
(banlan jiao); “Little-crooked-bone” (xiao wailagu). The literal meaning of
these colloquial terms of address was less important than their harsh, dep-
recating sound. Another spate of expressions focused on the horsey or don-
key-trots of women with poorly bound feet, as we have seen in Golden Stool
and Jade Dais, the two maids who tried to pass themselves oª as their mis-
tress. A related complaint was the terrible noise such a woman made as she
walked: “zhuo-da-zhou-da.” Even worse was ugly feet coupled with waste-
fulness. Hence a husband taunted his shrewish wife: “Keeping you around
we would have no jacket and pants to wear; why, a pair of your shoes uses
up three feet of cloth.”79
Both the desire for the glamour of fashion and the fear of appearing shabby
accounted for the seriousness with which women prepared for a visit to the
temple, one of the few excuses for a respectable woman to parade herself in
public. In a vernacular play, the chef of a well-oª household expressed his
pride in his wife’s appearance: “My master feeds me everyday and pays me
every month; we have money to spare. For my wife I had tailored a bright
red jacket and bright green cotton pants. When she is put together [zagua],
she looks as fetching as a colorful pigeon, and everybody marvels at how
handsome she looks. Yesterday she wanted to go burn incense but had no
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

shoes, so I sold a catty of sesame oil for her to buy a half-foot length of silk
[sanling ]. Also I gave her a catty of ginger and half a catty of peppercorns
to exchange for a knotted silk sash [koushi daizi]. Shouldn’t these things also
count toward what I make from my good master?” A knotted sash may re-
fer to a wide ribbon with tassels on both ends. Longer ones were used to
fasten a skirt. Its mention here after footwear may mean a leg sash, a shorter
version that northern women tied around their lower calves and ankles to
accentuate their arched shoes.80
The trope of an incense-burning wife dressed to the hilt for her pilgrim-
age is so emblematic of the visual age that it recurs in folk songs from other
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THE BODY CONCEALED 184
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regions of the empire. Indeed, seventeenth-century songs from the Wu-

dialect area in Jiangnan expressed the same anxieties about gender and status
boundaries in a ﬂuid society that we have seen in Pu Songling’s northern
songs. In the south, too, women with poorly bound feet were ridiculed with
more ferocity than those who never bothered to bind; the specter of failed
social climbing was all the more poignant because it was familiar. A typical
example is the song “Country-Mama Wants to Make an Oªering to the
Bodhisattva.” Following the standard pattern of starting with the head and
moving down the body, the narrator ended with her footwear and gait:
From neighbor to the east she borrowed binding cloth,
From neighbor to the west she borrowed socks to wear on top [taowa].
Bright red shoes with green heel-tab,
Stepping forward, with a jerk.

Seeing her skidding on a stone-paved road, passers-by had a good laugh.81

Echoing the emphasis on “tidying up,” a pair of fresh binding cloths was a
standard requirement for the toilette.
An earlier example of the trope is a spectacular play, “The Incense-Burn-
ing Wife” (“Xiaoxiang niangniang”), in the seventeenth-century collection
of Wu tunes, Mountain Songs (Shan’ge), compiled by the Suzhou writer Feng
Menglong (1574–1646).82 One unusual feature of this lengthy ballad is the
reverse ﬂow of pilgrimage—here, the wife of a merchant family was trav-
eling from city to village. As a consumer of fashion, she was less parodied
than paraded. One warm day in spring, aching to go sight-seeing, the wife
came up with a plan to burn incense in a bodhisattva temple in Qionglong
Mountain. The urban-rural contrast was highlighted at the outset: “Coun-
try people are honest to a fault; city people are rash and reckless.” Her reck-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

lessness is ﬁrst manifested in her audacity in overruling her father-in-law’s

objection by cursing him and threatening to hit him. But the family busi-
ness was in the red, the rice in the pantry was about to run out, and the
house was in disrepair. In a frenzy she plotted a strategy of assembling a re-
spectable wardrobe with the help of two neighbors. If she was reckless, she
was to be a reckless consumer of fashion.
The headgear and coiªure required the most eªort: “There is no other
way, then, but to cover my head with a pearl-studded velvet hairpiece; go
borrow one. A hibiscus-brocaded damask scarf for the head; go borrow one.
An orchid-shaped jade hairpin; go borrow one. Lilac earrings; go borrow a
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THE EROTICS OF PLACE 185
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pair.” Fortunately, the women had perfect knowledge as to whom to turn

to for help: “The wife in charge of the Xu family has a jade-studded Guanyin-
shaped gold pin for the sideburns. The young daughter-in-law of Chen-
the-butcher has a pair of phoenixes picking golden peaches; Elder Sister
Zhang has a gold-plated butterﬂy; Li San’s mother has a green-spotted
grasshopper.” What they could not borrow they would procure from the
market: “Take four coppers cash, and buy me a red cord to bundle my hair
into a screw-knot; ﬁnd some rouge [lujiaocai, siliquose pelvetia] to brush
my cheeks.”
The regimen began with grooming the head and ended with tidying up
the feet, as in the northern songs: “Beg for a bar of round and fragrant soap
for washing my body. Get two sticks of benzoin incense to perfume my
clothes. That should do for the head. Now let’s see what shall I wear. Borrow
a brocade top lined in pink for the inside, top oª with an unlined jacket—
either chestnut blue or willow yellow would do. A patterned silk one-piece
dress and a fringed cape, need one each. A pair of white shoes piped in blue
and a pair of loose trousers, need one pair each. And borrow a pair of white,
washed foot binders.” With her neighbors gone, she rushed to wash and
starch her underwear. Thus there was more to self-fashioning than osten-
tatious display. Although concealed, the tidiness of these intimate items was
important to her inner sense of self. Sending her aunt and nephew to the
pawnshop completed the preparation. For two wine ewers with bronze
spouts and two patched-up garments she obtained silver and copper cash
for the candles, incense, temple donation, lunch, and transportation. And
a bundle of pine branches for a nice hot bath that evening.
The following morning, the pilgrim set oª by boat and then rode a palan-
quin to the mountains. She had a splendid time before hurrying back by
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

sunset. The two neighbors promptly seized and returned the borrowed
goods; within seconds she was stripped naked. The play concluded with a
lament: “A while ago she glittered in gold, like a newly minted bodhisattva
statue on Chengshu mountain. . . . Now she looks like a stinking fortune-
telling hag dragging a turtle [as oracle] from door to door.”83 In a visually
oriented society, a woman’s fashion or “social skin” deﬁned her social status
and persona: without fashion she was nothing.
The gap in wealth between the north and south, personiﬁed in the three
Red Rock women’s adoration of southern scholars, is here dramatized in
the visual disparity between the chef ’s wife in the northern song and her
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THE BODY CONCEALED 186
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southern counterpart. Attuned to the subtleties of color coordination and

the varied textures of silk, the merchant’s wife belonged to a fashion regime
superior to that of the chef ’s wife, a colorful bird in her green cotton pants.
Southern refinement is also evinced by the attention given to bathing, per-
fuming the body, and fumigating the clothes as part of the toilette. Jiang-
nan, the center of sericulture, led the rest of the empire in terms of the ma-
terials and styles of attire as well as the knowledge of the consumer.
But in the final analysis, the two pilgrims occupied a similar socio-
economic position: the upwardly (and potentially downwardly) mobile ur-
ban commoner. Although by no means members of the privileged literati,
by dint of employment or residence they enjoyed limited access to the requi-
site cultural resources to pull oª a studied imitation. The channels through
which they obtained their items of fashion and accessories, however, betrayed
their incomplete participation in the economy of wants. Both the silk sash
bartered with ginger and peppercorns and the wardrobe put together from
loans, pawning, and other circuits of recycling bespeak the women’s cir-
cumscribed means. Their desires, always exceeding their world of things,
were to remain ultimately unfulfilled.

The ﬁgure of an incense-oªering pilgrim—neither reﬁned nor elite but

resourceful enough to know how to pose—returns us to the public space
in front of temples with which we began this chapter. The temple ground,
alleged stage for rapturous feet contests in the Northwest, appears to be a
diªerent place from the eyes of the fashionable woman now standing at
its center. Secure in her inner knowledge that her binding cloth was clean,
she courted the gaze of other women and men with her exterior splendor.
Female competition was no mere male fantasy; it was a daily reality for the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

status-conscious women whose bodies shouldered much of the anxiety of an

urban commercialized society. But with the anxiety also came new oppor-
tunities to fashion selves that exceeded old social distinctions. In making
decisions about what fabric to purchase, what garments to have made, as
well as what shoes and jewelry to wear to the temple, the incense-burning
wife partook in the making and remaking of the erotics of place which we
had taken to be the prerogative of the male writer-traveler.

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CINDERELLA’S DREAMS

The Burden and Uses of the Female Body

REMAINS

What traces does the body leave behind after life expires? What remain of
the sensations and sentiments that render each life singular and each woman
with bound feet the mistress of her universe? These questions flashed in my
head as I turned to examine with white-gloved fingers the exhibits in the con-
servation room of the National Silk Museum in Hangzhou. A pair of shoes,
two pairs of socks, and one set of binding cloths from the Yongle era (1403–
24) of the Ming dynasty sat on two felt-lined trays, recent discoveries from
a lady’s tomb in Jiangsu province (see fig. 15).
Slender and delicate, the ivory-colored shoes are in good condition. At
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a length of 21.75 cm (8.7 inches) they are not tiny, but their extreme nar-
rowness bespeaks an aesthetic that prefers reshaped feet to unfettered ones.
The edge of the vamp and the toe area are decorated with cloudlike “as you
wish” (ruyi) and floral motifs that were outlined in black ink and then em-
broidered. The underside of the recessed toes is reinforced with evenly spaced
backstitching to bind the satin upper to its lining. The original fabric sole has
corroded, exposing a layer of curly felt-like fiber that once was the cushion
inside the sole.
The unlined summer socks and the padded winter ones are flat with a
loose, straight shaft, as is typical of Chinese socks since the Han dynasty.1
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THE BODY CONCEALED 188
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The socks are each wrought of two pieces of fabric cut into the silhouette
of a foot with contoured toe and heel areas, with the toes dipping slightly
downward. Their length is 22 cm (8.8 inches), which is longer than the shoes
but is in eªect shortened when the bulk of a three-dimensional foot was fit
into what was essentially a two-dimensional space.
The dead woman was apparently buried with the binding cloths on her
feet. A long strip of cotton or silk gauze about 6 cm (2.4 inches) wide, the
Ming binding cloth is similar to its modern counterparts in size, but the
method of binding diªers. Instead of concealing the starting end of the cloth
by binding over it, here it was left loose around the instep. The last loop
stretches horizontally across the toes, compressing them into the narrow and
pointy style of the shoes. The finishing end of the cloth is secured by tying
it in a knot with the starting end. A blackish speck no bigger than 2 mm,
possibly a fragment of a toe bone, was found in the fold. Collapsed onto
itself, the flat bundle of fabric remembers the silhouette of the foot and the
space it once inhabited.2 The body is gone, but a tactile imprint on a piece
of intimate fabric—like the shroud of Turin—hints at the reality of its
presence.
In the previous five chapters, we have approached the history of foot-
binding primarily through the writings of men. This is necessary because
male concerns and emotions have to a large extent shaped the subject and
our knowledge of it. The modern nationalist’s feelings of embarrassment
and shame, the connoisseur’s pathos of nostalgia, the philologist’s curiosity
and disapproval couched in a disinterested tone, the traveler’s fantasies about
the northwest, the adventurer’s quest for the most exquisite pair of feet: these
very real passions have constituted the figure of “woman with bound feet”
in our minds as well as theirs.
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To put it bluntly: Were it not for male emotions and desires, there would
have been no women with bound feet. A pristine, isolated subject called
“footbound woman” does not exist. Male desires and female desires are
intertwined; hence to understand the latter we have to go through the for-
mer. This is not to deny that in each male-to-female encounter—in text and
in life—their interests, positions, and experiences diªer. I have read male writ-
ings backwards and sideways, paying attention to gaps and silences, to il-
luminate that gendered diªerence. The humiliation felt by the older women
during the anti-footbinding drive, the futile longings that consumed female
bandits in the miserable countryside, the incense-burning pilgrim’s anxieties
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CINDERELLA’S DREAMS 189
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about not looking sharp enough: these emotions are no less poignant than
male ones. Each woman with bound feet lived in a complex world, each
facing a changing constellation of motives, choices, suªerings, and rewards.
Whenever possible, I have sought to view the world from her eyes.
Toward the end of this book, I harbor a lasting regret. The crux of the
matter—the bodily sensations of premodern women with bound feet—is
ultimately unknowable.3 My quixotic goal in this chapter is to get as close
to their bodies as possible. These bodies once occupied a temporal and cul-
tural space, leaving behind material imprints and traces which rarely took
literary forms. However fragmentary, shoes, socks, binding cloths, foot pow-
der, medicinal recipes, and embroidery patterns provide clues to the van-
ished body, its subjective experiences, and the histories of which they were
a part. In focusing on the things that women made and the things that made
them women, this chapter places the burdens and uses of the female body
at the center of footbinding’s history from the ﬁfteenth to the nineteenth
centuries.

FROM FLAT SOLES TO CURVED ARCHES

Nothing is known about the fifteenth-century Jiangsu lady who wore silk
slippers in life and in death. But her sartorial remains, seen in the context of
the evolution of female footwear, tell a significant history. Her narrow, pointy,
and flat-soled slippers are typical of an early stage in the history of binding
feet which lasted through the Song and Yuan dynasties, and seems to have
lingered into the early- to mid-Ming.4 Excavated female footwear from this
period conform to two subtypes (see fig. 16): the first, as in the specimen
here, is shaped like a kayak, narrow and sleek with pointy toes that dip slightly
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

downward; the second, shaped like a canoe with a high stem, features turned-
up toes that were sometimes called “phoenix heads” ( fengtou).
The aesthetic appeal of the former style is an elegant slenderness, whereas
the visual focus of the latter is the curvature of the toes, which can soar to a
dramatic height of 7 cm (2.8 inches). Although “bow-shaped shoes” (gong-
xie) is a generic term referring to any slippers for bound feet, these curved-
toe shoes might have been its original namesake.5 The length of either type
of footwear from the thirteenth to ﬁfteenth centuries ranges from 13 to 22
cm (5.2 to 8.8 inches)—by no means small by latter-day standards.
Characteristic of both styles is the sole: whether thin or platform-like, it
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THE BODY CONCEALED 190
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is of even height. The body weight is thus distributed evenly on the bot-
tom of the foot. The fabric sole often serves as a cushion for soft landing:
witness the curly fiber on the bottom of the pair I examined or the em-
broidered shoes of Madame Sun (1543–82), consort of a Ming prince, ex-
cavated in Nancheng, Jiangxi province (see fig. 16h). The yellow brocade
upper, 13.5 cm (5.4 inches) long and 4.8 cm (1.9 inches) wide, was stitched
onto a platform sole of stacked cotton cloth that is 1.5 cm (0.6 inch) thick;
the inside was fortified with an insole padded with fluªy silk fiber.6 Although
delicate, these shoes were made for walking.
In chapter 4, we have seen that the scholar Zhang Bangji identified an
“arch or bow-shape” as the quintessential sign of footbinding in the second
half of the twelfth century. Successive scholars in the thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries also referred to feet that were “arched and slender” in their
origin discourses. But we should beware of readings that are too literal, for
“arched foot” (gongzu) is a generic term that encompasses a range of shapes
and degrees of curvature. It is most likely that the kayak and the high-stem-
canoe shapes were fashioned to accommodate two diªerent ways of bind-
ing feet. The former required reducing the spread of the toes, possibly by
folding the four digits downward. An anecdote relates that in the court of
the Southern Song emperor Lizong (r. 1225–64), consorts “tied their feet
into a straight and slender shape” (shuzu xianzhi); the style was given the
moniker “Quick-mounting” (kuai shangma). In his fable of Maiden Ying
discussed in chapter 4, the Ming scholar Yang Shen depicted her feet in terms
of “packed digits and flat sole.”7 In these cases, the term “arching” is mis-
leading because the bound foot was straight.
The high-stem-canoe-shaped shoes, in turn, might have entailed an up-
ward bending of the toes to conform to the curved tips of the shoes. The
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remains of two Southern Song ladies provide tantalizing but inconclusive

material evidence for this style of binding. The muscles and ligaments of
Huang Sheng (1227–43), wife of an imperial clansman buried near Fuzhou,
Fujian, had decomposed, but the bones of her feet were wrapped in a long
strip of plain gauze. Both the socks she was wearing and the fifteen pairs in
her wardrobe feature curved upturned toes, as do the shoes on her feet and
the five pairs stored in a pouch (fig. 17). A daughter of the supervisor of for-
eign trade in Quanzhou, Fujian, Huang Sheng was buried with a wardrobe
of 201 pieces of clothing and 153 pieces of silk fabric, attesting to the sophis-
tication of the Fujian coast as centers of silk manufacturing and fashion.8
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CINDERELLA’S DREAMS 191
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Curled-toed shoes may be merely whims of cosmopolitan fashion, but the

unadorned socks are constructed with the wearer’s comfort in mind. There
is no other compelling reason for the socks to have upturned toes than to
conform to the shape of the body.
Even more suggestive are the remains of Madam Zhou (1240–74),
interred in De’an, Jiangxi, who was a daughter and wife of scholar-o‹cials.
Her body was found intact and a published photograph of it, stripped bare,
shows her toes curling upward. When found, her feet were wrapped in bind-
ing cloth made of pale yellow gauze. And, similar to Madame Huang, both
the gauze socks and shoes she was wearing feature curled toes, as do the seven
pairs of socks and shoes in her wardrobe.9
The stylistic similarities of the footwear of the two southern ladies sug-
gest that upwardly curled toes might have been a regional fashion that be-
gan in the mid-thirteenth-century.10 Future excavations from other regions
and periods may reveal divergent binding styles and techniques. From the
two types of footwear discovered thus far, we may conclude that in the Song,
Yuan, and early-Ming periods the goal of footbinding was to make the foot
narrower and the tip of the toes sharper. The toes might have been curled
upward in some cases and folded downward in others, but the arch of the
foot was not tampered with. A ﬂat sole was the norm. The sizable shoes and
the choice of silk, a fabric less sturdy than cotton, for the two Song ladies’
binding cloths are suggestive of a relatively relaxed regimen in the initial
stage, when the binding of feet was associated more with aristocratic deli-
cacy than arduous labor.
Modern observers have taken the quest of excessive smallness and its corol-
lary, the bulged arch—epitomized by the name “three-inch golden lotus”—
to be a timeless trait. In fact it gained currency only in the later stage of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

footbinding’s history that unfolded with the advent of high heels in the
sixteenth century. In an essay discussed in chapter 4, the writer Yu Huai (1616–
96) commented on the novelty of arched heels favored by fashionable
Suzhou women, carved out of fragrant wood and covered with the ﬁnest
silk: “The engineering of high heels [gaodi] was unheard of in the past, but
nowadays they are exquisite.” 11
Heeled footwear facilitated a new visual pleasure, as explained by the
scholar Liu Tingji (b. 1653): “The heel area of the shoe is elevated by a small
cylindrical piece of carved wood, called high-heel [gaodi]. The tip of the
toes thus touches the ground at an angle, appearing all the more arched and
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THE BODY CONCEALED 192

tiny [gongxiao].”12 We have seen in the last chapter that the seventeenth-
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century connoisseur Li Yu made a similar remark: the unfair advantages of

high heels were so pronounced that some women with truly tiny feet, not
wanting to be accused of cheating, took to wearing flats. The birth of high
heels bespeaks a craze for miniaturization that began in the late-Ming period.
More than aªording an optical illusion, high heels also brought about a
sea-change in the method of binding underneath the seemingly timeless la-
bel of “arched feet.” Besides folding the four digits under, the new regimen
pushed the base of the metatarsal bones and the adjoining cuneiforms up-
ward, forming a bulge at midpoint on the top of the foot (see fig. 3a). The
distance between the back of the heel and the tip of the big toe was thus re-
duced drastically. Bending the arch stretched and weakened the tendons and
the extensors of toes on the instep. The metatarsal bones became atrophied,
but no fracturing was required, as is often imagined. The compression of
the fifth metatarsal bone toward the heel bone created a cleavage on the un-
derside of the foot, which was surrounded by thick fatty pads. This cleav-
age became the locus of erotic excess. When the connoisseur Li Yu bragged
about the feet of Datong courtesans that are as soft as if they were bone-
less, he was referring to the pads around the crevice.
The new triangular foot has often been compared to a lotus bud or bam-
boo shoot, which evokes the shape of a gently curved heel tapering oª to
sharp, pointy toes. The bulge on the top of the foot enabled a reduction in
the length of the foot, but it was unsightly and recurred as the subject of
ridicule. The goal of this strenuous binding that did away with the flat sole
thus appears to be an overall shrinkage in volume, a utopian melting away
of the body mass. High-heeled shoes redirected the wearer’s body weight
onto a tiny tripod-like area consisting of the tip of the big toe, the folded
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

toes, and the back of the heel. However unsteadily, heeled footwear pro-
vided better support than ﬂats for these feet.
The extreme way of binding gave rise to a new adjective for feet, “arched
and curved” (gongwan), which became another euphemism for the bound
foot. Hence Yu Huai said of a famous late-Ming Nanjing courtesan, Gu
Mei, that her “curved arches [gongwan] were slender and small.”13 At ﬁrst
glance the statement is curious in Chinese for it is comprised of a succes-
sion of four adjectives: arched—curved—slender—small (gongwan xian-
xiao). The uncompromising demand of the new fashion regime is thus
conveyed.
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THE CULT OF THE GOLDEN LOTUS

Although “golden lotus” ( jinlian, also gilded lily) had been a euphemism
for women’s feet in Song poetry and Yuan drama, it was not until the fad
of high heels appeared that footbinding could rightly be called “the cult of
the golden lotus.”14 With this obsession with smallness at the expense of
movement, standing and walking became increasingly precarious. This cult
and its attendant eroticization of bound feet in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were products of the commercialized, competitive, and fashion-
conscious culture in Jiangnan, a subject already discussed in the context of
Hu Yinglin’s sense of historical rapture in chapter 4, personiﬁed by the
incense-burning wife toward the end of the last chapter, and elaborated on
below. Once established, however, this extreme way of binding gradually
became normative for countless women throughout the empire into the
twentieth century. Li Yu’s parody of “Miss Carry,” doctors’ reports of gan-
grene, and the litany of crippling eªects recounted by the late-Qing aboli-
tionists all refer to this latter-day fad that made high heels not only desir-
able but also necessary.
Although the cult of curved arches prevailed, neither the ideal nor the
practice was universal. Ye Mengzhu, a Shanghai literatus who was the most
astute observer of fashion trends in early-Qing Jiangnan, remarked that the
new regimen was initially a mark of status distinctions: “The preference in
making arched shoes [gongxie] has long been the smaller the better. But judg-
ing from what I see, this perhaps applies to only daughters from elite fam-
ilies [shizu zhi nü]. As for others, servants and maids from the marketplace,
they often strive for narrowness. Therefore, their shoes are ﬂat-soled—the
shoes could be decorated with gold embroidery and pearls, but they do not
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

wear high-heeled shoes in the shape of bamboo shoot [gaodi xunlü].”

Ye corroborated the observations of Li Yu and Yu Huai that high heels
facilitated an optical illusion of smallness. The style thus began to spread
through the social ranks in the second half of the seventeenth century. Ye
continued: “In the waning years of the Chongzhen reign [1628–44], even
small children from the alleyways bound their toes into a slender shape, hence
half of the shoes worn in respectable families [neijia zhilü] followed the fash-
ion of high heels. Those with narrow and tiny feet can thus show oª, and
those with sizable feet can hide their defect. Women in our dynasty have
followed this custom.”15 Even as high heels became de rigueur, the old way
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THE BODY CONCEALED 194
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of binding—compressing the digits without bending the metatarsal bones—

never completely disappeared.
More pronounced than status diªerences were regional diversities. The
Hangzhou writer Tian Yiheng remarked in 1609 that the binding style of
contemporary women harked back to the mythical Yaoniang, whose feet
wrapped in silk gauze curved upward like the new moon. As for poetic
names, “Nowadays in the fragrant toilette genre and indecent verses, when
people eulogize dainty feet they say ‘sprout of bamboo shoot’ [xunya] or
‘half-fork’ [bancha]. In colloquialisms they say ‘three-inch-three-fen’ [san-
cun sanfen]. These are very elegant. In contrast, ancients sang praises of
arched shoes [gongxie], which were curved and turned over like a drawn bow
[wanzhuan rugong ]. It is the manner of northern women today; southern-
ers laugh at such feet, calling them ‘keeled-over feet’ [ fantou jiao], or ‘grop-
ing the stem of the boat’ [chuai chuantou]. These are vulgar sights unwor-
thy of mention.”16 It is di‹cult to discern the shapes from verbal descriptions
alone, but it appears that the desirable southern feet were characterized by
straight, pointy toes and gently curved insteps—a bamboo shoot—whereas
overzealous arching in the north often yielded unsteady bulging feet that
doubled up onto themselves.
Northern women returned the compliment by deriding bulging feet from
the south. When the adventurer Wang Jingqi made his fateful trip to the
northwest in the 1720s, he found that Shanxi women dismissed southerner’s
bow-shaped (gongxing ) feet as “goosehead bumps.” Northern bound feet fea-
tured ﬂat soles, Wang added, hence should not even be called “arched feet”
(gongzu). Wang might have read an almost identical description in a nota-
tion book by the scholar Gao Jiangcun (Shiqi, 1645–1704), who stated that:
“By ‘gongzu’ we refer to binding the foot by breaking the middle, curving
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

it like an arched bow. Little do we know that girls in Hebei and Shanxi [Yan-
Zhao] started binding at age three or four. Their feet are naturally slender
and small, and do not show an arched bow shape. Those who do are being
ridiculed as ‘goosehead bumps’; the latter is not treasured” (emphasis mine).17
Tastes may diªer between north and south, but the ultimate goal—a per-
fect pair of tiny feet—remains elusive. The contradictory descriptions of
north-south diªerence may in part be due to a century-long time lapse from
Tian to Wang, but more importantly, they bespeak the impossibly high stan-
dards that the aesthetic of curved arch had set. Although unsightly, the bulge
was inevitable because however vigorous, binding merely rearranged the
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CINDERELLA’S DREAMS 195
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bones, tendons, and muscles. As Cinderella’s stepsisters were painfully

aware, the body mass did not simply disappear, human will and eªort
notwithstanding. The more popular the cult of the golden lotus became,
the more ugly bulges there would inevitably be. Just like the toes of lesser
women, the entire practice of footbinding was vulgarized as it keeled over
and turned onto itself.
In the nineteenth century, a connoisseur of the pleasure quarters in
Yangzhou voiced his disenchantment with the profusion of ugly feet
camouflaged by arched wooden soles: “If a pair of feet is not [as slender and
curved as] lotus petals, and the woman forcefully fashioned them into a
curved-arch shape, I’d prefer a pair of plump white feet [i.e., unbound; the
kind that Tang poet Han Wo immortalized in his line] ‘glowing, glowing,
six inches of succulent flesh.’” Neither were high heels panaceas. They would
make small women appear all the more fragile and lovely, but the sight of
tall and robust women—especially those whose bound feet were sizable—
tottering on dainty heels was laughable.18
Implied in the criticism is the lament that the playing field was uneven;
only a minority of naturally small-bodied and small-boned women was
born to look good on the curved arch. At the height of its popularity, foot-
binding as a ladder of success for women thus mirrored the fate of the civil
service exam, a similar vehicle for men: as more people joined in the fray and
the competition became impossibly fierce, the belief that winners and losers
were born, not made, gained currency. This fatalism softened the humilia-
tion of defeat, upheld the prestige of an increasingly ridiculous system,
and thereby enticed even more people to participate.19 With the cult of the
golden lotus, footbinding became a virtual religion as it came to be discussed
increasingly in the language of divine intervention and the chosen few in
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The early style of binding resurfaced en masse as a by-product of the
anti-footbinding movement in the twentieth century. Many women who let
their feet out did so by relaxing the arch but retaining the narrowness at the
toe area. Some mothers also proceeded to bind their daughters’ feet in this
manner from the start (see ﬁgs. 2, 3b). By then it was too late. A new view of
the machine-like body created in the image of the Christian god had taken
hold. Regardless of the women’s subjective wishes, both the utopian and the
mundane manners of improving upon one’s body had become hopelessly
dated.
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THE SUBJECT OF MEDICAL ATTENTION

One sign of the growing obsession with size in the ﬁfteenth and early six-
teenth centuries is the heightened medical attention paid to women’s feet
and the ailments brought about by improper binding. Male physicians rarely
mentioned treatment of diseased female feet in their case books, but an early
and revealing case was recorded by Xue Ji (1487–1559), a doctor famous for
his knowledge of Song classics in external medicine (waike) and the treat-
ment of women ( fuke): “There was a twelve-year-old personal attendant
[shinü] whose face was rather fetching. But her new master found her feet
too big, so he recklessly took some binding cloth and tightly bound them,
and then he sealed oª the end with needle and thread.” The maid com-
plained of excruciating pain but to no avail.
After half a month, the master agreed to unseal the binder upon seeing
that putrid ﬂuid was oozing from the cloth. He summoned Dr. Xue, who
saw that “the front of the feet had completely rotted and turned black,
both the bones and muscles are dead.” The rotting was halted by a washing
of scallion broth and an application of ophicalcitum powder (huajuishi), a
rock mineral commonly used to dress wounds. Rubbing a red-jade tissue-
generating ointment (sheng ji yuhong gao) on the wound and ingesting a por-
ridge of rice and ginseng restored the girl’s vitality and stimulated new tis-
sue growth. But she never regained full use of her feet.20
In all likelihood this case hailed from the early- to mid-sixteenth century,
when Xue maintained a private practice in Nanjing. The master had probably
procured the attendant at a considerable price, hence his willingness to spare
no expense in summoning the famous doctor when his investment was im-
periled. Xue’s biting tone and use of such adverbs as “recklessly” (renyi) be-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

tray his sympathy for the maid and disdain for the master’s follies. So crazed
was the master by the cult of miniaturization that the maid’s “fetching face”
did not su‹ce. This new standard of artiﬁcial beauty clearly left much to be
desired in the doctor’s mind. Also implied in “reckless” is a judgment more
medical and physiological in nature: twelve is too advanced an age to begin
a regimen of vigorous binding. Furthermore, sealing up the binding cloth
without regular disinfection and cleaning was downright irresponsible.
If the master had cared enough to look, he would have found a range of
recipes for tending to the binding of feet in the household encyclopedias of
his times. First appearing in two seminal almanacs, Essentials of Domestic
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Living ( Jujia biyong shilei, ca. 1260–94) and Comprehensive Compendium

in the Forest of Aªairs (Shilin guang ji, compiled after 1233 but before 1279),
these recipes were reprinted in subsequent editions or anthologized in other
encyclopedias that Ming readers seem to have had a boundless appetite for.21
As established by the two thirteenth-century almanacs, this tradition of phar-
maceutical knowledge consists of two portions: a liquid for soaking the foot
to soften the bones before binding and an ointment or powder to keep the
foot dry, soft, and corn-free. Both the initial binding and subsequent every-
day maintenance became the subject of meticulous medical attention.
The liquid portion assumes fantastical names. The Forest of Aªairs named
it “Xishi’s bone-shedding broth,” after a Warring States consort who person-
ified feminine beauty. To make this broth, mix half an ounce each of frank-
incense and apricot kernel; have two ounces each of crude mirabilite (pu-
xiao) and the root bark of white mulberry, and divide each ingredient into
five portions. Place one portion of the apricot kernel and bark mixture into
a new jar, add five bowls of water, and reduce it to half by boiling. Add one
portion of each of the other two ingredients, seal the jar with a tape, and
boil it for another hour or less. Remove the tape and place the two feet on
the jar to soak up the gush of steam. When the liquid has cooled enough
to touch, pour it into a basin and soak the feet in it. Return the liquid to
the jar and repeat the procedure in two or three days. Each portion is good
for three treatments. When all five portions are used up, the feet will become
“as soft as cotton wool, putting up no resistance to swaddling and tying. It
is very e‹cacious.” 22
Even more miraculous is the infusion in Domestic Living, labeled “An in-
ner palace’s shortcut to shrinking the lotus steps.” Prepare a thick dark broth
by boiling the ashes of buckwheat stalks while mixing together the fine pow-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

der of sal ammoniac Sal, white poris cocos ( fuling ), and ligusticum rhizome.
Apply heat to 0.3 ounces of the powder and three bowls of the ash broth in
a clay pot. After several boilings, wash the feet in it, reheating if necessary.
Several washes would ensure that the feet are “naturally soft and easy to bind.”
The recipe originated from “a supreme being; its wonders cannot be ex-
hausted with words.” With its help, even a thirty-year-old woman can attain
her heart’s desires.23 This recipe appeared under the category of “Boudoir
Matters” (“Guige shiyi”), alongside such advice as ways to cure pimples, pre-
vent hair loss, or blend fragrant face powder. The binding of feet and their
care has become a matter of routine toilette.
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Although not without medical grounding, both recipes belong to the

realm of magic. The repeated evocation of five in the first recipe and three
in the second recalls Taoist exorcist rituals, as does a broth of ashes. The at-
tribution to “Xishi” and “a supreme being” from the “inner palace” places
the origin of secret knowledge in the harem, the exclusive pleasure garden
of male privilege and the birthplace of footbinding in popular imagination.
Like the anti-wrinkle creams peddled by today’s cosmetics companies, these
infusions promised miraculous transformations.
In contrast, the second type of recipe, a foot powder, is pragmatic and
no-nonsense. Grouped under the rubric of “Steady steps for the golden lo-
tus” are recipes of diªerent ingredients. The Domestic Living manual rec-
ommends an application of the root bark of Chinese wolfberry pounded
with sa›ower, which would hasten the scarring over of corns within a day.
Forest of Aªairs oªers a fine powder made of the bark of cork tree, the ear
of jing jie (schizonepeta tenuifolia), the rhizome of Chinese goldthread, and
yellow lead. Ingrown nails causing “unbearable pain” and crevices between
the toes too swollen or rotten to be wrapped up in binding cloth would be
cured instantaneously.24
Copied verbatim or in modified form, this handful of thirteenth-century
recipes was transmitted widely in Ming and Qing household almanacs, re-
maining part of a standard lexicon and knowledge associated with the car-
ing of bound feet until the twentieth century.25 We do not know the extent
to which such standardized, formulaic knowledge was put to practice sev-
eral centuries after their initial codification. Women in various locales, too,
were likely to have employed their own local remedies that were not com-
mitted to writing. The emergence and transmission of a tradition of phar-
maceutical attention to feet tell us less about actual domestic practices than
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

about two perceptions of the female body that might have accounted for
the arching of feet and, as a result, their heightened medicalization.
The bone-softening and shedding tonic evokes a fantastical corporeal state
of bonelessness—a Cinderella’s body—that is pliable and responsive, read-
ily submitting to one’s will and desires. It is a body of the chosen few whose
feet are so small that it seems as though they did not occupy any space. The
foot powder, in turn, ministers to a multitude of bodies fettered by gravity
and physicality—the stubborn body of Cinderella’s sisters and the rest of
humanity. Perhaps the incessant impulse to remake the latter into the for-
mer led to the intensiﬁcation of footbinding around the ﬁfteenth century.
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CINDERELLA’S DREAMS 199
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In a status-conscious society, an initially reasonable desire to improve upon

one’s given station or body and to out-small the neighbors could easily run
amok. Be that as it may, the binding of feet, in its milder or extreme forms,
was motivated by a utopian desire to overcome the material, stubborn body.26

ENTERTAINING URBAN WOMEN:

FASHION AND STATUS IN THE CHANTEFABLES

A nagging complaint about the burden of a stagnant and immobile body

ruined by footbinding recurred in a host of fifteenth-century texts, the most
graphic of which is a chantefable, “Judge Bao Judging the Case of Imper-
ial Uncle Cao” (“Xinke shuochang Bao Longtu duan Cao Guojiu gongan
zhuan”). The discovery of this and ten other chantefables (shuochang cihua,
also called verse ballads) in 1967 in Jiading, near Shanghai, filled a missing
link in the history of Chinese popular literature as in the history of foot-
binding. In the tomb of a Madame Xuan, wife of a Ming scholar-o‹cial,
peasants found twelve book-like bundles, the pages caked together with lime
and dirt. The peasants were terribly disappointed: other than the old books,
the tomb yielded only porcelain shards. The books languished on the shelves
above a pile of firewood in a farmhouse. Five years later, buyers from a book-
store bought the lot and sent them to the Shanghai Museum. Upon being
steamed and washed, the bamboo paper yielded a goldmine: eleven chante-
fables and one southern drama (nanxi) that had been unknown and unread
for five hundred years.27
Printed between 1471 and 1478, these works of popular entertainment were
deemed too vulgar by scholars at the time to be preserved in their libraries
or literary compilations. Madame Xuan evidently loved them so much that
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

she went to the grave with them. Anne E. McLaren, a specialist on chante-
fables, has argued that in presentation style and readability they lie midway
between the “performance-style” format of Yuan zaju-drama and “desk-top”
drama editions printed by the late-Ming literati. The chantefables were per-
formed in wealthy households, and the printed text allowed the audience
to read and sing aloud in the family circle, thus serving to “render the com-
plete performance experience” to audiences who had enjoyed them on stage.
Although the “authorship” is male, to a large extent these chantefables reﬂect
and shape the tastes and worldviews of their predominantly female audience.28
“Imperial Uncle Cao” is a long episode in a series featuring the beloved
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Judge Bao, a wise and incorruptible avenger of injustice. Set in the reign of
the Northern Song emperor Renzong (r. 1023–63), the story opens with the
travails of Scholar Yuan. Admitted into the roster of a special metropolitan
examination, he happily set oª with his wife, née Zhang, and infant son
from Chaozhou, in the far southeastern edge of the empire, to the eastern
capital of Kaifeng. Their ﬁrst experience of the capital, a typical country-
bumpkin-coming-to-town scene, was narrated with a characteristic energy
that must have made the chantefable so enchanting to its audience:

The eastern market spilling over to the western market,

The people on the southern street gawking at people on the northern street.
The cotton fabric store sitting opposite from the silk satin store,
The door of the teahouse facing the door of the wine shop.
A medicine shop sells dry herbs and prepared tonics,
Flower sellers calling out to ﬂower buyers.29

The series of oppositions establishes the grid-like political cosmology of im-

perial cities while conveying a sense of the commercial hustle and bustle
that threatens to upset such symmetrical order. In barely a few lines the au-
dience is transported to the urban streets in which the sensory faculties of
the body dominated.
A visual curiosity did the scholar in. The following morning he could
not wait to take in the sights (kanwan, look and play). In a quickening pas-
sage propelled by reiteration of “to look” (kan), the audience follows the
family of three to tour the stores, government o‹ces, and city gates. Then
they ran into the entourage of Imperial Uncle Cao, younger brother of the
empress:

From his horse he [Cao] saw [kanjian] with his own eyes,
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With his eyes he saw the ﬁgure [shen; literally, body] of the wife,
He saw that her face was beautiful as a ﬂower,
Her body more tender and bewitching than the Bodhisattva Guanyin. (4b–5a)

Conduit of his lust, Cao’s eyesight was also an instrument of his ruthless
power. He tricked and strangled the scholar; the infant son he beat to death
and threw into a well. Threatened with death herself, Zhang became Cao’s
wife and was taken to his new post in Zhengzhou. There was no mention
of Zhang’s bound feet in this scene of fatal attraction.
The storyteller directed the audience to Zhang’s feet at her second ap-
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CINDERELLA’S DREAMS 201
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pearance in the Cao mansion, when she had just received a summons to
join Cao for a drink. She intuited that Cao, who had become worried about
Judge Bao’s investigations, was plotting to kill her at the table. Determined
to maintain an upper hand by looking her best and remaining sober, she
gazed into her dressing mirror:

She paints her brows skillfully and applies lipstick lightly,

She piles a high coiled dragon chignon on her head,
Twelve gold hairpins, one for each hour.
She wears a headdress of gold phoenix and pearls,
Her two sidelocks as dark as the clouds.
For the top she puts on a golden-yellow jacket of Sichuan damask [shexiang
chuanling ao]
On her waist she ties on a Wave-on-River-Xiang skirt [xiang jiang shuilang qun].
On her feet her slippers [gongxie] are only three inches long,
Gently shifting her lotus steps she leaves the room.

Her beauty was accentuated by her elevated status, marked by scores of maids
holding golden censers leading the way. Cao found the spectacle of her pres-
entation as enticing as her person (18a–b).
In this formulaic description, footbinding—represented by two standard
tropes, three-inch slippers and lotus steps—was part of an expensive and
elaborate attire fit for a princess. To a large extent, the entourage of finely
appointed attendants was the outermost layer of the attire, a moving exten-
sion of her privileged self. The significance of this formula, which recurs
in the chantefables, has to be assessed in the context of the latter’s enter-
tainment mandate. The storyteller routinely invoked a vivid image and con-
veyed the social circumstances of a character by lavishing attention on the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

clothing, makeup, hairstyle, and jewelry.30 The audience could thus visual-
ize the character by concrete, bodily signs, not as mere abstractions.
Witness, for example, the deliberate gradations made between the appear-
ance of a princess and her attendants in another chantefable. The princess,
younger sister of the emperor, is introduced to the audience in almost iden-
tical terms as the ill-fated Woman Zhang: phoenix headdress, lotus-root silk
skirt, west-brook (xichuan) red brocade jacket, pearl pendant earrings, twelve
gold hairpins, and “embroidered slippers on her feet, three inches long.”
Identical, too, is the gentle manner in which she walks: “A bold step no more
than ﬁve inches, / A dainty step she makes is no more than three inches.”
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Like Zhang, the princess’s opulence is accentuated by her impressive en-

tourage of thirty.
The maids were put in their place by visual contrast. They wore clothing
good enough to impress the pedestrians: west-brook ten-motif brocade (xi-
chuan shiyang jin) jackets, purple gauze skirts, beaded headdresses, and a
peony on the sidelocks. But the sheer brevity of description and the lack of
footbinding announced their servitude to the princess.31 This pattern re-
peats itself in the presentation of a princess in another chantefable. The only
non-noble women with bound feet to be described in the chantefables are
an entertainer who appears in a pair of “arched shoes embroidered with col-
orful clouds” and the wife of a hereditary master weaver who decked her-
self out for a pilgrimage to a temple.32
Both three-inch slippers and lotus steps, consistently attached to princesses
and other females who serve high-status men, constitute a stereotype. Stereo-
types acquired power from regularity and repetition; having enjoyed enough
chantefables, the audience learned to interpret cultural codes in life by the
same rules. It would be erroneous to infer that all princesses, entertainers,
and weaver’s wives had bound feet in ﬁfteenth-century China. The charac-
ters in the chantefables do not “represent” social reality or practice. Rather
their presentation or representation constructed the audience’s sense of fe-
male beauty, social status, and desirability, linking it ﬁrmly to footbinding.
In this way, the chantefable performances served as a vehicle in the trans-
mission of Cinderella’s dreams among their audiences.

STUBBORN BODIES:
THE BURDEN AND USES OF FOOTBINDING
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

With this knowledge we may return to the saga of Imperial Uncle Cao and
Woman Zhang, who feigns drunkenness and is resting in bed. Cao, who
could not bear to kill her himself, dispatches a sword-wielding servant. Out
of the blue an Old Man Zhang, an incarnated deity, comes to the woman’s
rescue. He takes the time to administer a sobriety test, telling her that he
will whisk her away only if she is sober enough to walk on the rim of the
well counterclockwise three times and then clockwise three times. “With-
out a single misstep” and “as airily as a cloud” she passes the test (19b). In the
dark the old man leads her to the rear garden gate, telling her to ﬂee to Kai-
feng in the morning, where she can (and does) seek redress from Judge Bao.
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But surely she is not to get to the good judge so easily. The latest obsta-
cle is her bound feet: “Her feet small and her shoes pointy, it is hard to
walk, / The wild wind blows until her face turns red” (20a). The White Gold
Star Venus appears in human form with a wheelbarrow and escorts her to
Kaifeng. Referring to this scene, Anne McLaren has observed that “in Ming
chantefables and nüshu writings one commonly finds bound feet depicted
as an impediment to the actions of women.” According to McLaren, both
chantefables and nüshu writing, a form of texts in female script found in
twentieth-century Jianyong, Hunan, belong to the same oral tradition of
non-learned women in which footbinding was a source of complaint and
an outright burden.33
In the context of the chantefables, McLaren’s conclusion is not wrong
but one-dimensional. It fails to take account of the complex constellation
of meanings associated with footbinding within and without the text of the
chantefables. In the entire set of eleven chantefables, this is the only instance
where footbinding is depicted in a negative light. Indeed, bound feet do
constitute an impairment to Woman Zhang’s action as she flees the palace
of her murderous “husband” in the dark, hovering by the roadside alone.
But it is more accurate to say that bound feet become an impediment only
to a woman who has fallen from grace; the nuisance of bound feet signals
the pain of downward mobility.34
Contrast her circumstances with those of Cao’s sister, the empress, who
upon hearing that Judge Bao has seized both of her brothers, races to Kaifeng
in a dragon-and-phoenix palanquin borne by eight bearers, accompanied
by an entourage of three thousand flower girls and eight hundred female
attendants (32b–33a). The empress’s mother, too, is conveyed in a speedy
eight-man palanquin (30b). If footbinding— or, to be exact, three-inch slip-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

pers and lotus steps—is a stereotype in the chantefables, it derives its rhetor-
ical power from a social attitude that associates bound feet with women of
privilege. Hence in the chantefables, footbinding recurs as a sign of upward
mobility. The perils of Woman Zhang could only reinforce this prevalent
association of bound feet with high status. Footbinding was useful for social
climbing, not mountain climbing.
The chantefables contain contradictory messages about the physical mo-
bility of women with bound feet. Such stereotypical expressions as lotus
steps, three-inch steps, or gently shifting steps remind the reader that a
woman with bound feet realizes her beauty in motion, albeit in dainty steps.
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Woman Zhang’s success in circumnavigating the rim of the well also attests
to the desirability of nimbleness. In contrast, the expression “Her feet small
and her shoes pointy, it is hard to walk” ( jiaoxiao xiejian nanxingzou) and
its variant “Her shoes are arched, her feet tiny, and her steps di‹cult” (xiegong
jiaoxiao bunanxing; 20a) recall the nuisance of corns, bunions, and ingrown
nails that a growing repertoire of foot tonics and powders ministered to.
The complaint about tiny feet and restrictive footwear that impeded walk-
ing is a trope common in the ﬁfteenth century. In another southern drama
(nanxi) contemporary with the chantefables, “The Embroidered Jacket”
(“Xiuru ji”), an old prostitute mouthed it on a mountain path as an excuse
to part ways with a poor scholar: “My feet are tiny and my shoes arched
[ jiaoxiao xiegong ]; the path ahead is winding and uneven, I am not used to
walking on this kind of road.”35 The expression might well have enjoyed a
life oª stage. In the “Wedding rites” section of a 1597 household almanac,
there appears a series of auspicious chants that the master of ceremony was
to utter at each stage of the wedding ceremony. One of the chants recom-
mended for the arrival of the bride is:

Look, the bride alights the palanquin,

In a ﬂash we glimpse her matchless countenance.
Her feet tiny, her shoes arched, and her steps unsteady [ jiaoxiao xiegong xing-
buwen],
Let the jade maidens hold her by her side.36

In both of these usages, the line appears to be less a bitter complaint than
a straightforward statement of a fact of womanhood. Although agility was
valued, the crippling eªect of binding feet came to be taken for granted. In
the wedding incantation, unsteady steps constitute not a source of com-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

plaint but celebration.

This heightened awareness of the perils of footbinding and the conﬂict-
ing desires about the extent and manner of physical mobility manifested in
the chantefables are emblematic of a transitional age that witnessed the ini-
tial spread of the cult of golden lotus. There seems to be general agreement
that small feet and ornate footwear were markers of privileged status—the
sign of conspicuous leisure—but there was also a growing unease if not
malaise about the crippling eªect of the increasingly strenuous way of bind-
ing. This ambivalence was in fact voiced during the entire span of foot-
binding’s life as an actual practice, beginning in the twelfth century. The
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more popular and demanding the practice became, the more vocal was the
opposition. The futility of the male literati’s protests was in no small part
due to the success of such performing arts as the chantefables in conveying
both the burdens of footbinding and its glamorous image to their female
audiences.

THE BURDEN AND USES OF THE BODY

A profusion of the word shen (body) is instrumental to the visceral appeal

of the chantefables. The usages of shen are both familiar and unexpected to
a modern reader. In “Imperial Uncle Cao,” for example, Cao’s brother urged
him to “hurry up and kill the body of Woman Zhang” (17a). Cao began his
confession by recounting, “Her husband is the body of a government stu-
dent [xiucai] ” (19a). Stranded in the dark during her escape, Zhang “Blames
the body of her husband over and over” for “bringing ruination to this un-
worthy body of mine [wo nu shen].” Her savior with a wheelbarrow “comes
across the body of the woman by the road” (20a). Grammatically super-
ﬂuous, the recurrence of shen highlights the presence of a material body that
can be seen, disposed of, or spoken of by others. It also connotes a sense of
self in lieu of, or in addition to, the ﬁrst-person pronoun. Shen is thus more
accurately rendered “body-self.”
Shen evokes a diªerent way of being than the one prevalent in post-
Enlightenment Euro-America, which construes the body as a container of the
self or as a property owned by the self. Hence the expression “having a body.”
In contrast, shen bespeaks a phenomenology of “being a body.” Suzanne
Cahill, who has detected a similar use of shen in the poetry of Tang Daoist
women, has suggested that for these women, such disciplinary practices as
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

fasting, ingesting drugs, or abstinence from sex constitute the only way to
approach immortality. To transform the body one must begin by disciplining
the body with seemingly destructive measures. Synonymous with the self,
the body is at once a hindrance to and a means of deliverance.37
These insights on the ironic status of the body-self put the perils of foot-
binding in a diªerent framework of understanding. Beginning with the
premise that self and body are separate entities, such modern critics as Rev-
erend MacGowan viewed the binding of feet as an act of mutilating the
natural (God-given) body, as seen in chapter 1. To them, it is inconceivable
that any woman would have maimed herself out of her own free will. In
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the world of the chantefables and Tang Daoist practices, however, the con-
cept of a “natural body” was alien. Men and women achieved their goals—
be they religious, material, social, or sensual—by working their bodies.
Reﬂecting this premodern Chinese view, the connoisseur Li Yu placed the
“burdens and uses” (lei and yong ) of the body on a continuum, a formula-
tion which is more useful than the modern discourse of “natural versus crip-
pled body.” According to the latter framework, one has either a natural or
a deformed body; according to the former, every self is a body that is open
to, or even requires, various degrees of manipulation.
Li Yu’s formulation, we may recall from the last chapter, is part of his “aes-
thetics of function.” His original usage focuses narrowly on bound feet. Prais-
ing courtesans from Datong, he wrote of their “having the smallest feet that
are not burdensome; having the smallest feet that are still functional.” When
applied to women with or without bound feet, the discourse of burden-and-
use allows us to view their bodies as they viewed them from the inside, as
both an obstacle and a vehicle to achieving whatever aspirations they may
have had, without our dictating for them what these goals are to be.
In the remainder of this chapter, I seek to understand the women’s per-
spectives and desires from their self-presentations—presentations of their
body-selves—by focusing on the footwear they produced, purchased, and
wore from the seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. In
taking stock of how women worked with and against their bodies, we map
the changing constellation of the burdens and uses of the female body dur-
ing the heyday and eventual demise of the cult of the golden lotus.

FRIVOLOUS BODIES: A NEW URBAN FASHION REGIME

Empress Xiaojing (1565–1611), consort of the Ming emperor Wanli (r.

1573–1620), was buried with a striking pair of high-heeled shoes, the best
material evidence of the new taste for miniaturization that has survived from
the Ming period. Made of pale red satin, the shoe uppers are rather small,
measuring only 12 cm (4.8 inches) in length (see ﬁg. 18, no. 3). The slightly
turned-up toes retain the silhouette of the bow-shaped shoes from the pre-
vious dynasties, whereas the 4.5 cm- (1.8 inch-) tall cylindrical heels announce
a new fashion regime. Embroidered lotus blossoms and leaves decorated the
vamp, and at the underside of the tip of the toes, embroidered pine and
bamboo. The oval heels, 7 cm (2.8 inches) long and 5 cm (2 inches) wide,
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are made of layers of thick straw paper, stitched together with plied silk yarn
and covered with plain red satin.38
Empress Xiaojing was a posthumous title awarded to Consort Wang, who
began her career in the inner palace as a maid in the chambers of Wanli’s
mother. In 1582, she was promoted to Imperial Consort two months before
giving birth to Wanli’s first son, the future heir apparent and emperor. By
then Wanli’s attention had turned elsewhere, and his futile eªorts to install
the son of his favorite Consort Zheng as heir brought court life to ruina-
tion. When Consort Wang died lonely and despondent in 1611, her body
was interred in a separate site. But as the mother of the new emperor upon
Wanli’s death in 1620, she was granted the privilege of resting alongside Wanli
and his o‹cial wife, the Empress Xiaoduan, in the magnificent Ding mau-
soleum.39 Xiaojing was a classic Cinderella, albeit she did not live happily
ever after.
Xiaojing was buried in her co‹n with four pairs of flat “phoenix-head”
( fengtou) shoes, 12.9 cm (5.2 inches) long (see fig. 18, no. 2). In a box placed
at the southern edge of her co‹n were two pairs of “cloud tip” (yuntou) shoes,
only 10.5 cm (4.2 inches) long (similar to fig. 18, no. 1).40 The empress’s high
heels were made of uppers similar in shape to these flat-soled shoes with
curled tips; there was no indication of the arched wooden soles that con-
temporary writers marveled at. It is likely that Xiaojing’s high-heeled shoes
were a prototype, marking the transition to a new fashion regime that em-
bodied the opulence and contradictions in Emperor Wanli’s world. The in-
fusion of silver money from the New World in exchange for silk and porce-
lain rocked the moral foundation of the empire, as historian Timothy Brook
has described in his splendidly titled book, The Confusions of Pleasure. The
sexual provocation of women’s footwear epitomizes the allure and dangers
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

of the money economy.

The splendor of arched wooden heels in the urban fashion regime found
its most vivid expression in The Plum in the Golden Vase ( Jinpingmei cihua;
also known as Golden Lotus), a novel that was ﬁrst published in 1618 but
that had circulated in manuscript form since 1596. The literature specialist
Shang Wei has remarked on the quotidian quality of the novel as the very
emblem of its modernity. Like an encyclopedia, the novel evokes the vivid
everydayness in the polygynous household of a merchant named Ximen
Qing, his six concubines, and a multitude of servants, maids, and hangers-
on, in an anecdotal and fragmentary manner. As such the novel epitomizes
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the profusion of desires and words that characterized the cultural market-
place in Wanli’s world.41
The encyclopedic quality of Plum in the Golden Vase is evinced by the
details that the author lavished on objects as prosaic as shoes. The three re-
lated themes of female-male seduction, female advancement, and compe-
tition among women that are so central to the rise of the cult of the golden
lotus—and the novel itself—find concrete expressions in the minutiae of
footwear in several legendary scenes. In chapter 4, Ximen Qing and Pan
Jinlian, a married woman, were flirting ferociously as they sat drinking in
Dame Wang’s teahouse. Cutting to the chase, Ximen deliberately brushed
a pair of chopsticks to the floor, which rested next to Jinlian’s feet.
Ximen Qing quickly stooped down to pick them up. Behold:
The up-turned points of her tiny golden lotuses,
Barely three inches long,
But half a span in length,
Peeked out beside the chopsticks.
Ximen Qing ignored the chopsticks but gave a gentle pinch to the embroidered
tip of her shoe.
The woman laughed out loud. “There’s no need to beat around the bush, sir.
If you’ve got a mind to it,
I’ve got the will.
Are you actually trying to seduce me?”

Embroidered slippers had acquired such an erotic charge that even a pinch
at the tip was immediately understood to be sexual provocation.
At this juncture, right there in Dame Wang’s room, the two of them:
Took oª their clothes, undid their girdles, and
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Enjoyed each other on the same pillow.42

Jinlian’s beauty, especially her tiny feet, was her ticket to success. She mur-
dered her vendor husband to become Ximen’s ﬁfth concubine, sowing seeds
of retribution that brought her violent death toward the novel’s end. Mean-
while, in Ximen’s household, Jinlian met her match in Song Huilian, the
wife of a servant with feet smaller than hers.43 Their contest comes to the
fore in chapter 23. Having refused to let Ximen use her bedroom for a tryst
with a lowly servant’s wife, Jinlian eavesdropped on the two as they spent
the night in a grotto in the garden.
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“It’s frigid in here!” [Huilian] continued. “Let’s go to sleep. What are you so
intent on examining my feet for anyway? You’d think you’d never seen anyone
with small feet before. The only thing is I don’t have any shoe uppers. Couldn’t
you contrive to buy me a pair tomorrow? I see other people making shoes all
the time, but I can’t make any for myself.”
“My child,” said Ximen Qing, “that’s no problem. Tomorrow I’ll buy you
several mace [coppers] worth of diªerent patterned uppers. Who would have
thought your feet are even smaller than the Fifth Lady’s?”
“There’s no comparison,” the woman said. “The other day I tried on one
of her shoes and found that I could wear it over my own. But it’s not size that
matters so much as the stylishness of the shoe.” 44

Huilian has mouthed the ultimate put-down, and Jinlian was understand-
ably incensed. In the end, Huilian’s exquisite feet did not win her a berth
in Ximen’s entourage of “wives,” symbolized by the privileges of a room of
her own and the leisure to design and sew stylish footwear. In this episode,
however, the failed Cinderella won a prize in the form of purchased, pre-
embroidered shoe uppers. She has moved up in the world.
In Ximen’s household there was a hierarchy of shoemaking labor. Hui-
lian and other servants stuck to the chore of stitching shoe soles, interstitial
labor that was the fact of life for countless farm women. Not much had
changed almost three centuries later when Ida Pruitt watched her neighbor
in rural Shandong sitting in her courtyard,
pasting the scraps of cloth—all left-over pieces, all the bits from worn-out
clothes— on a plank. After the pasteboard had dried on the plank leaning
against a sunny wall, she would pull it oª and cut it into shoe-sole sizes.
Sewing these lifts together with hempen twine was the work forever in the
hands of every woman. The half-done shoe soles with the long steel needle
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

stuck in one of the holes, the small drill and a loop of hempen twine, lay
on every window sill, ready to be picked up when there was time for a stitch
between other duties.45

By contrast, the mistresses of the house took to designing and making shoe
uppers with great seriousness and care. The opening scene in chapter 29
of Plum in the Golden Vase describes their preoccupation with magniﬁcent
details:
The story goes that the next morning Pan Jinlian got up early and sent
Ximen Qing on his way. Remembering that she wanted to make a new pair
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of red shoes for herself, she took her sewing box into the garden with her
and sat down on the stylobate of the Kingfisher Pavilion, where she began
to sketch the design to be embroidered on the vamps of her new shoes. She
sent [her maid] Chunmei to invite [sixth concubine] Li Ping’er to join her.
When Li Ping’er arrived, she asked, “What’s that you’re sketching, Sister?”
“I want to make a pair of shoes,” said Jinlian, “out of scarlet iridescent silk,
with flat white satin soles, the toes of which will be embroidered with the motif
of ‘A Parrot Plucking a Peach.’”
“I’ve got a square of scarlet variegated [ten-motif ] silk,” said Li Ping’er.
“I’ll make a pair just like yours, except that I want high heels on mine.”
Thereupon, she fetched her sewing box, and the two of them sat down
to work together.
When Jinlian had finished sketching the pattern on one vamp, she set
it aside, saying, “Sister Li, sketch the other one for me, will you? I’m going
to the rear compound to fetch Sister Meng the Third. She told me yesterday
that she was going to make a pair of shoes too.”
She went straight to the rear compound. Meng Yuelou was in her room,
leaning on the bedrail, stitching away at a shoe that she held in her hand.
When Jinlian came in the door, Yuelou said, “You’re up and about early
today.”
“I got up early,” said Jinlian, “and sent Father oª to attend the farewell
party for Battalion Commander He outside the South Gate. I’ve arranged
with Sister Li to do some needlework together in the garden while it’s still
cool in the morning. In a little while the sun will be too hot, and we won’t
be able to continue. I’ve just finished sketching the design for one shoe and
asked Sister Li to do the other one while I came straight over here to invite
you to join us. The three of us can do our work together.
“What kind of shoe is that you’re working on right now?” she went on
to ask.
“It’s that pair of jet silk shoes you saw me start on yesterday,” Yuelou replied.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

“What a fine fellow you are,” exclaimed Jinlian. “You’ve managed to finish
one of them already.”
“I stitched that one yesterday,” said Yuelou, “and I’ve already done a good
deal on this one.”
Jinlian asked to have a look at it and said, “What kind of decoration are
you going to put on the toe?”
“I’m not to be compared with you youngsters,” said Yuelou, “with your
flashy fashions. I’m too old for that. I’ll have gold-spangled toes, with a motif
of white mountains around them, stitched out with sand-green thread, white
satin soles, and high heels. How does that sound?”

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When Meng Yuelou arrived at the garden she asked Jinlian:

“What are you making ﬂat-soled red shoes for? They don’t look as nice as
high-heeled shoes. If you’re worried that wooden heels are too noisy, you
can put felt on them, as I do, and they won’t make a noise when you walk.”
“They aren’t for everyday wear,” said Jinlian. “They’re sleeping shoes.”

The night before, one of Jinlian’s red sleeping shoes had been stolen by a
servant’s son and soiled, hence she had to wear “a pair of sand-green pongee
sleeping shoes with scarlet heel lifts” to bed. Ximen, who adored red shoes,
urged Jinlian to make a new pair.46
Meng Yuelou’s suggestion of putting felt on wooden soles is the kind of
insight that would occur only to a woman. More than any of the notations
we have surveyed, this scene conveys not only the splendor of high heels
but also the fact that the architects of the fad were none other than the
women who designed, made, and wore them.47 The women’s attention to
choice of fabric, color coordination, and design of the vamps bespeaks the
importance of shoes to their wardrobe and the pleasures they derived from
them. Also evident are the way that shoemaking was enmeshed in the
women’s everyday lives and that this activity facilitated both female com-
panionship and competition.
I have not been able to locate any high-heeled slipper with a wooden sole
from the seventeenth century, and this scene helps explain why. For all the
attention lavished on their design and production, high-heeled shoes were
objects of frivolous consumption. They soiled and wore out easily, but even
before they did they had often become dated. In two days the entrepreneurial
Meng Yuelou managed to replenish her wardrobe with a new pair. The pre-
embroidered uppers that Ximen Qing was to procure from the market for
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Huilian must have given the domestic women an impetus for stylistic inno-
vation. Caught up in the vicissitudes of the fashion cycle, the embroidered
slipper, an object so central to women’s self-presentation and men’s erotic
imagination, was thus essential but ironically disposable and ephemeral.
Jinlian’s eagerness to make a new pair of red sleeping shoes is a useful re-
minder that there is no reprieve from the tyranny of fashion day or night,
indoor or outdoor. Not only the embroidered slippers but the full regalia
of footwear, from the sleeping shoes to leggings, were essential in lending the
golden lotus a splendid and mysterious aura. Sleeping shoes, which are not

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so diªerent from flats for outdoor wear except that the former are soft-soled,
acquired the same connotations of privacy and provocation as bras and
panties in the West: not that they were never taken oª, but the concealment
and subsequent undressing is more interesting than the exposure itself.48
Even more unmentionable was a loosened binding cloth. At the height
of the cult of the golden lotus, bare feet constituted such a taboo that for
all the risqué sex scenes in The Plum in the Golden Vase, only one hints at the
spectacle of naked feet. In a drunken orgy, Ximen “took oª [ Jinlian’s] red
embroidered shoes, unwound her foot bindings, and amused himself by
using them to suspend her two feet from the grape arbor overhead.”49 In
breaking a visual and textual taboo, this scene in chapter 27 is one of the
most famous (and infamous) in the novel, an emblem of the sexual license
and excesses in Ximen’s household. The connoisseur Li Yu, in his erotic novel
The Carnal Prayer Mat, written in 1657, explained that the naked foot is a
taboo because it is the ultimate turn-oª. In a bedroom scene, the protago-
nist Vesperus took oª all of Jade Scent’s clothes, “including her underwear
and breastband, everything but her leggings.” Li commented: “In the last
resort tiny feet need a pair of dainty little leggings above them if they are
going to appeal. Without leggings, they would be as unsightly as a flower
with no leaves around it.” 50
As designers, makers, and wearers of sleeping shoes or arched high heels,
the women engineered an artifice of concealment and illusion, thereby ma-
nipulating the viewer’s gaze. Their skill is one of condensing, of reducing
the messiness of the disintegrating world into their bare essentials—red satin
or white damask? Gold couching or green chain stitching? In lavishing so
much detail onto something as minuscule as the edge of the vamp, sole,
and especially the tip of her slippers, the shoemaker focused the boundless
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

desires and fascination of the world onto her body-self.

PRODUCTIVE BODIES:
SHOEMAKING AND THE MARKETPLACE

The philologist Hu Yinglin (1551–1618) complained that contemporary

women no longer made their own shoes, entrusting the job instead to
“needle-workers who specialize in such a task” (dangzhi zi fengren).51 Al-
though information on the economy of shoemaking is scarce, anecdotal data
suggest that the “needle-workers” were seamstresses or craftsmen for hire to
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wealthy families, making shoes to order. Unlike men’s shoes, female footwear
did not develop into a full-fledged commodity sold in stores until the mod-
ern period.
Commercial production of myriad household goods and personal items
became increasingly common from the sixteenth century on. Fan Lian, a
native of Songjiang and a keen observer of fashion trends, noticed a seis-
mic change in the production of men’s footwear: “At first commercial shoe-
making was limited to the operations run by palanquin-bearers from Nan-
jing; there were absolutely no shoe stores nor straw-shoes stores in Songjiang.
Since the Wanli reign [1573–1620], we began to see men making shoes. The
styles they made gradually became lighter and more refined, and they es-
tablished a cluster of stores to the east of the county seat. The palanquin-
bearer’s operations have thus become the lowest in the pecking order.”
The flourishing of commercial shoemaking was fanned by the ease of
travel and regional migration. A shoemaker by the name of Shi moved to
Songjiang from nearby Yixing and created a fad of straw shoes with the ex-
pertly braided ones he sold. “Thereupon Yixing shoemakers opened stores
in blocks of five or six in the city. These stores now number several hundred;
their prices are so cheap that the natives can feel the heat of competition.”52
“Men making shoes,” or the end of shoemaking by domestic women, is syn-
onymous with its commodification. From Fan’s description, however, it is
clear that these commercial shoes were styled for men.
The Portuguese Dominican friar Gaspar da Cruz, who visited the south-
ern city of Guangzhou (Canton) for a few weeks in the winter of 1556, de-
scribed a thriving shoe market there decades before the reign of Wanli. Im-
pressed with the abundance of shoes, which was to his mind emblematic of
the material wealth of China, he opened his chapter on “mechanical crafts-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

men” and “merchants” with footwear: “And because shoes are the thing that
most is spent, there are more workman of shoemakers than of any other
trade. In Cantam are two particular streets of shoemakers very long, one
where they sell rich shoes and of silk, another where they sell common shoes
of leather; and besides these two streets, there are many workmen scattered
about the city.” A pricing structure had developed: “The rich boots and shoes
are covered with colored silk, embroidered over with twisted thread of very
ﬁne work; and there be boots from ten crowns to one crown price . . . [s]o
that the rich and the very poor may wear shoes, and the rich as they list.
The shoes of three pence, or of a rial, are of straw.”53
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Besides workshops catering to local costumers, a regional footwear trade

also prospered. A 1599 almanac coached itinerant merchants on the merits
and demerits of footwear that various villages and cities specialized in: “The
cloth-soled cotton shoes from Flintstone Bridge, Zezhou, and Yangzhou are
very tight; the cotton shoes with straw- or hemp-braided soles from Feng-
xiang prefecture, Fenzhou, and Luzhou, in turn, are loose. Silk shoes from
Nanjing are uneven in height, and those from Suzhou tend to be only so-so.
But the platform-soled shoes [lü] from Nanjing are made of fine materials
with soft linings; they last. Those from Yangzhou have stiª linings and in-
ferior materials; they won’t last.”54 Fengxiang, Fenzhou, Luzhou, and Zezhou
are in the northwestern provinces of Shaanxi and Shanxi; Nanjing, Suzhou,
and Yangzhou are in Jiangnan. Commercial shoemaking, which was not de-
pendent on any rare raw materials, thrived in the heartland as well as the
periphery of the empire.
The almanac also encouraged local entrepreneurs to experiment with new
products and explore markets further afield: “Reed shoes from Jiangyin may
provide a viable living. Gather and sun-dry the reeds in early spring, seal them
with heavy paper, and store in bundles by the window or door. Be careful,
for they may discolor if exposed to wind or develop yellow spots if rained
on. After late autumn they are ready. The frequent tra‹c to Hunan and
Guangdong would guarantee a 50 percent profit.” Jiangyin is a river port on
the banks of the Yangzi. Another good location was the intersection of the
Yangzi and the Grand Canal: “Guazhou hemp shoes may provide another
viable living. Gather the hemp fibers around the turn of the year and air them
dry. Package the fine items with the coarse ones. The goods would find their
way north and south; traders are bound to show up and buy them.”55
Although the writers made no mention of the division of labor in the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

shoemaking families, we may surmise that regional specialization and long-

distance trade in footwear provided an additional means of livelihood for
women in farming households, alongside the spun yarn and other piece
goods they produced to supplement domestic income. The commercial-
ization of male footwear and the attendant rise of male professional shoe-
makers did not end women’s careers as shoemakers.
The circumstances of women as consumers of footwear are murky for
lack of textual and material evidence. It appears that the clientele of the shoe
stores in Songjiang and Guangzhou, as well as the itinerant wholesalers, were
men. The only hint that respectable women wore store-bought shoes was
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made by the Suzhou native Shen Fu (b. 1763). When his wife, Yun, desired
to attend a lantern festival dressed as a man, Shen suggested: “In the street
they sell ‘butterfly shoes’[hudie lü] in all sizes. They’re easy to buy, and af-
terwards you can wear them around the house. Wouldn’t they do?”56 Al-
though favored by stylish women as casual wear (and when they cross-dressed
in public), “butterfly shoes” were flat-soled footwear intended for men.
In the first decade of the nineteenth-century, a native of Yangzhou re-
marked that workshops in his hometown produced butterfly shoes far su-
perior to those in Suzhou and Hangzhou. The soft sole was stitched from
ten to twelve layers of fine felt, and the vamps were fashioned from plain
satin, imported wool, or silk crepe in purple or grey. The tip of the toes was
reinforced with an appliquéd jet-black felt or satin butterfly, hence the name.
When he was young, the writer remembered “buying” butterfly shoes for
0.5–0.6 ounces of jet silk, but by the late eighteenth century the stores were
asking 1.2–1.3 ounces of silver for a pair.57 Sturdy and comfortable, they re-
mained popular informal male footwear. It is conceivable that shoes for
women without bound feet were available in the stores alongside butterfly
shoes and other male footwear. It seems unlikely, however, that shoes for re-
spectable women with bound feet, which are vested with such power of
provocation, could be procured in such a manner.
This assumption is supported by the fact that in the Qing law courts and
theater, the embroidered slipper, especially the sleeping shoe, was such a
synecdoche of a woman’s sexuality that its very possession by a man other
than her husband su‹ced to intimate illicit union (see fig. 19). The murder
case of the twenty-three-year-old Woman Wang in Jinzhou in 1737 turned
on the key evidence of her green cotton sleeping shoes. Wang’s husband, a
vegetable peddler, borrowed money from Zhang Da, a thirty-three-year-old
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

friend, a vendor. On the morning of June 10, Zhang showed up and got
into a ﬁght with Wang after her husband had left the house. Wang, stabbed
in her face, neck, and abdomen, told county investigators that Zhang came
to reclaim his money and, upon seeing that she was alone, tried to rape her
but she resisted. Later in the day, she died from her wounds.
Caught by the couple’s landlord at the scene, Zhang was thrown in jail.
During his reexamination by a new magistrate he oªered a new line of de-
fense, saying that he had long been Wang’s lover. On June 9 he chanced
upon her having sex with another lover, Wu. He ﬂew into a rage when Wang
refused to sleep with him the following morning. As proof for his aªair with
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Wang he directed investigators to the sleeping shoes stowed in his inven-

tory box. Adding to Zhang’s credibility, Wu confessed to his illicit aªair when
interrogated. But the green shoes stood as the sole evidence for an alleged
aªair between Zhang and the now dead woman. Wang’s mother admitted
that she recognized them as “shoes that my daughter had made for herself.”
Wang’s husband, however, had never seen them. The judge opted to believe
Zhang.58
In another case from 1743, even a pair of outer shoes stowed in a man’s
luggage constituted cause for suspicion. Yu Qi was escorting his recently
married younger sister back to her new family after a natal family visit when
they passed through a village in Yongcheng, Henan, around midnight, and
sought lodging. A local boxer and ru‹an named Li, looking for an excuse
to cause trouble, cornered them and searched Yu’s bags, ﬁnding a pair of fe-
male shoes tucked inside his bedding. Li claimed that this was su‹cient proof
to him that Yu was trying to elope with his illicit lover. The case ended up
in court after the young bride, having been raped by Li, committed suicide.
The judge did not buy Li’s excuse, which in any case did not mitigate his
criminal act.59 However forced, Li’s defense attests to how commonplace it
was to construe women’s shoes as extensions of their private parts. If they
were commodities readily available in the marketplace, the frequent argu-
ment that they were tokens of illicit love would not have washed.

STYLISTIC CHANGES
AND TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women’s footwear was produced

at the intersection of the market and domestic economies. The advent of
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

high heels brought an end to the domestic production of female shoes ac-
cording to the classical requirements of “womanly work” as the foundation
of a self-su‹cient agrarian economy. In theory, a pair of shoes made of cot-
ton, hemp, or silk could have been the product of domestic women’s hands
in its entirety, untouched by market transactions. But the wooden sole re-
quired carpentry work that could only be procured from outside the
boudoir. The late-Ming courtesan Liu Rushi (1618–64) was said to have com-
missioned famous artisans to carve her wooden soles, including the most
sought-after bamboo carver of his day, Pu Zhongqian.60
The shoemaking scene from Plum in the Golden Vase suggests that do-
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CINDERELLA’S DREAMS 217
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mestic women did not stop making shoes. For everyday footwear, urban
women from households with cash to spare bought the components—the
wooden soles and pre-embroidered uppers—and assembled them at home.
There is also evidence that among the domestic help engaged by wealthy
families were teams of seamstresses who labored in the family compound
to supply the needs of family members.61 Such special-occasion shoes as
wedding shoes, gift shoes for in-laws and friends, and votive shoes oªered
to the gods did not belong to the realm of frivolous fashion but were ex-
tensions of the body-self; they were inevitably made by the wearer or devo-
tee from scratch.62 The aura of handmade artifacts could only be enhanced
in an age of commercial production, hence the design and embroidering
of shoe uppers, in contrast to stitching fabric soles, were deemed genteel
women’s work in Ximen Qing’s household.
Market tastes began to intrude into the boudoir by way of uncut pre-
embroidered uppers in the late Ming. We do not know the selection of vamps
that Ximen Qing was able to buy for Huilian, but the cross-fertilization
among the tastes of the marketplace, brothel, and boudoir is evident in a
tendency toward over-ornamentation. Song and Yuan shoes for bound feet
were monochrome, in such muted neutral colors as pale yellow and em-
broidered in outline stitching with ﬂoss of the same color. Although more
dramatic, Empress Xiaojing’s pale-red high heels are also single-colored.
Sometimes made of textured damask or brocade and decorated with a tiny
bow, the earlier shoes are quiet, with a ﬁne aesthetic sensitivity that focuses
the eyes on the shimmering light of the thread that reveals subtle variations
in texture.
The handiwork of the ladies in Ximen Qing’s household announces a new
multicolored palette featuring primary colors. Red or black vamps are con-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

trasted with white soles or green heel tabs; gold couching stands out on pur-
ple vamp. Peach red uppers are edged in gold leather. Tian Yiheng (ﬂ. 1609)
conﬁrmed that gilded lamb skin was a new material that shoemakers of his
day used lavishly for women’s slippers.63 The palette became more varie-
gated and the color combinations more striking as time went on, and by
the end of the Qing embroidery stitching in a cascade of contrasting color
was the norm.
The profusion of auspicious symbols on every surface of Qing material
culture, from porcelain and paintings, to textiles and robes, was also evi-
dent on shoe designs. The games of visual punning became increasingly so-
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phisticated; a bat ( fu) standing for fortune ( fu) no longer su‹ced. Fertility
and conjugal happiness, two ardent desires that undergirded almost every
motif embroidered on shoe uppers and soles, found concrete expressions in
a colorful array of images: lotus, butterfly, pomegranate, double coins, melon
and vine, goldfish, peach, and the eight immortals. As if seeking a reprieve
from this overload of good wishes, commercial uppers became spare, vague,
and abstract toward the dynasty’s end. The even and expertly executed stitch-
ing coupled with formulaic floral designs found on the majority of late-Qing
slippers attests to the fact that footwear, after all, is a mundane business.
When embroidery became too tiresome, brush-painting on shiny starched
cloth vamps mass-produced a new look in 1904–11 (see fig. 7d).64
Domestic assembly of purchased components remained the dominant
mode of production for bound-foot shoes during the Qing dynasty. In the
nineteenth century, professional carpenters made wooden heels and soles in
standardized sizes and styles, and male peddlers hawked them along with
heel stiªenings and other sewing implements, calling out, “Come buy wooden
soles!” as they went (see fig. 7e). In Jiangsu, peddlers carried carving knives
to make adjustments, in a procedure known as “lathing wooden soles” (che
mudi). A wood file was a standard tool in village households in the Tianjin
area for fine-tuning. According to a rare report about the trade in late-Qing
Hebei and Shandong in Picking Radishes, three types of pre-made wooden
soles were available, in descending order of popularity: heels, front taps, and
full heel-to-toe soles.65
The standard sizing of pre-made shoe components gives a rough indica-
tion of the average sizes of bound feet. The full sole came in sizes 1 (7.6
inches) to 10 (3.3 inches). The heels, which extended to the mid-point of
the shoe, also came in ten standard sizes, in increments of 0.3 inch, with
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

size 1 at 4.8 inches, size 2 at 4.5 inches, down to size 10, 2.1 inches. The car-
penters generally sold the heels at wholesale in strings of ten pairs, one each
of the ten diªerent sizes. Retailing vendors, however, would sell the bigger
ones at a higher price. Most readily available were the middling sizes 3–7
(4.2 inches to 3 inches, which means shoes 8.4 to 6 inches long), and the
biggest sizes of 1 and 2 tended to be the ﬁrst to sell out.
The pricing structure was also standardized, at least for the northern re-
gion where data are available. If the vendor desired additional pairs of sizes
1 and 2, he would have to add a forty percent premium to the wholesale
price. Carpenters also made soles of speciﬁc curvatures and sizes to order.
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If the design required additional lathing on the top, bottom, and sides of
the standard soles, he would charge five times the wholesale price. If only
one side of special lathing was needed, the price was doubled. In Jiangsu, a
standard pair retailed at 4 coppers (wen) in the 1880s. By the 1900s the price
had doubled, but business soon tapered oª as the anti-footbinding move-
ment spread.66
The making of shoe uppers was less commercialized. The earliest extant
examples of mechanically reproduced shoe patterns appear in a household
almanac entitled Precious Mirror of Feminine Virtues (Kunde baojian) pub-
lished in 1777.67 Gathered in the last two fascicles ( juan 8–9) are a wealth
of sewing and embroidery patterns in actual sizes, covering the span of small
personal eªects for men, women, and children. Fascicle 8 features primar-
ily objects for men’s use, to be given to men as souvenirs, or for children:
male hats, children’s hats, four styles of purses, toothpick holder, fan cases,
pincushions, powder puªs, paper bags, pillow ends, children’s shoes (fig.
20a), men’s shoes. Fascicle 9 focuses on female clothing: headbands, ker-
chiefs, children’s headbands, women’s collars, straight lapels, big sleeves, small
sleeves, skirt panels, trim for the bottom of pant legs, floral embroidery mo-
tifs for shoes, cloud embroidery motifs for shoes, cloud embroidery motifs
for the shafts of boots (fig. 21a), cloud appliquéd motifs for shoes (fig. 21b).68
The other seven fascicles of the almanac are fashioned entirely from re-
cycled materials culled from two textual traditions: moral instruction books
and such practical household encyclopedias as The Forest of Aªairs and Es-
sentials for Domestic Living.69 The compiler, Tanmian daoren (Taoist adept
who sleeps in a jar), stated his purpose: “Women may use this book in their
fragrant pavilions or leave it by their sewing boxes, so that the two can keep
each other company day and night. May their hearts be stirred just by look-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

ing at the book, so that they would know the teachings of ‘thrice following’
and the ‘four virtues.’ May they know that such household chores as draw-
ing water, grinding grain, and needlework are not just the preserve of the
poor and the mean, but should not be ignored even by daughters of privi-
lege.” The rhetoric places Precious Mirror in the tradition of didactic texts
admonishing women to adhere to their domestic calling. At ﬁrst glance, the
almanac seems to decry the degeneracy of the commercial age; women had
neglected the requisite womanly work for so long that they needed to be
taught anew the skill of drawing patterns.
Underneath and against its own rhetoric, however, Precious Mirror has
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far less to do with domestic virtues than with the culture of the market-
place. Issued by a commercial publisher, it is in itself a commodity. Surely
the sewing and embroidery patterns could have been an inspiration for ladies
in the boudoir, but they were likely to be more helpful to a class of minimally
educated daughters who desired to produce value-added piece goods for the
market but suªered from a lack of artistic education. It is no accident that
all the patterns are small and the design of the clouds, flora, and fauna generic.
There was an enormous market in such small personal eªects as purses, fan
cases, and children’s hats, all standard gifts and requisite social lubricants
for friends and strangers. Small textile goods in the form of collars or sleeve
facings were the mainstay in embroidery stores (xiuzhuang ), which sold them
to the busy housewife or tailor to fashion into finished garments.
Instead of being an instrument for reviving domestic textile production
as claimed, Precious Mirror is a testament to the intrusion of the market into
the former and to the formulaic modular designs that dulled the viewer’s
mind that resulted from it. In this light, it is significant that although generic
designs for embroidering women’s shoe uppers proliferated, no outline
pattern of the shoes themselves was included. The latter appeared in printed
form only in the last decade of the Qing dynasty, suggesting that until then,
the skills of designing, cutting, and assembling shoes for bound feet remained
knowledge transmitted from one seamstress to another by personal exam-
ple. They had remained, in other words, embodied female knowledge.
Precious Mirror of Feminine Virtues must have met a fervent demand, for
it remained in circulation into the nineteenth century in the form of an almost
identical copy of the two chapters of patterns meticulously traced by hand
using an extra-fine calligraphic brush (fig. 20b, 21c-d). The single handmade
copy, which is in fact more exquisite than the original, must have consumed
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

an inordinate amount of time.70 Perhaps this is only natural, for by the turn
of the last century any material production or reproduction that bears a tac-
tile imprint of bodily traces appears precious, a mirror into the bygone days
when women embroidered and stitched an entire world into existence.

THE LAST FASHION CYCLES

The invention of high heels created a frivolous, urban fashion regime and
ushered in the cult of the golden lotus in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies. Paradoxically, footwear fashion reached the second summit of its cre-
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ative power during the demise of the golden lotus at the turn of the last cen-
tury (see fig. 9). By then perfected as an integument of concealment, “basic
footwear” comprised three or four layers: binding cloth, sock, soft-soled slip-
per, and outer shoe or bootie. Leggings, leg-binders, ankle bracelets, and pants
or a long skirt completed the ensemble at the lower body (see figs. 14, 22).
Shoes had become the keepers of the exterior presentation of the body-
self. Be they exposed and accentuated by leg binders that extended from the
ankle to the knee or peeking demurely from under a long skirt, their de-
sign, color, and fitting were crucial to the overall “look” that a woman de-
sired to achieve. In the transitional decade of the 1890s to 1900s, the pop-
ularity of Kun-style shoes and booties with a gently relaxed arched sole
reflected the adaptation that the fashion regime made to the anti-footbinding
movement (see figs. 6, 7). Kun shoes derived their allure from the residual
aura of high heels, but at the same time they announced the end of the era
of the golden lotus. The arch of the shoes, like the arch of the foot, became
progressively flatter as the twentieth century advanced. In the 1920s and
1930s, stylistic and technological innovations in female footwear were driven
by the incorporation of Western structures, designs, and materials. Kun shoes
and booties are the last elegant heeled footwear for bound feet produced in
the Chinese shoemaking tradition.
Underneath the shoes, socks or sleeping slippers are akin to the modern
camisoles: their main function as “underwear” is less as body-shaper than
as a frontier of provocation. They add a layer of intrigue to the admirer’s
eyes and present a barrier in disrobing, prolonging the pleasure of anticipa-
tion. This is why in the 1890s, when prostitutes led the fashion cycle in foot-
wear as harbingers of change, much of their creative energy was focused on
the design and positioning of the sleeping slippers, changing slippers, and
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

socks. The arrival of sleeping slippers worn as outer shoe in 1908–11, on the
eve of the collapse of the imperium, signaled the end of the old order of seduc-
tion. There is nothing more to expose and nothing more to hide.
As intimate textile next to the skin, the binding cloth was the most es-
sential foundational garment. Like a straight-fronted corset in the Art Nou-
veau period (1890s–1900s) that helped reshape the wearer’s body into the
fashionable S-curve, the binding cloth molded the foot into the requisite
shapes and silhouettes according to the whims of fashion: a bulged arch with
rounded tip at the toes this year; a ﬂatter arch with straighter toes next year.
As the retroactively reconstructed chronology in Picking Radishes (see ﬁg.
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THE BODY CONCEALED 222
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22) shows, the wheels of footwear fashion turned at a robust pace during
the years from 1894 to 1911, at the height of the o‹cial anti-footbinding
movement. New styles and silhouettes appeared every three to four years.
The binding cloth performed its feat without alterations in its physical
design or structure; therein lay its diªerence from corsetry in a most im-
portant way. The cloth binder manipulated the presentation of the body-
self not by the insertion of whale bone stays or padding. It remained the
long strip of fabric that it had been since the beginning of footbinding’s his-
tory, as evinced by the remains of the mid-thirteenth-century ladies Huang
Sheng and Zhou discussed above. The fabric had changed with the in-
creasingly arduous binding regimen in the Ming and Qing periods; plain
woven cotton with a slightly rough touch to the hand—which would nei-
ther slide nor give—became the fabric of choice.71 Observers have reported
that the binding cloth was among the last articles that women hand-wove
on domestic looms in Yunnan and Taiwan.72 Imported white cloth was also
used when available. The width, length, and color of the binding cloth may
vary with the age of user and the occasion; young girls, for example, some-
times used indigo-dyed cloth to enhance healing. But the basic design and
principle had remained constant for centuries.
The foundation for changes in the fashion regime is far more subtle: it
inheres in the user, not the implement. In Picking Radishes, someone using
the pseudonym of Plain Girl explained the incredible burden this material
fact placed on the nimbleness and skill of the woman. Because variations
in the dimensions of the binding cloth are slight, choosing the right size re-
quired nuanced understanding of one’s own bodily conditions and the de-
sired stylistic eªect. The length of the cloth, she explained, can range from
ﬁve or six feet to seven or eight feet; some are even longer than ten. But any
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

cloth shorter than five feet would not su‹ce for the requisite five or seven
wrappings. The optimal width of the cloth is six-tenths of the length of the
foot; in practice three inches is the average width. Any cloth narrower than
two-and-a-half inches or wider than three-and-a-half inches would be
di‹cult to manage.
Even more unforgiving is the manipulation of the binding cloth. The
traditional seven layers of wrapping involved dexterity of fingers and an
intimate, intuitive understanding of the anatomy of one’s own feet. First,
position the binding cloth under the ball of the foot, bring it up to the top
and fold the four digits downward, leaving the big toe unfettered. Second,
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CINDERELLA’S DREAMS 223
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bring the cloth up and restrain the middle of the foot sideways. Third, wrap
around the big toe and work backward to the heel. Fourth, push the heel
forward and work upward to the big toe, this time leaving it unbound, to
apply a second wrapping on the folded digits. Fifth, cross to the pushed heel,
secure it and apply a second sideways wrapping to the middle of the foot.
Sixth, reinforce the big toe and work backward. Seventh, bring the cloth to
the inside arch of the foot after a final wrapping of the heel and secure the
end with needle and thread. Controlling the tension of the cloth at each
step served to mold the foot into desirable shapes.73 When footbinding was
a viable practice, such measurements and procedures would have been in-
tuitive knowledge to the women. Only at the end of footbinding’s history
would it be necessary to commit such knowledge to writing for the curious
outsider and posterity.
But that is the historian’s perspective, not the women’s. Anti-footbind-
ing measures came and went; as did the tides of fashion. Deft fingers con-
tinued to wield the binding cloth day after day, shaping and reshaping the
foot to fit into the new flat pointy tips, the tiny satin Mary Janes, or the tri-
angular leather oxfords in the 1920s and 1930s. The body could be stubborn
and the binding of feet burdensome, but when the fingers were at work all
else was forgotten. Shoes and socks could easily be store-bought, worn and
discarded; they are merchandise in a commercialized regime of fashion. A
pair of bound feet, however, was inalienable. Once bound, they required
assiduous maintenance according to the demands of hygiene and fashion.
A pair of shapely bound feet was the lifelong handiwork of the woman.
The least eroticized among the implements for footbinding, the binding
cloth was also the last item taken oª the domestic loom. Although indis-
pensable, it did its work virtually unseen, from the inside, and without
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

decoration. More than the ﬂowery words of men and the spectacular but
hollow shoes, the binding cloth remained the preserve of the woman’s pro-
ductive, private body-self.

RESIDUAL MEMORIES

I arrived in Liuyi village in Yunnan province early in the morning, and I

was too late. The vast courtyard in front of the village’s senior center was
empty, rendering the huge couplet on the side wall all the more eye-catching:
“The last song of the golden lotus; / Stepping to the dance as the rooster
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THE BODY CONCEALED 224
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crows” ( jinlian juechang, wenji qiwu). The sign marks the performance soon
to begin exclusively for me as a tourist site, the same way that notable inscrip-
tions announce the entrance to the Song pavilion in nearby Elegant Hill.
Since the 1990s tourism magazines and television programs have promoted
Liuyi as “Footbinding Village,” the last bastion of the practice in China.74
During peak tourist season there would be several dance performances every
week.
Tonghai county, of which Liuyi village is a part, was settled by Han sol-
diers brought by the powerful Mu family from Nanjing during the early
years of the Ming dynasty. Having defeated the indigenous Yi, Bai, Tai, and
Hani peoples, the Han immigrants established six camp-like villages on the
southern shores of Lake Jilu. Local legends attribute the beginnings of foot-
binding and a high level of civility in the area to the settlement (see fig. 14).75
In the mid-1980s there were five to six hundred women with bound feet in
the predominantly Han village. Today, Liuyi is a prosperous exporter of napa
cabbage and other fresh produce to cities as far away as Beijing. Among
the population of over nine thousand there remain only about eighty golden-
lotus ladies.
Ma Qiaofen, a physical education coach at the senior center, told me that
footbound women in the village have danced for visitors since 1985 (for a
negotiable fee). Ma, a congenial and robust Yi-minority woman who mar-
ried into the village thirty years ago, does not have bound feet. In 1984, about
one hundred fifty of the tiny-footed women took the initiative in organiz-
ing a senior sports association, gaining instant fame when their croquet team
beat the big-footed contingent from the county seat. Since then they have
competed in regional and national tournaments. The disco-on-bound-feet
routine they developed also became a media sensation.76
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Inside the main hall, seven women in blue polyester tunics trimmed in
red sat on low benches, quietly awaiting their spectator. Underneath balloon-
shaped white pants they wore white cotton socks and flat embroidered slip-
pers made of bright red polyester in Mary Jane style. I noticed that the
majority had “liberated feet” that were flat and without the bulge, much
like the style in the initial stage of footbinding’s history. The only two with
triangular arched feet—which retain the shape after “liberation”—were,
not surprisingly, also the oldest: Xiao Xiuxiang is eighty-four and Pu Jifen,
seventy-eight. Tonghai county was famous for its handwoven cotton cloth
in the first half of the twentieth century.77 Xiao and Pu are both old enough
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CINDERELLA’S DREAMS 225
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to have worked at the loom for their families. Pu Jifen retains the reputa-
tion among her friends as the best embroiderer and shoemaker.
The dancers filed into position, each holding a bamboo flute as the mu-
sic sounded from a cassette recorder. No prompting was needed; the reper-
toire must have been familiar. Gliding across a spectrum from the civil to
martial arts, they followed the flute dance with a sword dance and a tai-chi
dance which looked remarkably like the exercise routine seen in early morn-
ing parks across China. Their steps steady and stately, their bodies surpris-
ingly supple for their age, the women showed no expression on their faces.
It looked as though they were either engrossed in the present moment or
dancing a dance that belonged to a life and time far removed from their
own. Afraid to break the spell when the music stopped, I applauded with
mu›ed hands.
To break the ice, I asked casually if they still do textile work. No, some-
one replied, the family loom was taken down and turned into firewood eons
ago. Xiao Xiuxiang and Pu Jifen flashed a playful grin. Without missing a
beat, they both raised their left arms into mid-air as if they were sitting in
front of a loom. Their pair of arched feet stepping on what would have been
treadles, they moved their right arms back and forth as if shu›ing a shut-
tle cock in perfect coordination. Neither the croquet nor the dances they
learned in the recent past have displaced or erased the earlier regimen of
productive labor. Their bodies remember.

A way of life has become history: the hand-weaving technology is obsolete,

the livelihood nulliﬁed along with it, and the culture of binding feet is vili-
ﬁed. Yet the body remembers. When the body expires, the sediment of resid-
ual memories, the layers of history that the body bears witness to, and the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

repertoire of skills that have woven colorful and textured worlds will dis-
appear along with it. With my mind’s eye, I took a snapshot of the two old
women working their imaginary looms, and in that instant I knew that not
only had I collected my trophy souvenir but I had also witnessed the con-
clusion to this book.

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EPILOGUE

The pursuit of beauty, status, sex, culture, money: footbinding is implicated

in every one of these human desires, but in themselves these drives for self-
betterment or gratification cannot account for the ferocity with which foot-
binding spread, sprouting a surprising array of literary forms and material
cultures along the way. Envy, cruelty, violence, objectification: these horri-
ble things that men do to others are also part of the story, but they are in-
adequate explanations for the longevity of the practice and the stubborn-
ness with which women embraced and perpetuated it. At once beautiful
and ugly, neither voluntary nor coerced, footbinding defies a black-and-
white, male-against-female, and good-or-bad way of understanding the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

world.
As conclusion to this book I can oªer no convenient culprit, facile ex-
planations, or neat narratives. The parts are bigger than their sum; the his-
tory of footbinding does not add up. It has to be sought in the incongruities,
repetitions, and omissions in the textual and material archives. The whole
millennium-long history is a bit out of kilter, if not downright absurd: In
the beginning, the word preceded the deed; toward the end the deed ex-
hausted and exceeded all justiﬁcations. In between these two extremes,
women lived in the mundane realities of their bodies while aspiring to a
better life.
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EPILOGUE 228
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The aesthetic ideal of tiny feet and dainty steps ﬁrst appeared as poetic
allusions to enchanting but distant goddesses in the Six Dynasties period.
Eulogies of brocade slippers and shoelaces became increasingly graphic and
acquired an erotic charge in the boudoir poetry of the Tang dynasty. The
poet’s imagination was translated into material forms in subsequent dynas-
ties, as “every step a lotus” heels or “echoed hallway” soles became prized
items in fashionable women’s wardrobes. But the absence of contemporary
criticisms and the lack of archaeological remains suggest that the binding
of feet had yet to be realized as an actual practice before the fall of the Tang.
Although male desires for bound feet were born of and perpetuated by
poetic allusions, the written word enjoyed far less persuasive power among
women. A handful of literate women in the Ming and Qing dynasties did
participate in poetic exercises, but women learned about the burdens and
uses of footbinding primarily from the performing arts and material culture—
realms that were inﬂuenced by the world of the literati but were by no means
contained by it. For this reason I have sought female perspectives not from
women’s poetry, but from ballads, vernacular plays, household almanacs,
and the material remains themselves. However dominant, male desires and
tastes cannot account for the longevity let alone the geographical and social
scope of footbinding.
In seeking female incentives I have avoided the language of “free choice.”
Modern critics often imagine that traditional Chinese women would have
rebelled if given a choice, and the fact that they did not attests to the dra-
conian success of Confucian patriarchy. This erroneous view derives from
a modern, individualistic valorization of free choice that structures our de-
sires but not theirs. It is true that from the sixteenth century on, women did
not have a “choice”: any daughter from Han Chinese families whose eco-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

nomic circumstances could remotely allow them to bind would. Even those
who could not aªord to did. Footbinding was not merely an announcement
of status and desirability to the outside world, but also a concrete embod-
iment of self-respect to the woman herself.
Gayatri Spivak has construed “free choice” as “the radical and voluntary
rearrangement of desires.” Female desires were so “rearranged” by the fash-
ion regime and sediments of culture in the late imperial period that not-
binding became unthinkable, in the same way that choosing to bind is un-
thinkable to us. Instead of resisting, the women applied their imagination
and skills to the pursuit of perfect pairs of footwear and the most advanta-
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EPILOGUE 229
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geous angle of presentation, vying to outdo their sisters and neighbors in

the choice of fabric, novelty of style, and workmanship. To them, the ap-
peal of footbinding is located in the fantastic lives of shoes as fashionable
and ritualized objects. Without the participation of women, footbinding
would not have spread so far in the face of persistent and vehement oppo-
sition by moralizing and pontificating men.
Although the exact mechanisms of transmission remain dimly understood,
during its spread across geographical and social boundaries, the practice of
binding feet sedimented in local cultures and acquired a concrete reality in
the minutiae of everyday life—rituals, colloquialisms, footwear styles, and
gestures of the body. In due time, a once alien practice that belonged to the
“other woman” became a matter-of-fact way of living in one’s body. On both
the collective and personal levels, the persuasive power of footbinding was
rooted in this power to switch perspectives, to create novel views on a fa-
miliar body, to inculcate a new “common sense,” and indeed to remake the
world.
In light of this localized, embodied nature of footbinding’s reality and its
propensity to change, I stated my thesis at the outset that there is not one
footbinding but many. Instead of oªering blanket statements or a compre-
hensive history in this book, I have presented my readings of what I take to
be the most intriguing texts and objects produced during footbinding’s
long history. In structuring the chapters so that they introduce a succession
of local, partial, and often conflicting viewpoints, I hope to create an open-
ended space in which each reader will not only come to his or her own con-
clusions but also continue to reassess them.
Footbinding began as an act of embodied lyricism—to live as the poets
imagined—and ended as a ridiculous exercise of excess and folly. In the final
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

analysis, self-contradiction—the ability to encompass conﬂicting desires

and the tendency to turn against itself—is the only enduring trait of foot-
binding as a social practice and as a subject of knowledge. For this reason,
it continues to both repel and fascinate long after it has ceased to be a viable
practice.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION
1. Stephen West uttered these two words in a casual conversation at Columbia
University, Oct. 2002.
2. A notable exception in English is Howard S. Levy’s Chinese Footbinding: The
History of A Curious Erotic Custom (Taipei: Nantian shuju, 1984). The rhetoric of
disavowal that Levy adopted is a thinly veiled disguise of his fascination and long-
ing. This stance is remarkably similar to that of Yao Lingxi, the compiler of the en-
cyclopedic Caifeilu (Picking radishes). The fragmentary structure of Levy’s book is
modeled after Caifeilu, which also supplies much of his substantive data. For the
complicated stance of Yao and Levy as well as the generation of new knowledge
and desires from textual imitation, see chapter 3 of the present book. An exception
in Chinese is Gao Hongxing’s Chanzu shi ([A history of footbinding ] Shanghai:
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1995), which is less a historical than an ethnographic

study, based almost entirely on information culled from Caifeilu.
3. One consequence of my decision to focus on footbinding as a lifelong process
in this book is that footbinding often appears as something that women practiced
on themselves. For the dynamics of transmitting footbinding from mother to daugh-
ter, see my Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century
China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 169–71.
4. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. with
an introduction by Philip Rieª (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 214–19. See
also Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (New York and Lon-
don: Marion Boyars, 1991), pp. 81–85. Rey Chow has critiqued Kristeva’s reading
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of footbinding as female castration in her Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Pol-
itics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), pp. 6–7. On the related issue of female fetish, I have learned more from my
former undergraduate students at Rutgers Stephanie Capneau and Samantha Pinto
than from published volumes.
5. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin Books,
1994), pp. 148–49. This classic was first published in 1899.
6. Hill Gates, “Footbinding and Homespinning in Sichuan: Capitalism’s Am-
biguous Gifts to Petty Capitalism,” in Constructing China: The Interaction of Cul-
ture and Economics, ed. Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Shuen-fu Lin, and Ernest P. Young
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 177–94. For the petty capi-
talist mode of production, see her China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capi-
talism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Delia Davin is the first to explain
the popularity of footbinding by the mode of economic production. In the north,
where dry-field agriculture dominated, footbinding flourished, in contrast to the
wet-rice regions in the south (Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary
China [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978], pp. 117–18).
7. Laurel Bossen, Chinese Women and Rural Development: Sixty Years of Change
in Lu Village, Yunnan (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2002); quote
from p. 45. See also pp. 73–75 for Bossen on the correlation between the history of
technological change and footbinding from 1800 to the 1950s. For “cultureless
custom,” see Gates, “Footbinding and Homespinning,” pp. 180–82.
8. These interviews were conducted in Beiping before 1938 and were first pub-
lished in 1945 (Ida Pruitt, A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Work-
ing Woman [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967], p. 22). Pruitt (b. 1888)
spent the first twelve years of her life in Penglai, a village in Shandong. In her mem-
oir A China Childhood (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, Inc., 1978), Pruitt
related how footbinding was practiced by all but the most deprived women in this
part of the country in the 1890s, from the daughter of the local physician to Dada,
her peasant caretaker. Dada’s youngest daughter did not have bound feet, and was
called “a prostitute” (89). So prestigious was footbinding that the daughter imitated
the sway of women with bound feet, and a refugee woman had “token binding”
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

(158). I am grateful to Sarah Scheenwind, who brought this book to my attention.

9. For an overview of the history of an enduring European fascination with
footbinding since the sixteenth century, see my “Bondage in Time: Footbinding
and Fashion Theory,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, & Culture 1, no. 1
(March 1997): 3–28. For an in-depth investigation of one chapter of this history,
see Sandra May Adams, “Nineteenth Century Representations of Footbinding to
the English Reading Public,” Ph.D. diss., University of Macau, 1993. I thank Dr.
Chi-sheng Ko for making this study available.
10. Another often-cited explanation, that footbinding kept women in the house
by crippling them, is a distinctly modern theory that gained currency during the

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NOTES TO PAGES 4–9 233
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anti-footbinding movement. The didactic work Nürenjing, in which this reason-

ing was articulated, is a modern text that has no bibliographic and textual traces
before the late nineteenth century. The logic of the construct and its premise that
mobility is desirable are modern biases. It could not have provided a plausible ex-
planation for footbinding’s spread during the imperial times. Not only was the vir-
tue of binding feet never mentioned in the Confucian didactic literature, it also
flies in the face of empirical evidence that footbound gentrywomen did travel out-
side of their homes without detriment to their moral respectability. I have argued
that the relationship between footbinding and Confucianism is extremely ambiva-
lent. For the women, footbinding amounted to the achievement of Confucian goals
(modesty and civility) using an anti-Confucian means (maiming the body). See my
“Footbinding as Female Inscription,” in Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present
in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, ed. Benjamin Elman, John Duncan, and Her-
man Ooms (Los Angeles: Asia Pacific Monograph Series in International Studies,
UCLA, 2002).
11. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Oªer: French Feminists and the Rights
of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 2.
12. Bill Kirby first planted this question of finality in my head at the end of a talk
I gave at Harvard University in March 1992. For the past decade it has guided my
approach to footbinding’s history, and I would like to acknowledge his inspiration.
13. Feminists who believe in a universal patriarchy may disagree. Mary Daly, fol-
lowing Andrea Dworkin, sees the oppression of women today in the form of plas-
tic surgery as synonymous with footbinding, female genital cutting, and Nazi medi-
cal experiments. See Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1978). See also Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: Plume, 1974). I
have articulated my disagreement in an earlier article, “The Sex of Footbinding,” in
Good Sex: Women’s Religious Wisdom, ed. Radhika Balakrishnan, Mary E. Hunt, and
Patricia Beattie Jung (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

1. GIGANTIC HISTORIES OF THE NATION IN THE GLOBE

1. “Xiaojiao beige huashang xiuzhifu” (The sad song of small feet has come to
a full stop), Xinmin wanbao, Nov. 22, 1999. Production of these pointy shoes started
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

only in 1991, “using old designs and traditional handwork techniques.” It is not clear
if the shoes were leather or fabric. Silk or cotton shoes—the predominant tradi-
tional Chinese footwear—required no lasts for stretching the upper onto the soles,
only for ironing the vamp. Orders poured in from throughout the country. A dis-
patch from the Xinhua News Agency (dateline Beijing) on Oct. 26, 1998, stated
that in the ﬁrst two years of production, over two thousand pairs of shoes were sold
annually (http://www.sfmuseum.org/chin/foot.html). For photographs of four
single modern leather shoes made for (once-)bound feet, see my Every Step a Lotus:
Shoes for Bound Feet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001),
p. 135.

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NOTES TO PAGES 10–12 234
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2. See, for example, Zhang Zhong, Xiaojiao yu bianzi (Taipei: Youshi wenhua
shiye gongsi, 1995); Dai Qing and Luo Ke, Chanzu nüzi: Dangdai Zhongguo nü-
xing wenti (Hong Kong: Mingbao chubanshe, 1996); Wang Zijin, Bozu diguo:
Zhongguo chuantong jiaotong xingtai yanjiu (Lanzhou: Dunhuang wenyi chuban-
she, 1996). The title of a popular book of Qing cultural history by Wang Dong-
fang says it all: March to Modernity: Braid-Cutting and Feet-Liberating (Maixiang
xiandai: jianbian yu fangzu [Shenyang: Liaohai chubanshe, 1997]). See also Liang
Jinghe’s substantive section on anti-footbinding in his unabashedly polemical book,
Jindai Zhongguo lousu wenhua shanbian yanjiu ([A study of the evolution of the cul-
ture of undesirable customs in modern China] Beijing: Shoudu shifan daxue chuban-
she, 1998), pp. 204–22. Although published in English, Fan Hong’s Footbinding,
Feminism, and Freedom: The Liberation of Women’s Bodies in Modern China (Lon-
don: Frank Cass, 1997) is informed by the same liberationist rhetoric and dichoto-
mous view of history. Two other books from the same period on the ethnography
of footbinding, by Gao Hongxing and Yao Jushun, are exceptional in adopting an
objective tone. Although Yao’s Zhongguo chanzu fengsu (Shenyang: Liaoning daxue
chubanshe, 1991) was presented as an original work, the first nine chapters are in
fact verbatim translations of Okamoto Ryuzo’s Tensoku monogatari (Tokyo: Toho
shoten, 1986 [first published 1963]). On reflections on culturalism, tradition, and
modernity during the mid- to late-1980s, see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism
in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cin-
ema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997).
3. For state prohibitions, see Sun Yat-sen’s 1912 edict in CFL II: 39. Lin Qiumin
has pointed out that it was never implemented on the national level (“Yan Xishan
yu Shanxi de tianzu yundong,” Guoshiguan guankan, fukan [new series] 18 [ June
1995]: 143). Using primarily missionary and foreign accounts, Christena Turner has
unearthed remarkable local variations in the practice of binding feet and the tim-
ing of its end. She has argued that such variations expose the fragility of the veneer
of cultural integration that bound “China” together into a meaningful entity. It also
destabilizes the integrity of “footbinding” as a category (“Locating Footbinding:
Variations across Class and Space in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century
China,” The Journal of Historical Sociology 10, no. 4 [Dec. 1997]: 444–79).
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

4. Two surgeons studied the feet of women with bound feet in Hong Kong in
the 1950s and produced a report that is remarkable not only in its documentation
but also in its sympathy for Chinese cultural practices and the women. See H. S. Y.
Fang and F. Y. K. Yu, “Foot Binding in Chinese Women,” Canadian Journal of
Surgery 3 (April 1960): 195–202. The surgeons attested to the fact that footbinding
did not break bones: “Individual bones of the foot alter but slightly in shape, yet
the distortion is considerable.” Furthermore, “The joints of the outer four toes which
are acutely ﬂexed into the sole, have adapted to their deformed manner and can-
not be straightened, even by force” (199). Footbinding is irreversible.
5. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Sou-
venir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 71.
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NOTES TO PAGES 12–15 235
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6. For an introduction to the works of and modern scholarship on Qiu Jin, Ding
Ling, and sixteen other women writers, see Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torge-
son, eds., Writing Women in Modern China: An Anthology of Women’s Literature from
the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
7. One ironic outcome of this containment is that despite the rhetoric of sex-
ual liberation, the corporeality of the female body is erased. Lydia Liu has been one
of the first scholars to focus on the suªering female body in nationalist discourses
(“The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Post-
modernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Ka-
plan [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994], pp. 37–62).
8. In an attempt to rethink the history of the Chinese enlightenment, Wang
Zheng has used oral history to recover the voices of another group of women whose
voices were submerged or contained by o‹cial communist historiography, bour-
geois career women. See her Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual
Histories (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
9. Gail Hershatter was the first to make this observation. See her “The Subal-
tern Talks Back: Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese History,” positions:
east asia cultures critique 1, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 103–30, which discusses Small Hap-
piness. For interviews with footbound women in the 1930s, see the Caifeilu volumes
(discussed in chap. 3); for interviews conducted in Taiwan in 1960–61, see Howard S.
Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom (Taipei: Nantian
shuju, 1984), chap. 10. One particularly informative interview was that of Lu Zhi-
lan (b. 1915). Lu, a native of Lu-Family Village in the vicinity of Ji’nan city, Shan-
dong province, had her feet bound in 1922. All the girls from the more than three
hundred families in the village had bound feet (Yao Jushun, Zhongguo chanzu fengsu,
pp. 158–65). A latest and possibly last attempt is by Yang Yang, son of a footbound
mother from Liuyi village, Yunnan province, who related the stories of twenty-six
women in his Xiaojiao wudao: Dian-nan yige xiangcun de chanzu gushi (Hefei: An-
hui wenyi chubanshe, 1999), pp. 91–168.
10. John MacGowan, How England Saved China (London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1913), pp. 25–26. Although the Reverend stayed in China for fifty years and com-
piled a dictionary of Amoy colloquiums, it is not clear if the couple spoke the lo-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

cal tongue when they ﬁrst arrived. For an account of their trip from London and
their initial impressions of Amoy (“I am going to take you in imagination a very
long journey to the far-oª land of China, that we may see with our eyes the strange
people that live there”) see MacGowan, Beside the Bamboo (London: London Mis-
sionary Society, 1914), quote from p. 9. Coincidentally, MacGowan erroneously
attributed the origins of footbinding to the Duke of Donghun of Qi (Tung Hwun
Hau, 499–501 c.e.). See his The Imperial History of China (Shanghai: American
Presbyterian Mission Press, 1906), p. 225.
11. MacGowan, How England Saved China, pp. 46–68. The speech of the “tall,
handsome-looking woman” is from pp. 59–60. The Heavenly Feet Society was to
meet twice a year. Many men showed up and spoke at its next meeting (pp. 70–74).
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NOTES TO PAGES 15–16 236
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Alison Drucker has placed the first meeting in 1874 (“The Influence of Western
Women on the Anti-footbinding Movement, 1840–1911,” in Women in China: Cur-
rent Directions in Historical Scholarship, ed. Richard W. Guisso and Stanley Johan-
nesen [Youngstown, N.Y.: Philo Press, 1991], pp. 187–88). Here I follow Lin Wei-
hong’s deduction of 1875 from the date of publication of Baozhuo zi’s essay in
1878–79 (“Qingji de funü buchanzu yundong [1894–1911],” Guoli Taiwan daxue
lishi xuexi xuebao 16 [1991]: p. 155).
12. MacGowan, How England Saved China, p. 21.
13. Ibid., pp. 34, 64–65.
14. This posture of “going native” is not always egalitarian in intent or result.
John MacGowan donned a “Viceroy’s o‹cial robe” in a photograph with sixteen
Chinese elders from the Amoy churches. The photograph was taken to mark his
fiftieth year in Amoy. All the Chinese wore plain “riding jackets,” and MacGowan
stood out as the most authoritative (Beside the Bamboo, image facing p. 177).
15. It is unclear if Macgowan’s Heavenly Feet Society had a Chinese name at its
first meeting in 1875. The name “Jie chanzu hui” first appeared in an article by
Baozhuo zi, “Xiamen jie chanzu hui,” Wangguo gongbao, vol. 11 (1878–79): 406–408,
reprinted in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa, Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao,
pp. 836–40. See also Lü Meiyi and Zheng Yongfu, Zhongguo funü yundong (1840–
1921) (Henan Renmin chubanshe, 1990), p. 43. A Xiamen Tianzu hui was founded
in 1904; its manifesto is in Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp. 880–81. None of
the early anti-footbinding societies founded by Chinese reformers, beginning with
Kang Youwei’s 1883 Bu guozu hui, adopted the name “tianzu hui.” Bu chanzu
(Don’t bind feet) or Jie chanzu (Quit binding feet) predominated, both being a
negation of a native category, chanzu (footbinding). Tianzu hui (Natural feet so-
ciety) became a common name across the country only in the early 1900s. See
Lin Weihong, “Qingji,” pp. 160–63; Lin Qiumin, “Jindai Zhongguo de buchanzu
yundong (1895–1937),” master’s thesis, Guoli Zhengzhi daxue, 1990, pp. 52, 60–61.
Even then, “jie chanzu” remained current in the press. In 1902, an essay in Dagong
bao by that title was translated in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, in an interlinear
format. See “Kai tensoku setsu,” Taiwan kanshu kiji 2, no. 11 (1902): 43–49 [887–93].
16. In an earlier article “Footbinding as Female Inscription,” I have discussed a
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

striking anti-footbinding polemical essay by the early-Qing writer Chu Jiaxuan in

which he wrote a natural geometric body into being. In its Confucian context,
this natural body was to serve the patriarchal family. For the body in imperial dis-
courses, see Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacriﬁce as Text / Performance
in Eighteenth-Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
17. Baozhuo zi, “Xiamen jie chanzu hui,” in Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp.
839–40. As Lin Weihong has shown (citing Virginia Chau), in the early 1870s Chris-
tian communities in China debated whether footbinding was a categorical sin and
if women had to let their feet out before they could become Christian. An 1878
meeting resolved that footbinding is not a doctrinal matter, and that the family of

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believers has the right to choose the best course of action (Lin Weihong, “Qingji,”
pp. 152–53). For summaries of these debates in The Chinese Recorder between 1869
and 1870 (by Dr. Dudgeon, H.G., J. C. Kerr), see Lin Qiumin, “Jindai Zhongguo
de buchanzu yundong,” pp. 30–32; see also Virginia Chiu-tin Chau, “The Anti-
Footbinding Movement in China, 1850–1912,” master’s thesis, Columbia Univer-
sity, 1966.
18. Baozhuo zi, “Xiamen jie chanzu hui.” In contrast, the reformer Liang Qichao
drew on a Chinese tradition of anti-footbinding polemics [“Lanling nüzi”] in blam-
ing the “despicable man” who committed a wrong that lasts a thousand generations
so that he can indulge in “one day’s worth of desire” (“Jie chanzu hui xu,” in Li and
Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, p. 841).
19. The ﬂourishing of anti-footbinding societies in 1895–98 has been the most
studied aspect of the anti-footbinding movement due to the abundance of sources.
In this chapter I focus on its pre-history and its re-reading by such Republican writ-
ers as Xu Ke (see below). Almost all of the documents pertinent to the founding of
the Tianzu hui in 1895 and local societies in 1898–1911 are reprinted in Li and Zhang,
Jindai Zhongguo, pp. 480–542, 836–909. For interpretive histories, see the works
of Lin Qiumin, Lin Weihong, Lü Meiyi and Zheng Yongfu, Julie Broadwin, Ali-
son Drucker, and Sakamoto Hiroko. See also the fascinating memoirs of Mrs. Lit-
tle on the work and local reception of the Tianzu hui in her The Land of the Blue
Gown (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), pp. 305–70.
20. The trope of the body-as-machine, so prevalent in missionary discourses, is
part and parcel of a larger valorization of circulation (of air, ideas, and so on) as the
basis of hygiene. In educational meetings organized by the Natural Feet Society,
members would use a tube of rubber hosing to demonstrate the importance of un-
obstructed blood circulation (Kikuchi Takaharu, “Futensoku undo ni tsuite,” Reki-
shi kyoiku 5, no.12 [1957]: 35).
21. Joan Judge has analyzed the contradictory message about women’s value and
potential in the discourses of women’s education during the 1898 reform period
(“Reforming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898” in Rethink-
ing the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, ed.
Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Center, 2002], pp. 158–79). The view that women were “mere playthings preoccu-
pied with making up their faces, binding their feet, and piercing their ears” was preva-
lent in the writings of such leading intellectuals as Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, and Liang
Qichao (in Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, quote from p. 161) in the 1890s and 1900s.
22. Traditional historiography emphasizes foreign initiatives. Jialin Bao Tao’s
revisionist essay argues strongly for a cooperation of equal footing (“The Anti-
Footbinding Movement in Late Ch’ing China: Indigenous Development and West-
ern Inﬂuence,” Research on Women in Modern Chinese History 2 [June 1994]: 141–73).
Lin Weihong, in her pioneering study of local anti-footbinding societies (“Qingji”),
emphasizes instead that the earlier Christian movement and the subsequent Chi-

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NOTES TO PAGES 18–22 238
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nese local movements stemmed from separate rationales and social dynamics. Both
were external to women’s concerns for their own beneﬁts. Lin Qiumin concurred
in arguing that the missionary motive was “religious” whereas the reformers’ mo-
tive was “political” (“Jindai Zhongguo de Buchanzu yundong,” p. 51). For a rare
study of the role of female Protestant missionaries in the anti-footbinding move-
ment, see Takashima Ko, “Kyokai to shinja no aida de: Josei senkyoshi ni yoru ten-
soku kaiho no kokorumi,” in Chugoku kindaika no dotai kozo, ed. Mori Tokihiko,
pp. 273–309 (Kyoto: Kyoto daigaku jinbun kagaku kenkyujo, 2004). I thank Ono
Kazuko Sensei for sending this essay to me.
23. Xu Ke, “Tianzu kaolüe,” in Xu Ke, ed., Tiansuke congkan (Shanghai:
Shangwu yinshuguan, 1914), 1a. For details about the myriad anti-footbinding so-
cieties that sprang up around 1898, see the convenient summary in Lin Weihong,
“Qing ji,” pp. 155–66.
24. Xu, “Tianzu kaolüe,” 1a–b. Xu, “Zhizu yu,” in Xu, Tiansuke biji shisanzhong,
vol. 2 (Hong Kong: Zhongshan tushu gongsi, 1973), p. 139.
25. Xu, “Tianzu kaolüe,” 1a–b; see also “Zhizu yu,” p. 139.
26. The Bu guozu hui, among the earliest Chinese anti-footbinding organiza-
tions, was co-founded by Ou Eliang in Kang’s hometown, Nanhai, Guangdong
province. See Lü and Zheng, Zhongguo funü yundong, pp. 76–77; Lin Weihong,
“Qingji,” pp. 155–56. Kang Youwei’s famous memorial to the Guangxu emperor,
admonishing him to ban footbinding (“Qingjin funü guozu zhe”), is in Li and
Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp. 508–10.
27. Xu Ke, Chunfeiguan ci, 31a, 34b, in Tiansuke congkan. The assassinated friend
was Xia Chuifang, a founder of the Commercial Press.
28. Tang Yisuo, “Xu Zhongke xiansheng ‘Tiansuke yuwan tu’ xu,” 22b–23a. Ap-
pendix to Xu Ke, Chunfeiguan ci, in Xu, Tiansuke congkan.
29. Liang Qichao, “Lun nüxue,” in Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp. 549–56;
quotations from pp. 549–50. Although often cited independently, this is a section
of a longer essay, “Bianfa tongyi.” Joan Judge has pointed out that the arguments
and tropes of this essay served as a blueprint for subsequent reformist writings on
women’s education (“Reforming the Feminine,” p. 170). Rebecca Karl has analyzed
Liang’s trope of “women as slaves,” which was part and parcel of the trope of all
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

citizens as slaves (wangguo nu, colonized subjects) in “‘Slavery,’ Citizenship, and

Gender in Late Qing China’s Global Context,” in Karl and Zarrow, Rethinking the
1898 Reform Period, pp. 212–44.
30. “Nüzi ziqiang,” plate 553, in Wang Shucun, Zhongguo minjian nianhuashi
tulu (Shanghai: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1991), p. 542. The same themes of
women’s economic independence and equality of classes recur in the essays of Xu
Ke’s daughter Xu Xinhua (New China). They were published after her death at age
twenty-one as Tongfenshi wen and Tongfenshi biji, in Xu Ke, Tiansuke congkan.
31. Tang Yisuo, “Xu Zhongke xiansheng,” 23a.
32. Ibid. The early cotton mills were established in Shanghai after 1895. By 1919,
almost half of the 181,485 factory workers in Shanghai were in the cotton mills (Emily
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NOTES TO PAGES 23–28 239
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Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 [Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986], p. 23).
33. According to Shi Meng Huang Xiuqiu was ﬁrst serialized in 1905 in vol. 2 of
Xin xiaoshuo and issued as a separate title by the same publishers in 1907 (Wan-Qing
xiaoshuo [Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989], p. 109). The editors of a mod-
ern Taiwan reprint give the dates 1904 and 1906, respectively. See “Huang Xiuqiu
tiyao,” in Tang Yisuo, Huang Xiuqiu, in vol. 15 of Wan-Qing xiaoshuo daxi (Taipei:
Guangya shuju, 1984), 1. The confusion may rise from the fact that the year of pub-
lication of Xin xiaoshuo ceased to appear after vol. 2 no. 6 (Tarumoto Teruo, Shin-
matsu shosetsu kandan [Kyoto: Horitsu bunkasha, 1983], p. 12). Ying Hu has ana-
lyzed this novel by focusing on the meetings between Huang Xiuqiu and Madame
Roland in the novel, which she construes as a metaphor for the encounter between
Chinese nationalism and the universalism of European Enlightenment (Tales of
Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 [Stanford, Calif.: Stan-
ford University Press, 2000], pp. 153–96). Hu has also traced the novelist’s subju-
gation of women’s education to nationalistic concerns to Liang Qichao’s essay, “Lun
nüxue” (pp. 162–69).
34. Tang Yisuo, Huang Xiuqiu, pp. 23, 54.
35. Joan Scott has argued that this paradox is inherent in liberal feminism (Only
Paradoxes to Oªer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man [Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1996]).
36. Zhang Xiushu, “Qingmo minjian ertong duwu,” in Sichuan wenshi ziliao
xuanji (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1979), 20: 185.
37. Ibid., pp. 184–85.
38. Ibid., pp. 187–89.
39. Nü xuebao 7 (Sept. 1898), 1b. The illustration is the work of a woman artist,
Liu Qing (Keqing), and is reprinted in Nanxiu Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan
( Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms,” Modern China 29, no.
4 (Oct. 2003): 420.
40. The Dalu magazine is discussed in Zhang Nan and Wang Renzhi, eds., Xin-
hai geming qian shinian jian shilun xuanji (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1978), juan 1,
p. 967. This cover is reproduced at the beginning of juan 1, no page. The Globe
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Society is mentioned in Wang Shu-Hwai et al., eds., International Union List of Chi-
nese Journals Relating to Women (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia
Sinica, 1995), p. 57.
41. Xiao Yun, “Tianzu shuo,” Xiaoshuo congbao 3, no. 8 (1917): 2.
42. Ibid., pp. 2–3. The author was more interested in showing oª various allu-
sions to tian and chanzu than in writing a polemic against footbinding. The essay
ended with a plea that as commendable as the Tianzu hui may be, reformers should
concern themselves with issues more serious than women’s feet.
43. Madame Roland (1754–93) was a leader of the Girondists who was put to
the guillotine. For her popularity in late-Qing China, see Ying Hu, Tales of Trans-
lation, pp. 153–96. The way Madame Roland introduces her name in Huang Xiu-
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qiu resembles that in a long biography of the heroine serialized in two 1902 issues
of Xinmin congbao, suggesting inﬂuence by the latter (“Jinshi diyi nüjie Luolan furen
zhuan,” in Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp. 318–31). One of the three books is
Yingxiong zhuan, in an alphabet script; another is a translated geography textbook.
The third, also an alphabet, is unnamed. Tang Yisuo’s attitude toward the West, as
mirrored in Huang Tongli, is ambivalent. Tongli thinks that Madame Roland, a
member of the White clan, is condescending to Xiuqiu because she is from the Yel-
low clan (23). Throughout the novel he criticizes the Westernization model repre-
sented by Shanghai as going too fast too far, to the point of compromising “Chi-
nese” identity. Hence he questions the motives of some members of Shanghai natural
foot societies (73, 76).
44. It is not clear if the doctor’s big feet are the product of her Cantonese con-
nections or foreign education. Ying Hu has seen in Tang Yisuo’s way of ascribing
the undetermined origins of Dr. Bi’s natural foot “a narrative awareness of a larger
China”(“Re-Conﬁguring Nei/Wai: Writing the Woman Traveler in the Late Qing,”
Late Imperial China 18, no. 1 [ June 1997]: 82–83).
45. Wang Tao sojourned in England in 1867–70, during which time he also vis-
ited France and Russia. He founded the Xunhuan ribao (Circulation daily) in Hong
Kong in 1873. Zheng Guanying handled foreign enterprises for Li Hongzhang. See
Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late
Ch’ing China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
46. For the importance of the transnational world in the making of modern Chi-
nese nationalism, see Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the
Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002).
47. Wu Guoqing, Wentan guaijie Gu Hongming (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1988),
p. 151. Lydia Liu has analyzed Gu’s “sovereignty complex,” one manifestation of
which was his loyalty to the anti-reformist Empress Dowager (“The Desire for the
Sovereign and the Logic of Reciprocity in the Family of Nations,” Diacritics 29,
no. 4 (1999): 160–69).
48. Hui-min Lo is the only scholar who has painstakingly sifted through history
and myth to reconstruct Gu Hongming’s upbringing and early career. Gu was said
to have been born on the estate of the second-generation colonial planter Forbes
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Scott Brown, who was of Scottish descent. As guardian and benefactor, Brown later
financed Gu’s education in Europe. See Lo, “Ku Hung-ming: Schooling,” Papers
on Far Eastern History 37–38 (1988): 46–47. Gu’s great-grandfather Gu Lihuan (d.
1826) was present to welcome the vanguard of British Captain Light when he landed
in Point Pennager. When Penang was colonized and renamed Prince Wales Island
in 1786, Gu Lihuan was appointed “Kapitan” in charge of Chinese aªairs. One of
Lihuan’s sons, Guocai, accompanied Stamford Ra›es on his trip to colonize Sin-
gapore. See Wu Guoqing, Wentan guaijie, pp. 46, 186–87. Hui-min Lo identified
Zhou Zuoren as the first one who asserted that Gu’s mother was European. Although
this remains unverified, Lo described a permissive society governed by neither Con-
fucian nor Victorian morality, with rampant extramarital aªairs and illegitimacy.
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Forbes Scott Brown’s mother was Malay or Chinese (“Ku Hung-ming: Schooling,”
pp. 47–48).
49. Two events in 1879–81 served as triggers for Gu’s “conversion.” One was a
missionary incident in Fuzhou. Lo has located an English poem by Gu which sug-
gests that he first set foot in China in late 1879, when he arrived at Fuzhou, Fujian.
Gu gave up his naïve faith in European Enlightenment values and became a Chi-
nese nationalist, as evinced in the last stanza of his poem: “We want no priest to
help us in our need, / Priests we have shaven and unshaven both; / We want no
mumblings of an outworn creed, / But science we want and knowledge of our
growth, / And Rules with unselfish hearts and just, / To sweep you from our land
as whirlwind sweepeth dust.” The second trigger was a meeting with the Fujianese
scholar-translator Ma Jianzhong (1844–1900), a French-educated Roman Catholic,
in Singapore in 1881. According to unverified accounts, Gu was then serving in the
Colonial Secretary’s O‹ce in Singapore. The legendary meeting took place at the
Strand Hotel, and according to Gu’s recollections over forty years later, they con-
versed in French because Ma’s Mandarin was poor. Inspired, Gu resigned from his
post three days later and prepared to sail to China by growing a queue and wear-
ing Chinese clothes, hence “coming back into the fold of Chinese nationality” (Lo,
“Ku Hung-ming: Homecoming, Part 2,” East Asian History 9 [1995]: 67, 73, 83–89;
poem on p. 73). See also Wen Yuan-ning, “Gu Hongming,” T’ien Hsia Monthly 4,
no. 4 (April 1937), reprinted in Zhu Chuanyu, comp., Gu Hongming zhuanji zhi-
liao (Taipei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1979), 2: 2–3. In 1882, Gu enlisted as interpreter
for a British surveying expedition to Yunnan and Burma. By then he seems to have
had working knowledge of Cantonese and Mandarin and “reasonable reading ability
in Chinese” (Lo, “Homecoming, Part 2,” pp. 90–93; see also Wu, Wentan guaijie,
pp. 188–89).
50. Information on Gu’s knowledge of Malay and Amoy dialect is from Lo, “Ku
Hung-ming: Homecoming [Part 1],” East Asian History 6 (1993): 167.
51. On Analects tutors, see Huang Xintao, Xianhua Gu Hongming (Haikou:
Hainan chubanshe, 1997), pp. 24, 28, 40. The Kangxi Dictionary episode and the
student’s report of misshapen characters are in Wu, Wentan guaijie, pp. 173, 15. The
scrawls of his calligraphy are in Zhu Chuanyu, comp., Gu Hongming zhuanji zhi-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

liao, 1: 47. Judging from Gu’s calligraphy as reproduced as frontispieces in volume

one of his Gu Hongming wenji (Haikou: Hianan chubanshe, 1996), these observers
are right.
52. Huang Xintao, Xianhua Gu Hongming, pp. 34–38. In another version Gu
was said to read an English newspaper upside down (Sang Rou, Gu Hongming de
youmo [Taipei: Jingmei chubanshe, 1985], pp. 43–44). A variation on the same
theme: when Gu ran into a German professor in the hallways of Peking Univer-
sity, he would criticize Germany in German, and could do the same in English or
French in accordance with the identity of his hapless colleagues ( Wu Guoqing,
Wentan guaijie, p. 161).
53. Representative of Gu’s views on classical Chinese is “Fandui Zhongguo
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wenxue geming” (Opposing the Chinese literary revolution), in Gu Hongming wenji,

2: 165–70. This essay was ﬁrst published in Millard’s Review on July 5, 1919, two
months after the May Fourth incident that launched the New Culture Movement.
The poignant tribute was transmitted by a woman writer, Ling Shuhua, a neigh-
bor of the Gu family whose father was a close friend of Gu Hongming ( Wu, Wen-
tan guaijie, p. 138).
54. The “badge and insignia . . . ” are Gu’s words, quoted by Hui-min Lo, who
has also argued that when Gu left Penang for his schooling in Scotland sometime
in 1870 or 1871, he was deﬁnitely wearing a queue, but he cut it oª before sailing
from Edinburgh for Penang and China in 1879 (“Schooling,” pp. 50, 62; see also
“Homecoming [Part 1],” p. 169). Others are less certain that Gu had a queue in
Penang. Wen Yuan-ning, who did not disclose his source, wrote that Gu started to
grow a queue only after he was “converted” by Ma Jianzhong in Singapore some-
time between the late 1870s and early 1880s (Zhu Chuanyu, Gu Hongming zhuanji
zhiliao, 2: 2). Gu cherished telling the stories of his being ridiculed in Europe be-
cause of his pigtail. See Wu, Wentan guaijie, p. 5; Huang Xintao, Xianhua, pp. 17–18.
55. Gu Hongming, “Zhao xiang” (Taking a photograph), in Gu Hongming wenji,
1: 453–54. See also Huang, Xianhua, p. 216; Sang Rou, Gu Hongming de youmo,
pp. 158–60. Gu Hongming was very sensitive to the social snobbery of Victorian
Scotland (Lo, “Schooling,” p. 53).
56. Gu, “Ri-E zhanzheng de daode yuanyin” (The moral cause of the Russo-
Japanese War), in Gu Hongming wenji, 1: 201.
57. Gu, “Zhongguo funü” (Chinese women), in Gu, Zhongguoren de jingshen,
trans. Huang Xingtao and Song Xiaoqing (Haikou: Hainan chubanshe, 1996), pp.
96–98. Gu expressed the same admiration for the quiet virtues of a queen in “the
state of Italy,” a commoner daughter who earned her exalted place by passing a test
imposed by her king. Gu stated that he translated the biography of this virtuous
foreign woman from “classical Italian” ( Yi-da-li guwen; “Yi-da-li-guo xianfei
zhuan,” in Gu Hongming wenji, 2: 241–44).
58. Lo, “Homecoming [Part 1],” p. 176; “Homecoming, Part 2,” p. 90.
59. The memoirs of Hu Shi, Zhou Zuoren, Luo Jialun, and a host of Gu’s stu-
dents can be found in Wu, Wentan guaijie, passim. The story of Gu’s wife and con-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

cubine ﬁrst appeared in Chen Zhang’s biography of Gu, in Gujintan zazhi she, ed.,
Gujin mingren zhuanji (Taipei: Gujintan zazhishe, 1972), pp. 109–17. See also
Huang, Xianhua, p. 180. Gu’s daughter had unbound feet and loved to go dancing
with Gu’s students ( Wu, Wentan guaijie, p. 153; see also Sang Rou, Gu Hongming,
p. 248). It is not surprising that these rather titillating stories are widely antholo-
gized. See, for example, Sang Rou, Gu Hongming, pp. 79–84; Zhu Chuanyu, Gu
Hongming zhuanji zhiliao, 2: 8–9. The seven-word mantra and the rotten egg say-
ings are recounted in Wu Guoqing, Wentan guaijie, p. 36, and Zhu, Gu Hongming
zhuanji zhiliao, 1: 17, 78. These seven words were in fact those of another alleged
lotus lover, Fang Xuan, to be discussed in chap. 3.
60. The ﬁrst three items of feudal customs are from Huang, Xianhua, pp. 81–84.
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The list is longer in Sang Rou, Gu Hongming, p. 247. For a classic summary state-
ment of the missionary discourse, see Dr. J.-J. Matignon, Superstition, crime, et mi-
sére en Chine: souvenirs de biologie sociale (Lyon: A Storck & Cie, 1899). Matignon
was an o‹cer of the French Legation; his list of “miseries” is given in ﬁg. 2 of the
present book. I am grateful to Steªani Pfeiªer for giving me a copy of this book
and for her insightful analysis.

2. THE BODY INSIDE OUT

1. Kang Youwei, “Qing jin funü chanzu zhe,” in Li Yuning and Zhang Yufa,
Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao (Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1975),
pp. 508–10. Kang condemned footbinding on ﬁve grounds: it is a form of corpo-
real punishment; it detracts from parental love; the broken bones make the women
frail; it weakens the Chinese army by weakening their seed (zhong, race); and the
barbaric custom makes China a laughing stock in the eyes of other nations. Kang’s
sense of embarrassment at being subjected to global gaze is palpable. He ended the
memorial with the prediction that if footbinding is successfully outlawed, “the for-
eigner’s ridicule that we are barbaric will subside” (510).
2. Xue Shaohui’s husband, Chen Shoupeng (1857–ca. 1928), and his brother Chen
Jitong (1851–1907) were editors of the reformist newspaper Qiushi bao. Jitong’s wife
went by the Chinese name of Lai Mayi. The initial organization meeting took place
on Dec. 6, 1897, and the girls’ school opened in May 1898. Seventy girls registered
during the two years of its operation. The journal began publication on July 24,
1898, and the last issue, the twelfth, appeared on Oct. 29, 1898. Only eight issues
are extant. See Nanxiu Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan ( Worthy Ladies) Tradi-
tion: Women in the 1898 Reforms,” Modern China 29, no. 4 (Oct. 2003): 399–454.
See also Qian, “Qingji nü zuojia Xue Shaohui jiqi ‘Waiguo lienüzhuan,’” in Ming-
Qing wenxue yu xingbie yanjiu, ed. Zhang Hongsheng (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji
chubanshe, 2002), pp. 932–56. I am indebted to Nanxiu Qian, who generously made
her drafts and copies of Xue Shaohui’s writings available to me.
3. Xue Shaohui, “Fu Shen nüshi shu,” in Daiyunlou wenji, juan xia, 20b–21a;
in Xue, Daiyunlou yiji (Fujian: Chenshi jiakanben, 1914). Nanxiu Qian brought
this letter to my attention. Shen’s original letter is no longer extant. According to
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Nanxiu Qian (personal communication, Dec. 2002), Xue’s response was not pub-
lished in the eight extant issues of Nü xuebao, but it is likely that it appeared in one
of the four issues that are no longer extant. Xue criticized Kang’s memorial, using
similar wording, twice in her letter. Her rebuttal of the femme fatale argument is
also a direct response to an essay by Yong Jiaxiang, who won an essay contest held
by the Tianzu hui in 1898 (Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp. 510–13). Hence it
is likely that the original publication date of Xue’s letter was late 1898. Like the male
philologists before her, Xue Shaohui erred in mistaking poetic allusions for social
practice. See chap. 4 for a discussion of the philological way of knowing.
4. Xue Shaohui sought to reestablish the “talented women” genealogy in mod-
ern times. She adopted the Confucian terminology of nüde (female virtue) and fu-
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dao (the way of a woman), but argued for a radically new content of women’s edu-
cation. For the curriculum of the girls’ school, Xue favored a combination of “ven-
erating Confucius” (zun Kong ) and Western languages and sciences. Two teachers
recruited by Liang Qichao, Dr. Kang Aide (Ida Kahn) and Dr. Shi Meiyu (Mary
Stone), signed an open letter criticizing the school’s Confucian orientation. See Qian,
“Revitalizing.” For Kang Aide, see Hu Ying, “Naming the First ‘New Woman,’” in
Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China,
ed. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia
Center, 2002), pp. 180–211.
5. Xue’s comments on the rapidity of changing tastes capture the ambiguous
beauty standards in a transitional period. Decades after footbinding was being con-
demned as shameful, many women continued to find bound feet beautiful whereas
unbound feet were merely convenient. Ida Pruitt, a missionary’s daughter born in
Shandong in 1888, expressed this attitude (A China Childhood [San Francisco: Chi-
nese Materials Center, Inc., 1978], pp. 89–90). Kwei-lan, a gentry daughter in Pearl
Buck’s first novel, East Wind: West Wind, struggled with the reversal of standards.
She was crestfallen when her Western-educated husband showed her an X-ray of
the “ugly” foot but eventually agreed to unbind her feet to please him (East Wind:
West Wind [London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1934; first published 1930], pp. 47–48,
67–76). The historian Yang Nianqun has discussed an identical story in the con-
text of the introduction of discourse of biomedicine. His source was a story trans-
lated from a German magazine and published in the influential Chinese journal
Funü zazhi in 1927 (13, no. 3: 1–6). In Yang’s essay Kwei-lan’s (Guilan) story was
presented as a real event that happened in a commoner household (“Cong kexue
huayu dao guojia kongzhi: Dui nüzi chanzu you ‘mei’ bian ‘chou’ de duoyuan fenxi,”
Beijing dang’an shiliao 4 [2001]: 248–51). See also scattered remarks made by old
women whom Howard Levy interviewed in Taiwan in 1960–61 (Chinese Footbind-
ing: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom [Taipei: Nantian shuju, 1984], pp. 246,
267, 278). Yang Xingmei and Luo Zhitian have analyzed this change in standards
of feminine beauty brilliantly in their study “Jindai Zhongguoren dui nüxing xiao-
jiaomei de fouding” (paper presented at the Symposium on the History of Health
and Beauty, Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

June 11–12, 1999).

6. Early eªorts by local male elite were concentrated in the three reformist prov-
inces of Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Hunan. Only in Hunan did the Hunan Buchanzu
hui (1897) receive o‹cial support from Huang Zunxian, the Surveillance Com-
missioner (ancha shi). See Lin Qiumin, “Jindai Zhongguo de buchanzu yundong,”
master’s thesis, Guoli Zhengzhi daxue, 1990, pp. 52–58. Chinese-initiated anti-
footbinding societies proliferated on the local level around the turn of the century.
Lin Weihong, who has based her arguments on the years of formation of the local
Tianzu hui’s, identiﬁed 1898 as their peak. She has also observed that they were
ineªective in ending footbinding, populated as they were by a minority of local
leaders who rallied to curry favor with their superiors. These local o‹cial and semi-
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o‹cial organizations lacked broad-based support among the local elite, who re-
mained overwhelmingly conservative (“Qingji de funü buchanzu yundong [1894–
1911],” Guoli Taiwan daxue lishi xuexi xuebao 16 [1991]: 177–78). In contrast, Lü
Meiyi and Zheng Yongfu (Zhongguo funü yundong [1840–1921] [Henan: Renmin
chubanshe, 1990], pp. 162–63) saw initial setback for the local tianzu movement af-
ter the fiasco of 1898 and the Boxers; they identified 1901–5 as the period of renewal
of local anti-footbinding activities.
7. For a list of titles and prices of the pamphlets available in 1904, see Li and
Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp. 872–73. For essay contests, see pp. 840–41. See also Lü
and Zheng, Zhongguo funü yundong, pp. 163–64. In one Natural Feet Society meet-
ing in Hankou alone, Mrs. Little gave away two thousand leaflets and tracts to the
invited Chinese o‹cials for further distribution (Little, The Land of the Blue Gown
[London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902], p. 306).
8. Thiriez has written that “Women unbinding their feet for the photogra-
pher . . . were poor models fulfilling the demands of a market. The fact that few
negatives were actually taken was a measure of the impropriety of this Western fan-
tasy” (“Photography and Portraiture in Nineteenth-Century China,” East Asian His-
tory 17/18 (1999): 77–102; quote from p. 97; see also p. 93). These photographs fo-
cus on the pair of feet; often showing one bound and the other unbound. Before
the 1890s, every commercial photographer would have several images of the bound
foot, mixed in with other “Chinese customs” such as the rickshaw, the bamboo pole,
the 360 occupations, and so on, for customers to choose from. At least one photo
studio in Shanghai had two large display windows, hence Chinese passers-by would
also have access to some of these images. This and other information on photo al-
bums, commercial photographers, and their customers is from Thiriez (personal
communications, Feb. 2003). I thank Dr. Thiriez for taking the time to answer my
questions and for generously sharing her materials and expertise.
9. One of the earliest medical reports illustrated by both X-ray and regular pho-
tographs is J. Preston Maxwell, “On the Evils of Chinese Foot-Binding,” The China
Medical Journal 30, no. 6 (Nov. 1916): 393–96. Dr. Maxwell practiced in Yongcun,
southern Fujian. See also the X-ray drawings and photographs of naked feet in F. M.
Al-Akl, “Bound Feet in China,” American Journal of Surgery n.s. 18, no. 3 (Dec.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

1932): 545–50. Two X-ray radiographs taken in 1920 and 1922 by the Department
of Radiology at the University of California are reproduced in Ilza Veith, “The His-
tory of Medicine Dolls and Foot-Binding in China,” Clio Medica 14, no. 3/4 (1980):
255–67.
10. Kang, “Qing jin funü chanzu zhe,” in Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, p. 508.
11. Much of the anti-footbinding propaganda worked by the technique of vi-
sual exposé. According to a Tianzu hui 1904 report, a poster with a photograph “A
New Way to See Through Bones” was posted in and around Beijing (Li and Zhang,
Jindai Zhongguo, p. 872). On the X-ray mode of penetration as a means of social
critique, see my “The Subject of Pain,” in From the Late Ming to the Late Qing: Dy-
nastic Decline and Cultural Innovation, ed. David Wang and Wei Shang (Stanford,
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NOTES TO PAGES 42–49 246
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Calif.: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). A “Tianzu huabao she” (Natural

feet pictorial) was advertised in 1912. See Lin Qiumin, “Jindai Zhongguo de bu-
chanzu yundong,” p. 96.
12. Thiriez, “Photography and Portraiture,” p. 97.
13. Although speech making dominated the meetings of the Tianzu hui, it her-
alded various rituals to enhance audience participation. In its 1904 meeting in Shang-
hai, several pairs of shoe models were exhibited on stage at the end of the meeting,
and the female guests were invited to cast red strips of paper inside the shoes to
“vote” on the most popular styles. Shanghai Zhongguo Tianzu hui, Tianzu huibao
no. 1 (Summer 1907): 17.
14. Jingzhong ribao, Dec. 30 and 31, 1904, in Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp.
881–82. The reporter’s coining of “Fangzu commemorating assembly” ( fangzu ji-
nian hui) highlights its ceremonial nature, staged after the fact of Cai’s unbinding.
15. According to Lin Weihong, four anti-footbinding societies were founded by
women: 1895 in Shanghai; 1903 Hangzhou; 1903 Liuyang; 1904 Lili (“Qingji,” p.
167). The Lili buchanzu hui was housed in a private tutorial school, the Qiuwo
mengshu (Selfhood-seeking school). Mrs. Ni’s manifesto (dictated to Liu Yazi) is in
Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp. 867–69. The anti-footbinding movement gave
elite women a forum to make speeches and exercise their leadership skills. For the
speeches of Mrs. Gao Baisu in Hangzhou, see Lin, “Qingji,” p. 147. For female
speech making in general, see those of Xue Qinjin in Zhangyuan in 1901, in Amy
D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson, eds., Writing Women in Modern China: An
Anthology of Women’s Literature from the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1998), p. 84, and cf. p. 9. See also the formation of a Funü
xuanjiang hui in 1911 (Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp. 971ª, 1535).
16. A similar set of instructions for young girls and older women, “Fangzu
liangfa,” was reprinted in Zhongguo Tianzu hui, Tianzu hui nianbao (Shanghai:
Meihua shuju, 1908), pp. 12–13. The Fang jiao hui in Shaoxing emphasized that once
they let their feet out, females should refrain from wearing shoes with pointy tips,
and should instead advertise their “civilized state” by wearing shoes with round tips
(ibid., p. 15).
17. “Suzhou fangzu hui yanshuo fangzu zhi fazi,” in ibid., pp. 71–77. These in-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

formative instructions circulated widely beyond Suzhou. A slightly abridged ver-

sion, without the twenty names and the address of the Suzhou fangzu hui, appeared
as “Yanshuo fangjiao zhi fazi,” in Shuntian shibao, Aug. 19 and Aug. 23, 1905; in Li
and Zhang, Jindai Zhongguo, pp. 535–37. The Shuntian shibao instructions con-
cluded with an admonition absent in the Tianzu huibao version: “Women from
foreign countries do not bind their feet, therefore their bodies are strong and solid
and they are capable of performing a hundred tasks. We have made one mistake
before and should better make up for it now. Let it out! Let it out! Don’t delay!
Don’t delay!” (537). As late as 1928, a much shortened version of these instructions
appeared in the newspaper Yishi bao (Aug. 14, 1928), cited in CFL II: 32–33.
18. For a photograph of inner high heels, see my Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for
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Bound Feet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 102. An informative

ethnographic study of the fangzu campaigns in Taiwan describes a similar process
of fangzu that hinged on gradually lowering the height of the heels so that the in-
step of the foot could flatten. In Taiwan, a special kind of shoes with exposed wooden
heels and rounder tips was made. As the arch flattened, the heels would be sawed
down, until eventually the woman could wear flats. See Hong Minlin, “Chanjiao
yu Taiwan de tianranzu yundong,” Taiwan wenxian 27, no. 3 (Sept. 1976): 148, 156.
In Every Step a Lotus, I have erred in suggesting that these were training shoes for
binding feet (62).
19. The commingling of Christian miracle and personal eªorts also structures
a conversion story related by Reverend MacGowan. A Christian woman who had
bound her feet for forty years decided to let them out. “The men and women of
China had never yet dreamed of the subtle power that Nature possessed of touch-
ing with her magic fingers the poor distorted feet and of restoring them to the nat-
ural shape which God had originally designed. It was reserved for a Christian woman,
a member of the Heavenly Foot Society, to show that the convictions of the women
and the deductions of science as given by the medical man were entirely wrong”
(How England Saved China [London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913], p. 80; the entire story
is on pp. 80–86).
20. For this proclamation, see CFL II: 39. On the mobilization and training of
people’s bodies for the Republic, see Andrew Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A His-
tory of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2004).
21. In the last decade of the Qing dynasty, authorities in Sichuan province
promoted fangzu. Their approach, however, was admonition and did not involve
the threat or exercise of state power to inspect and to punish. See Yang Xingmei
and Luo Zhitian, “Jindai Zhongguoren,” pp. 3, 14, 21.
22. Lin Qiumin, “Yan Xishan yu Shanxi tianzu yundong,” Guoshiguan guankan,
fukan n.s. 18 ( June 1995): 130.
23. Yan Xishan, comp., Shanxi Liuzheng sanshi huibian (n.p. [Taiyuan]: Shanxi
cunzhengchu, 1929), xuanyan 1a, 2a–b. For the grouping of “Three Ills,” see 3.3b.
The “women comprise half our population” statement is a rhetorical flourish. In a
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

1919 speech, Yan referred to a census report that put the male to female ratio as ap-
proximately 7 to 5. He attributed the shortage of females in part to footbinding
(Zhi-Jin zhengwu quanshu chubian [Taipei: Yanzhai, n.d. (1960)], p. 721).
24. The “horrid sight” quote is from Yan, Shanxi liuzheng, 3.4a. The term “ordi-
nary people” is from 1.4b.
25. “Jinzhi chanzu gaoshi,” in Yan, Zhi-Jin zhengwu, p. 1523. The passage cited
here recurred as a mantra in many of Yan’s edicts and proclamations. See, for ex-
ample, his order to the Taiyuan police bureau (Shanxi liuzheng, 3.78b). This notice
was not dated, but from the other dated edicts I deduce that it was promulgated
before April 1918. The ﬁgure of one hundred thousand copies in the ﬁrst printing
is in Shanxi liuzheng, 1.4b.
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26. Yan, Zhi-Jin zhengwu, p. 721.

27. Ibid., pp. 717–24. What the People Should Know (Renmin xuzhi) is a basic
text for mass education to be read to the illiterate. Written in a colloquial style, it
includes a list of “don’ts” (footbinding, female infanticide, teenage marriage) and
lessons on world geography, races on the globe, and unequal treaties. A revised ver-
sion is appended to Shanxi cunzheng chu, comp., Shanxi cunzheng huibian (n.p.
[Taiyuan?]: Shanxi cunzhengchu, 1928). In the preface of a second reprint dated
Jan. 1919, Yan mentioned that a total of 2.7 million copies of the primer were printed
(Preface, Renmin xuzhi, no page).
28. Yan admonished these lawmakers to promote civilization and progress upon
returning to their native districts. “How can we, Shanxi people, bear to see China
following the footsteps of India and Poland?” (Zhi-Jin zhengwu, pp. 1521–23). Outer
appearance as a conduit of inner beliefs is a constant theme in Yan’s orders and
speeches: “The changing of outward form can orient people’s hearts and minds”
(Shanxi liuzheng, xuanyan 2b).
29. “Gexian sheli Tianzu hui jianzhang,” Sept. 25, 1917, in Shanxi liuzheng, 2.56b–
57b; cf. Shanxi cunzhengchu, comp., Shanxi cunzheng huibian, 1.39b–40b. The
membership figure was cited in Yan’s report to the president of the Republic, see
Shanxi liuzheng, 1.4b.
30. “Xiuzheng yanjin chanzu tiaoli,” in Shanxi liuzheng, 2.55b–56a; Shanxi cun-
zheng, 1.42b–43a. In the former source the decree is dated Nov. 29, 1916; in the lat-
ter Dec. 27, 1916. The same, undated but entitled “Yanjin chanzu tiaoli,” also ap-
pears in Zhi-Jin zhengwu, pp. 1503–4. As early as 1899, a manifesto for the Shanghai
Tianzu hui had suggested imposing a fine according to a sliding scale: the smaller
the feet, the heavier the fine (“Tianzu hui chenci,” in Li and Zhang, Jindai Zhong-
guo, pp. 854–56).
31. Zhi-Jin zhengwu, pp. 1523–24.
32. For the March 1918 order against the manufacturing and selling of wooden
heels and copper bracelets, see Shanxi liuzheng, 3.78a; Zhi-Jin zhengwu, p. 1512. Some
Kun-shoes, especially those sold in stores, had wooden soles. As the arched shape
went out of style, the firm support of a wooden sole was no longer needed, and
leather or cotton soles became common. Some Kun-shoes were also domestically
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

made. Variations of the style remained popular unto the 1930s. One variation is the
zaoxie, a ﬂat shoe with a one-piece vamp construction instead of two (CFJHL: 93,
113). For a photograph of a vendor’s set of arched wooden soles outlawed by Yan,
see Ko, Every Step a Lotus, p. 85.
33. Shanxi liuzheng, 3.78b–79a; Yuwu zhen is in Tunliu county. Yan responded
to a letter from a lawmaker in 1918 who pointed out that “The militant heroine in
traditional attire dramas is always clad with [stilts that] imitate bound feet, as if
unless she has bound feet she cannot represent a heroine. . . . So when the audience
idolizes the heroine they also idolize her bound feet. Has it occurred to anybody that
since the ancient heroine is so militant, how can she possibly have small feet? This
strange phenomenon is invented by some busybody; it is not the true image of the
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ancient heroine. In fact, it brings her shame.” The provincial Tianzu hui scripted
new operas but the dialogues proved too di‹cult for the actors (Shanxi liuzheng,
3.80a–b; Zhi-Jin, p. 1514). In Beijing, male actors playing female roles often wore
stilts (qiao) to signify bound feet, and a great number of taboos surrounded the use
of the stilts on stage and their storage oªstage. Mirroring the decline of footbind-
ing as a social practice, qiao also fell into disuse in the decades after 1902. For this
fascinating history, see Huang Yufu, Jing ju, qiao he Zhongguo de xingbei guanxi, 1902–
1937 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1998).
34. In the Lu’an area (Lu’an was a prefecture in the Ming and Qing; its seat is
present-day Changzhi city in southern Shanxi), a good bride was one with “a tidy
head and tiny feet,” whereas a good husband was one who was wealthy ( Wang Ji-
aju, “Lu’an diqu hunsang zhidu zai Xinhai geming qianhou di biange,” in Shanxi
wenshi zhiliao [Taiyuan: Wenshi zhiliao yanjiu weiyuanhui, 1984], 7: 104).
35. Shanxi liuzheng, 3.79b.
36. “Tianzu diaocha biao” and “Tianzu baogao biao,” in Shanxi liuzheng,
5.37a–38a.
37. “Xuning gexian quzhang . . . ” March 13, 1919, in Shanxi cunzheng, 2.47a.
38. CFL: 275.
39. The hiring of female feet inspectors was stipulated in a March 19, 1919, order;
in Shanxi cunzheng 2.47b. For the impropriety of mixing female bodies and the
body politic, see Zhi-Jin zhengwu, p. 720.
40. Shanxi liuzheng, 2.57b.
41. “Nü jichayuan guize” and “Nü jichayuan fuwu guize,” both Nov. 22, 1919,
in Shanxi liuzheng, 2.57b–58b; Zhi-Jin zhengwu, p. 1507; Shanxi cunzheng 1.41a–b.
42. Both statements are in speeches by Yan. The ﬁrst ( Jan. 1919) is in Zhi-Jin
zhengwu, p. 719; the second, in a public notice dated 1921, is in ibid., p. 1525; see
also Shanxi cunzheng, 5.36a.
43. The rumors about women soldiers and fear about docility were transmitted
by Yan in the 1919 speech to students; in Zhi-Jin zhengwu, p. 720; see also pp. 715–16.
The problem of conservative local gentry was the most daunting obstacle, as Yan
pointed out in repeated directives; see the ones for Shaoyang county (Shanxi cun-
zheng, 2.49a) and Datong (Shanxi liuzheng, 3.81a–b). The rumors about the immu-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

nity of brides are related in two directives: one for Huguan county in 1923, the other
for Lucheng in 1926; both are in Shanxi cunzheng, 2.48b–49b; and Zhi-Jin zhengwu,
pp. 1519–20. Huguan was a particularly recalcitrant county. In 1918, Yan admon-
ished the county authorities to begin the “publicity—persuasion—enforcement”
process (Shanxi liuzheng, 3.80b), but as late as 1923 Yan lamented that “the results
are negligible.”
44. For Yan’s polemics against early marriage, see, for example, Xiuzheng renmin
xuzhi, 16b, appended to Shanxi cunzheng.
45. The three duties and the 30/70 percent stipulation are in Zhi-Jin zhengwu,
pp. 993 and 1524, respectively.
46. Shanxi liuzheng, 3.79b–80a.
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47. For Yan’s complaints about the Tianzu hui, see Shanxi cunzheng, 2.48b; Zhi-
Jin zhengwu, p. 1518. For abuses in Pinglu, see Shanxi liuzheng, 3.84a. For abuses in
Shouyang, see Zhi-Jin, pp. 1520–21; Shanxi cunzheng, 2.49a.
48. “Quan sheng xuesheng buqu chanzu funü hui jianzhang,” Aug. 29, 1918, in
Shanxi cunzheng, 1.40b–41a; Zhi-Jin zhengwu, pp. 1506–7; this constitution was
not included in Shanxi liuzheng. In a directive to county magistrates and school au-
thorities the same day, Yan encouraged them to establish a sports club together with
the Refusing to Marry club (Shanxi cunzheng, 2.46b; Zhi-Jin zhengwu, p. 1513). A
badge made of paper for members in the Refusing to Marry club in Jiexiu county
is in the collection of Dr. Ko Chi-sheng. On the front it says, “I won’t marry a foot-
bound woman.” On the back a name is inscribed (Ren Shuming) with a date (Min-
guo 8 [1919]). A photograph of this badge is in Ke Jisheng, Qianzai jinlian fenghua
(Taipei: Guoli lishi bowuguan, 2003), p. 139; see also Yan’s appointment letter for
a feet inspector dated 1918 (139) and the receipt for a ﬁne imposed on an “unedu-
cated” wife Li, dated 1933 (140).
49. Zhi-Jin zhengwu, p. 719.
50. Shanxi liuzheng, 3.83a–b; Yan’s warning against “empty words” is at 3.79a.
51. For the commemorations in Xiangling and the Fanshi magistrate’s wife and
daughter, see Shanxi liuzheng, 3.80a and 3.82a, respectively.
52. Zhi-Jin zhengwu, pp. 1524–25.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Shanxi liuzheng, 1.4b, 3.79b.
56. Ibid., 3.81b–82a. The recruitment of Yanshi female teachers is at 3.79a–b.
57. Zhou Songyao, Chanzu (n.p., n.d.), pp. 20–21.The subject positions of the
female inspector and the footbound woman were so far apart that stories about their
budding friendship were literally the stuª of ﬁction. In the 1936 anthology Picking
Radishes (Caifeilu), for example, a Mrs. Meng from Tongxian told of her encoun-
ters with one female inspector from the Tianzu hui. The latter became so sympa-
thetic to her inability to unbind that they became close friends, “sisters with diªer-
ent surnames” (CFL II: 59). It is hard to ascertain if this anecdote is from a woman’s
hand or that of a male ventriloquist. For the problems of female testimonies in this
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

anthology, see chap. 3.

58. The resistance of the older women is in Yan’s order to county authorities,
May 25, 1920. He admonished the latter to focus on persuading the former so as to
eradicate footbinding by the end of the year (Shanxi liuzheng, 3.83b–84a). The shift-
ing focus on fangzu among women older than sixteen was mandated in an earlier
notice dated Dec. 20, 1919, in Liuzheng 3.82b; see also its attendant announcement
in which Yan addressed the women directly, in Zhi-Jin zhengwu, pp. 1524–25.
59. Zhi-Jin, p. 1518. See also repeated notices to counties in 1923, 1924, 1926
(Shanxi cunzheng 2.48b–49b; Zhi-Jin, pp. 1519–21).
60. The percentage ﬁgures are cited in Lin Qiumin, “Yan Xishan yu Shanxi tianzu
yundong,” pp. 141–42. The 1932–33 ﬁgures are in Yang Xingmei, “Nanjing guomin
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zhengfu jinzhi funü chanzu de nuli yu chengxiao,” Lishi yanjiu no. 3 (1998): 125.
Also cited in Ryuzo Nagao, Shina minzoku shi (Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai, 1973),
p. 824.
61. In his 1664 edict to ban footbinding, the Kangxi emperor targeted only girls
born after 1662. He did not mention the unbinding of older women. It was re-
tracted in 1667 or 1668. The prohibition failed for political reasons: ironically the
ban turned footbinding into a desirable marker of Han Chinese ethnicity. See my
“The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth-Century
China,” Journal of Women’s History 8, no. 4 ( Winter 1997): 8–27.
62. For example, on April 19, 1927, a “fangzu yundong dahui” (rally of the fangzu
movement) was held in Hankou; around May, one was held in Lanzhou. Later that
year a “Xihu nüzi yundong dahui” (rally of the women’s movement by the West
Lake) was held in Hangzhou. See Shenbao reports cited in CFL II: 28–31. Andrew
Morris (personal communications, Sept. 1998) has noted that the organization of
the Hankou rally was similar to that of a sports meeting, with departments (gu)
handling publicity, general aªairs, and publications.
63. The cloth binders had symbolic value to both a civilizing regime and the
women themselves. In 1899, a plague broke out in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Before
burning Chinatown to the ground, American authorities forced women to unwrap
their binders and burned them (Rebecca E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Na-
tionalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century [Durham and London: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2002], p. 78). Women wove their binding cloth using a simple loom.
Laurel Bossen has reported that in Yunnan, long after machine-woven textiles had
replaced domestic production, “one of the last remaining handwoven products in
one of the villages I visited in 1996 was the long thin cotton binding cloth that the
old ladies still use to bind their tiny feet” (Chinese Women and Rural Development:
Sixty Years of Change in Lu Village, Yunnan [Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littleﬁeld,
Inc., 2002], p. 71). Dr. Ko Chi-sheng has reported a similar situation in Taiwan
(personal communications, June 1999).
64. Stages two and three were combined later (Lin Qiumin, “Jindai Zhongguo
de buchanzu yundong,” p. 127). Deng, a trusted lieutenant of Feng Yuxiang, was
transferred to Henan in 1928 to head up a new “fangzu chu” (O‹ce of letting-out-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

feet), where he applied the same binding-cloth-based fangzu tactics. See Yang Xing-
mei, “Nanjing guomin zhengfu,” pp. 126–27; Hong Renqing, “Minguo shiqi de
quanjin chanzu yundong,” Minguo chunqiu 6 (1996): 19.
65. For “bare-legs-tiny-feet,” see “Shaanxi yanjin nüzi chanzu zhi quwen,” Shen-
bao, Feb. 22, 1928; cited in Lin, “Jindai Zhongguo,” p. 128. The pageant was called
“bare-feet-tiny-feet” and the Shenbao source was dated 1927 in CFL II: 26–27. For
the shoelace mount, see CFL II: 2, 31, 281; the number 25,400 is from p. 29.
66. CFL II: 27.
67. Ibid., p. 28.
68. Ibid., p. 52.
69. CFL IV: 251–52. The term jiefang (liberation) used in this story is diªerent
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in connotations from the jiefang (to unwrap [the binding cloth] and let [the foot]
out) used in the fangzu discourse earlier. For contestations over the term jiefang in
early communist discourses of the 1920s and 1930s, see Harriet Evans, “The Lan-
guage of Liberation: Gender and Jiefang in Early Chinese Communist Party Dis-
course,” Intersections: Gender, History, and Culture in the Asian Context, inaugural
issue (Sept. 1998): 1–20.
70. There are two notable exceptions to the almost universal celebration of the
anti-footbinding movement. Lin Weihong, in her pioneering study of the late-Qing
anti-footbinding societies at the local level (“Qingji de funü buchanzu yundong”),
has questioned their eªectiveness in the face of severe opposition from the conser-
vative gentry. She has also criticized their male bias, and has striven to document
the involvement of elite women. But she did not illuminate the subjectivities of the
women who bound their feet. Yang Xingmei (“Nanjing guomin zhengfu”), in as-
sessing the anti-footbinding eªorts of the Nanjing regime, has focused on the in-
centive structures that made the binding of feet reasonable to the women. This is
an important paradigmatic shift.

3. THE BOUND FOOT AS ANTIQUE

1. In Tianjin Yao and his family lived at no. 58, Yiqing li, Mengmai lu (Bom-
bay Road, Yiqing Lane). Ruth Rogaski (personal communications, Dec. 2000) has
informed me that this residential area in the British Settlement was primarily for
Chinese lower-middle-class families. Almost nothing is known about Yao Lingxi
(courtesy names Xunqi, Dansu) in published documents other than what he re-
vealed in Caifeilu. I have had the good fortune of examining a number of Yao’s
handwritten poems, letters, and miscellaneous manuscripts in the collection of Dr.
Chi-sheng Ko, the unsurpassed authority on Yao. After the communist revolution,
Yao remained active in a poetry society and wrote poems to celebrate such occa-
sions as Women’s Day (March 8) and Labor Day (May 1). His birth date (the thir-
tieth day of the eleventh month, 1899) is mentioned in a poem from one of his
friends, Xu Zhenwu, written in 1961. The last poem by Yao is dated 1959. I thank
Dr. Ko for his generosity.
2. Tianfeng bao was published from 1930 to 1938 and as a pictorial, Tianfeng
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

huabao, from 1938 to 1939. I am grateful to Kwan Man-Bun for his help in identi-
fying this and other Tianjin materials. A total of two volumes was planned for the
sixth venture, Caifei jinghualu, but the second volume was never printed. I do not
have circulation ﬁgures. The list price for the ﬁrst volume (Caifeilu [chubian], 1934;
cited as CFL) was $1.50 (guobi, national currency), which was about ten times the
price of an average book. Yet it sold well enough that a reprint appeared in Jan. 1936,
one month before the sequel was issued. Caifeilu xubian (1936; cited as CFL II) was
listed at $1.50. Caifeilu sanbian (1936; CFL III) was priced at $1.20, and Caifeilu
sibian (1938; CFL IV) at $1.50. Caifei xinbian ($3.80; CFXB) and Caifei jinghualu
($3.50; CFJHL) were both published in 1941.
3. Materials in the published volumes are grouped in sections: Foreword,
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Colophons, “My Reactions to Caifeilu,” Evidential Studies (kaozheng ), Jottings, El-

egant Words, Opinions, Special Works, Snapshots, Banters, Admonitions, Misc.
Notes, Humor, Appendix. There is no apparent logic to the classiﬁcation, and the
order is not always followed. Each individual volume of Caifeilu is thus similar in
format to a traditional jotting or notation book (biji), which contracts and expands
according to the availability of materials.
4. Tao was a proliﬁc writer agile in various genres. One essay of connoisseurship
of feet shows an intimate knowledge of regional styles and local customs (CFL:
127–34). See also his poems and songs, probably composed as drinking games with
friends (CFL: 100–109, 116; CFL IV: 82ª). He was rumored to have authored a
million-word Lotus History (Lianshi), but the manuscript was burned by his wife
after his death (CFL: 290–91, 355–56; CFL III: 185–88). He also authored a review
article entitled “Qian-Qing de xiaoshuo yuekan,” ( Xiaoshuo periodicals from the
bygone Qing Dynasty), published in a 1922 issue of the magazine Youxi shijie.
5. Zhou Ying is the pen name of Zhu Chengyu. The last surviving member of
the Caifeilu team, he remained in Shanghai after 1949 and later retired as a shop-
keeper. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2001 before I had a chance to interview
him. I am grateful to Mr. Yang Shaorong for identifying his whereabouts.
6. The song is “Valley Wind” (“Gufeng”), in the “Airs of the Wei” (“Weifeng”)
section of the Book of Songs. Arthur Waley thus rendered these lines: “He who plucks
greens, plucks cabbage / Does not judge by the lower parts” (The Book of Songs, trans.
Arthur Waley [New York: Grove Press, 1996], p. 30). Scholars have concurred that
the voice of this song was that of an abandoned wife, but they disagree on whether
the root or the leaves of the vegetables were the more desirable parts. See the Chi-
nese text and commentary by Wang Fuzhi in Jin Qihua, trans., Shijing quanyi ( Jiang-
su: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1996), pp. 76–79. The reading of xiati as genitals was
heralded by Li Yu (Xianqing ouji [Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000], p.
146); see also quote by Zhou Zuoren in Shuwu, ed., Nüxing de faxian (Beijing: Wen-
hua yishu chubanshe, 1990), p. 240. Both Fang Xuan and Li Yu played with the am-
biguity between lewdness and canonical respectability in using the term “picking
radishes.”
7. For the triumph of positivist scientism in the 1920s, see D. W. Y. Kwok, Sci-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

entism in Chinese Thought, 1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962);
Charlotte Furth, Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China’s New Culture (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); and Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from
the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), p. 93. See also the warning in Caifeilu that eyes are unreliable (CFL:
9–10).
8. Each Picking Radishes volume, as loops of quotations, recalls Benjamin’s com-
ment that collection of quotations illustrates the inﬁnite and regenerative seriality
of language. See Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gi-
gantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1993), p. 156.
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9. In time the Picking Radishes columns and anthologies shifted focus. In the
beginning, more excerpts from traditional sources and scientific surveys were fea-
tured, and the writing tended to be of higher quality. Understandably, good sources
ran out, and the entries became more superficial in tone and content. There were
more first-person narratives, often with sexual exposé. The Lotus-Seeking Club can
be seen as an eªort for the editors to broaden their readership while improving the
quality of coverage. In an announcement, the club invited women with bound or
once-bound feet (nü tongzhi, female comrades) to mail in questions about the dec-
oration and hygiene of feet, claiming that an expert, Madam Chen Jingyun, would
answer them in private (CFL IV: 366). It is not known if any women did so.
10. Yao insinuated that scores of young readers of his newspaper columns did
become enticed to bind (CFL IV: 343). One was an ailing male student who wanted
to bind his own feet as talisman. Yao brought a physician friend to their appoint-
ment but he did not show up (CFL: 220). Another was a fifteen-year-old girl who
asked for express recipes that would help shrink her feet at once to placate her itin-
erant father who was soon to return home. Having determined to his satisfaction
that she was not an impostor, Yao wrote his friends for instructions, which he then
published (CFL: 356–61). This is an extreme case of a female voice that is presented
as authentic, but the very nature of the request is so incongruous with the age of
disavowal that it generates its own skepticism. For a spectrum of female voices in
Caifeilu and the problem of authenticity, see below in this chapter.
11. Playing or gaming (youxi) and whiling away of leisure time (xiaoxian) are
dominant modes in the world of late Qing fiction. They figure as the raison d’être
of the Suzhou-based weekly Libailiu (Saturday, named after the U.S. Saturday
Evening Post), often known as the home of “Mandarin duck and butterfly” fiction,
a popular form of urban entertainment. Another fiction writer, Li Baojia (1867–
1906), called himself the Master of Gaming ( Youxi zhuren) and founded the Youxi
bao in 1897. In the same year, another major novelist, Wu Woyao (1866–1910),
founded the Xiaoxian bao. See Teruo Tarumoto, Shinmatsu shosetsu kandan (Kyoto:
Horitsu bunkasha, 1983), pp. 5–8, 252.
12. The miniature, as Susan Stewart reminded us, is linked to the nostalgia for
childhood. The diminutive lends itself to domestication and manipulation (On
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Longing, p. 69).
13. Late Qing ﬁction is a mega-genre that enveloped drama and poetry and was
distinguished from earlier ﬁctional genres in the speed with which written manu-
scripts hit the newsstand (Kang Laixin, Wan-Qing xiaoshuo lilun yanjiu [Taipei:
Da’an chubanshe, 1986], pp. 239–56). David Der-wei Wang has argued that the
late Qing was the beginning of the literary modern in China (Fin-de-Siècle Splen-
dor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 [Stanford, Calif.: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997]).
14. Tao Anhua [Baopi], “Xiaozu juan” (Excising small feet), Yueyue xiaoshuo 1,
no. 6 (Feb. 1907): 177–86, quote at p. 177. Yueyue xiaoshuo was published from 1906
to ca. 1908. In 1907, when Tao’s story appeared, its editor was Wu Woyao (Taru-
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moto, Shinmatsu, p. 13). Anhua in Hunan province, Tao’s native place, became one
of his courtesy names.
15. This penalty scheme, which implies that six inches was the size of a never-
bound foot, is modeled after “Tianzu hui chenci,” published in the first 1900 issue
of Wanguo gongbao; cited in Li Yuning and Zhang Yufa, Jindai Zhongguo nüquan
yundong shiliao (Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1975), pp. 854–56.
16. Life imitates fiction just as fiction imitates life. Yao Lingxi reported an o‹cial-
in-waiting Xu in Hubei who apparently drafted a memorial similar to the one Tao
described. It is not known which came earlier (CFL IV: 155, 171).
17. As such, “Excising Small Feet” belongs to a genre of exposé of the literati
world as it was breathing its last. The definitive genre of the 1900s, this literature
is represented by the more famous and much longer Exposing the Corruptions of
O‹cialdom (Guanchang xianxing ji) (1903-?) by Li Baojia; The Travels of Lao Can
(1903–4; continued 1906–7) by Liu E; and Strange Events Witnessed in the Recent
Two Decades (1903; 1906–10) by Wu Woyao.
18. I have argued in an earlier article (“Bondage in Time: Footbinding and Fash-
ion Theory,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, & Culture 1, no. 1 [March
1997]: 3–28) that this split between form and content, or representation and inner
truth, was the result of a modern metaphysic of seeing. Timothy Mitchell has
identified this split as the primary mode in which “colonizing power” operates
(Colonising Egypt [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991]).
19. This textual symmetry is also found in one of the earliest anti-footbinding
tracts, Quan fang jiao tushuo, published in 1894 by a group of Presbyterians in Shang-
hai. According to Yao Lingxi’s description, this tract comprises eighteen double leafs,
each with a drawing and captions. The first nine sets depict connoisseurship sub-
jects such as “ancient beauties,” whereas the other nine deal with anti-footbinding
subjects such as “the pain of footbinding” and so on (CFL: 239–40). One set, “Yao-
niang chanzu,” is reproduced in CFJHL. For a third example, see Jia Shen,
Zhonghua funü chanzu kao (Beijing: Xiangshan ciyouyuan, 1925). A fourth exam-
ple is Qiu Weixuan’s “Chanzu kao,” followed by “Tianran zu kao,” in his notation
book Shuyuan zhuitan (1897; an excerpt is reprinted in the collectanea Xiangyan
congshu, as Shuyuan zhuitan jielü, in vol. 8, juan 3).
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

20. The corollary of this phenomenon of verbatim quotation of connoisseur-

ship writings in anti-footbinding literature can be found in the titles of some anti-
footbinding tracts which advertise “Studies of Footbinding [chanzu] ”—not tianzu.
A well-known example is Jia Shen’s Zhonghua funü chanzu kao; another is Zhou
Songyao’s Chanzu [n.p., n.d.], the two earliest anti-footbinding treatises published
in book form. Neither the titles nor substantive portions of the text communicate
the authors’ polemical intent. There are also many poems with titles like “Praises
for the Beauty’s Feet” or “Elegies for Footbinding” that are full of such nation-
alistic slogans as “natural-born limbs” or “equal rights between male and female”
(CFL: 96–98).
21. On recycling history as a modern and inventive form of nostalgia, see
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Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2003).
22. Susan Stewart has observed that fascination with antiques and exotic objects
amounts to a throwback to childhood and playthings and that this fascination is
similar to the impulse for collecting things, which stems from a desire to master
birth and death (On Longing, pp. 75–76). There is, however, a crucial diªerence
between a collection and a single antique item. In a collection, the context of ori-
gins is destroyed and all times are made synchronous to the collector’s. Stewart called
it the replacement of origins by classification (151). An antique object, on the other
hand, “presents itself as a myth of origins” (76). It embodies a nostalgia for origins
and an obsession with authenticity.
23. Judith Zeitlin, “The Petrified Heart: Obsession in Chinese Literature, Art,
and Medicine,” Late Imperial China 12, no. 1 ( June 1991): 1–26.
24. These are the Xiangyan congshu and Shuofu. There are many compilations by
the title of Shuofu through the dynasties. This particular compilation was by Wang
Wenru, a late-Qing man of letters from Wuxing, who claimed to use only rare or
hand-copied manuscripts from reliable collections in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Wang’s
“rules of compilation” (liyan) are dated 1915. Fang’s treatises are entitled “Fangshi
wuzhong” (Five treatises of Mr. Fang), Shuofu (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1963), pp.
1241–55. They are “Xianglian pinzao” (Aesthetics of the fragrant lotus), the treatise
most often cited; “Jinyuan zazuan” (Miscellaneous sayings from Jinyuan); “Guanyue
cha” (The moon-circulating wine cup); “Cailian chuan” (The lotus-picking boat);
and “Xiangxie pu” (High-heeled shoe chessboard). This last contains instructions
for a board game that uses shoe-shaped chess pieces; it is attributed to a Song dy-
nasty author, with extensive annotations by Fang Xuan. Xiangxie (literally the shoe
that echoes) refers to the sound that the high heels make as a beauty walks across a
hallway. The first four treatises also appear in a later collectanea: Gao Jianhua, comp.,
Hongxiu tianxiangshi congshu (Shanghai: Shanghai qunxue she, 1936), 2: 108–53. Gao
is the wife of Xu Xiaotian, a commentator of Fang’s treatises (CFL II: 292–96).
25. Fang Xuan, “Jinyuan zazuan,” in Xiangyan congshu, vol. 8, juan 1 [n.p.: Guo-
xue fulunshe, 1914], p. 2072. Jinyuan is one of Fang Xuan’s names.
26. Fang, “Xianglian pinzao,” Xiangyan congshu, pp. 2069–70.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

27. Ibid., p. 2067. One hundred guihua trees were planted on the grounds of Ping-
shantang during its renovation in 1736 (Zhao Zhibi, Pingshantang tuzhi [Kyoto:
Dohosha, 1981], 1.4b). I am grateful to Tobie Meyer-Fong for this information. A
popular destination for literati touring in the Qing, the Pingshantang was not as-
sociated with prostitutes or women-viewing in the Qianlong period (Tobie Meyer-
Fong, personal communication, July 1998). This rare mentioning of a real place in
Fang Xuan’s work yields no conclusive evidence about his dates or veracity, but sug-
gests that he was a post-Qianlong writer. Fang’s descriptions here of the gaze from
the bottom up is imitative of Li Yu (see chap. 5).
28. Xiangyan congshu traced the origins of Fang’s works to hand-copied manu-
scripts in the Xu family collection in Nanling, Anhui. The Nanling Xushi collec-
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tion was associated with the connoisseurship of women. Its owner, Xu Naichang
(1862–1936), published the monumental Xiao tanluanshi huike guixiu ci, an an-
thology of song-lyrics by one hundred women, in 1895–96, and a sequel, Guixiu
cicao, in 1909. They are boxed together and published under the earlier title (n.p.
[Nanling ]: Xiao tanluanshi, 1895–1909).
29. Fang, “Jinyuan zazuan,” Xiangyan congshu, p. 2086.
30. See commentaries to “Jinyuan zazuan” by Xu Xiaotian, CFL II: 292–96. For
citations of Fang’s treatises in fragments within the Caifeilu, see CFL: 131; CFL II:
230, 234, 291ª; CFXB: 8.
31. Zhou Ying, editor of a section entitled “Fengfei xiantan” (Random chats on
radishes), stated that his editorial principle was to seek “conﬁrmation from ancient
texts” (duizheng guben) for every modern practice described (e.g., female massag-
ing her own feet; CFL II: 185). This is clearly an unattainable goal but jibes with
his and Yao’s posture as mimetic literati. On the lack of interiority in discourses of
sexuality in Ming ﬁction, see Kang Zhengguo, Chongshen fengyuejian (Taipei: Mai-
tian chuban, 1996), 252–53 and passim.
32. One such account in CFL IV, by a Zhao Yixin, is unusual in that boyhood
memories of playing with a neighbor woman’s feet directly led into his adult world
of the here-now as he sat writing, complete with the convenient foil that his wife
and daughter were taking a nap. A footbound woman who lived across the court-
yard was bathing when her aunt came to visit. The woman called over for Zhao to
open the gate, and he saw that the aunt also had small feet. He, too aroused to keep
writing, was quite willing to be seduced by the two. The provocative encounter in
the here-now has to be tamed by Yao Lingxi’s announcement that this is a posthu-
mous work (305–7). The same strategy of claiming boyhood innocence in narrat-
ing a taboo subject was used by contemporary writer Yang Yang—son of a foot-
bound woman—who took his readers straight to the boudoir and inner worlds of
women in Liuyi village (Xiaojiao wudao: Dian-nan yige xiangcun de chanzu gushi
[Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 2001], pp. 1–5, 37).
33. The same narrator, again claiming to transmit the experience of Yu Aitong,
elaborated on how fondling the golden lotus creates pleasure for both the male and
female. This pleasure is as good as, if not better than, sexual intercourse (CFL IV:
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

48–49).
34. A Faithful of Lotus-ism—Lianjiao xinshi—harks back to Qingshi, a late Ming
manifesto of the cult of qing in which Feng Menglong vowed to establish a Qingjiao
(a religion or teaching of love). Yao Lingxi’s evocation of the cult of qing, discussed
above, rings true, but this imitation seems contrived. Even as he referred to Fang
Xuan and Feng Menglong, Lianjiao xinshi gave explicit expression to both male and
female sexual desires that would have been unspeakable in the traditional genres Fang
adhered to. The connoisseur’s love of feet is construed as an instinct arising from the
inside and expressed in behavior. Yao Lingxi thus described the psychological process
of modern connoisseurship: “Since we love the tiny foot, of course we adore con-
cubines with tiny feet. When love becomes extreme, it propels all kinds of rebel-
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lious acts, such as disobeying mother, abandoning wife, casting away sons. Hence
a love inside the psyche [xinli shang ] becomes expressed in behavior. Other behav-
iors are expressions of the sex drive [xingyu shang ], such as sodomy. . . . This is more
disgusting than biting or smelling bound feet, yet there are people who do this”
(CFL: 294). At least to Yao, love of feet and sex drive are distinct instincts.
35. On the trope of the femme fatale in Ming-Qing erotic novels, see Kang,
Chongshen fengyuejian, pp. 57–81.
36. Li, Yuemantang riji, cited in Daqiao Shiyu, Hu Xueyan waizhuan, in Wan-
Qing xiaoshuo daxi (Taipei: Guangya chuban, 1984), tiyao, p. 1.
37. A reader of Caifeilu recalled buying a lithographed copy of Hu Xueyan from
a book stall only to be disappointed that it was so thin and lacking in explicit de-
scription of footbinding. Yao Lingxi described one 96-page version by Daqiao Shiyu,
printed in stereotype by Duotian Tailang (Tada Taro) and distributed by a Riben
Aishan she (Nippon Aizen sha), none of which are “real” Japanese names (CFL IV:
34). This is probably the version on which the 1984 retypeset is based.
38. Xu Ke related that wealthy merchants in Taigu, Shanxi, favored concubines
who wore jade soles in the summer, which were cool to the touch (Qingbai leichao
[Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986], p. 6210).
39. Jean Baudrillard has placed antique and exotic objects in nonfunctional sys-
tems of objects. Marginalized, they are “warm” objects associated with childhood
(The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict [London and New York: Verso, 1996],
p. 146). The function of jade soles as an opium roller does not stem from any in-
trinsic nature of the material; any surface would do, hence its extravagant appeal.
Indeed, an imitator, a former governor of Guangdong, reportedly used the bare heels
of his Guangdong attendants to hold snuª (CFL: 301). In a slightly diªerent ver-
sion the o‹cial, a zhongtong in Guangdong, was said to use the heels of footbound
women (CFL II: 233). A contributor to Radishes called into question both the phys-
ical possibility and aesthetic desirability of containing fragrance in an oriﬁce usu-
ally associated with foulness even though a perfectly bound foot should have a heel
that resembles the smooth and lustrous texture of a snuª dish (CFL II: 152).
40. Some argued that the practice of drinking wine from a shoe started in Song,
as evinced by a poem by Wang Shenfu, but the practice became ﬁrmly associated
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

with Yang Tieya (CFL: 180; cf. Su Fu, Xianggui xiewa dianlüe [Haining Zoushi shizu
youlanshi manuscript edition, 1879], p. 37). Yang once drank from a giant lotus cup
at a brothel party in Suzhou, but made no mention of drinking from a shoe in his
poetry (Yang Weizhen shiji [Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1994], p. 377). In
a series of poems emulating the “Xianglian” poems of Han Wo, Yang expressed his
fondness for bound feet. The last couplet from “Swing,” for example, reads: “A ro-
bust wind blows, lifting the gaze to the edge of space, / A pair of upside-down golden
lotus reaching to the sky” (404).
41. Yang sojourned in Suzhou in 1344–49, often working as a music teacher (Su,
Xianggui xiewa, p. 39). The disclaimer is in Tao Zhongyi, Chuogeng lü, cited in Su,
Xianggui xiewa, p. 36. The Japanese scholar Aoki Masaru has found a story of a cer-
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tain Tang Fuming drinking directly from a shoe in a Tang collection of jottings.
The shoe was made of cloth and sealed in wax (“Shusho shudan,” in Aoki Masaru
zenshu, vol. 8 [Tokyo: Shunju sha, 1984], pp. 85–86).
42. Shen Defu, Wanli yehuo bian (n.p.: Fuli shanfang, 1827), 23.28a; cf. Ni Zan,
Qingmige quanji, in Yuandai zhenben wenji huikan (Taipei: Guoli zhongyan
tushuguan, 1970), p. 483. Stories about Ni’s obsession with cleanliness were etched
in his funerary epitaphs, and many more circulated in the late Ming and early Qing.
He was said to build his toilet on stilts and line the cesspool with goose feathers
that would cover feces dropping (Ni, Qingmige, pp. 481–84). He had the rocks and
trees in his garden scrubbed and his clothes changed scores of times daily. In the
eyes of the Donglin patriots Gu Xiancheng and Gao Panlong, Ni’s love of physi-
cal cleanliness is sign of his moral purity and love of political tranquility (634, 668).
It is no accident that Xu Ke, proponent of natural feet, cited Shen’s version of the
Tieya story to emphasize the unseemly nature of lotus-loving (“Tianzu kaolue,” in
Tiansuke congkan, ed. Xu Ke [Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1914], 13a).
43. Ji Yun, Yuewei caotang biji; cited in CFL: 331. Yao Lingxi recounted another
tale: a gang of hoodlums was drinking when a boy walked by toying with a dainty
shoe. They snatched it and proceeded to drink from it. A wrinkled granny entered
the scene, cursing her grandson who stole her decades-old wedding slipper. The
merrymakers were so revolted that they vomited (CFL: 332).
44. The Jingdezhen kiln in Jiangxi had been making these shoe-shaped wine cups
since at least the late Ming period. For an underglaze blue specimen from the sec-
ond quarter of the seventeenth century, see “Wine cup in the shape of a shoe,” in
Wu Tung, Earth Transformed: Chinese Ceramics in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), p. 142. The words xiaoxiao jinlian fengyibei (tiny-
tiny-golden-lotus-oªering-one-cup) were inscribed on the insole. I thank Alex Tun-
stall for bringing this to my attention.
45. CFL: 7, 12–13. Lao Xuan’s theory about the origins of footbinding is also
woman-centered, but is more problematic: women’s “natural” inclination is to beau-
tify themselves to win over men’s love. Hence women invented footbinding just as
they invented tight-lacing, waved hair, high heels, and so on (CFL: 17). His rendi-
tion of female agency: woman is the ﬁsher; man the ﬁsh; and adornment, the hook
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

(CFL: 20). Hence the only true woman in this heterosexuality-as-biology model is
one who courts man. Lao Xuan was a teacher of English, geography, and history
in Beijing who also wrote columns for Shibao, Tuhua shijie, and Beiyang huabao.
An unabridged version of Lao Xuan’s composite essay “Nannü” is in his Luanyu
quanshu (Beijing: Hualing chubanshe, 1996), pp. 1–137. The historian Yang Nian-
qun has found Lao Xuan’s historicist insistence refreshing (“ ‘Guoduqi’ lishi de ling-
yimian,” Dushu 6 [2002]: 128–35).
46. Hu Yepin, “Xiao xiancheng zhong de liangge furen,” Dongfang zazhi 26, no.
18 (Sept. 1929): 103. In emphasizing the di‹culty if not the impossibility of letting
feet out, this story reverses the prevailing trend established by Tang Yisuo’s Huang
Xiuqiu.
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47. In yet another example of the supplemental relationship between Radishes

and the anti-footbinding polemics, most of the female testimonies in the antholo-
gies are replicas of the latter. In fact, Yao Lingxi placed them in a section called “Ad-
monitions,” or anti-footbinding literature (CFL: 231–62; CFL II: 39–68; CFL III:
13–23; not in CFL IV but see 126–43; not in CFXB).
48. In the 1934 Caifeilu anthology, the spectrum of female voice/authorship in
the “Admonitions” section was presented in three ways: Madam Axiu’s “Painful His-
tory” was written in the first person and published under her name; “The Self Nar-
ration of the Binding Process by Madam Jin Suqing” was presented as oral testi-
mony by an unnamed scribe (CFL: 258–61); “The Self Narration of the Binding
Process by Madam Lin Yanmei” was attributed to her younger brother, Lin
Zhangliu, who was named as the scribe (261–62). In all cases, male intervention is
undeniable. I am not interested in ascertaining which is the more “authentic” fe-
male voice. Taking as a given that they came to us marked as “female,” I ask ques-
tions about what this femaleness meant to the readers at the time.
49. The third narrative, as told by Madam Lin Yanmei to her younger brother,
defies this stereotype in its description of a completely pliant female body. She started
binding at age four but her feet grew back to an unbent albeit very narrow shape,
when she unbound at age nine. Madam Lin attributed her success to a secret-
formula tonic known only to her dead mother. So reversible was her binding that
she called the experience “irrelevant to my body” (CFL: 262).
50. The Repentant Scholar was also a collector. He once sent Yao Lingxi a soft
sock-like slipper he found in an antique market in Beiping to inquire about its use.
Yao asked an elder and confirmed that prostitutes gave such coarsely made slippers
to clients as souvenirs of one-night stands (CFL II: 368–70).
51. Thomas Richards, “Archive and Utopia,” Representations 37 ( Winter 1992):
104–35; quote from p. 104.

4. FROM ANCIENT TEXTS TO CURRENT CUSTOMS

1. Although erotic paintings and pictures existed, their mode of enticement is
similar to that of written discourses: indirection. R. H. Van Gulik observed that
“representation of woman’s uncovered feet is completely taboo” in erotic prints from
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the Ming (Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period [Tokyo: privately published, 1951],
p. 170). Nineteenth-century prints are more explicit, mirroring the growing ex-
plicitness of the textual discourse. For an eighteenth-to-nineteenth-century album
of erotic paintings see Dreams of Spring: Erotic Art in China from the Bertholet Col-
lection (Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1997). For the early-Qing painter Gu Jianlong
(1606–ca. 1694) and his erotic albums, see the articles by James Cahill, “Where Did
the Nymph Hang?” Kaikodo Journal 7 (1998): 8–16; and “The Emperor’s Erotica,”
Kaikodo Journal 9 (1999): 24–43.
2. Zhang Bangji, Mozhuang manlu, 8.5a–b, in Qinding siku quanshu. The PRC
writer Gao Hongxing deduced from internal reference that this book was completed
after 1148 (Chanzu shi [Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1995], p. 12). Char-
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lotte Furth has called attention to the correlation between the initial spread of foot-
binding and the emergence of gynecology ( fuke) as a specialized field in the North-
ern Song dynasty (960–1125). In its preoccupation with the reproductive functions
of the female body, the rise of Song gynecology signified a heightened medical and
social attention on maternity. The maternal body, or the body parts associated with
gestation, became de-eroticized, leading to a “splitting of the body of desire from
the body of reproduction.” The arched foot became a “fetishist signifier of woman
as desirable” exactly because “it was not identified with any part of the body asso-
ciated with a reproductive function” (A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical
History, 960–1665 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999], p. 133; for the rise
of Song fuke, see pp. 59–93). Coincidentally, in contrast to this fuke assumption
that the foot is an asexual organ, recent studies in cognitive science have shown that
on a brain surface sensory system map, the foot and toes are located next to the
genitals (Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, and Thomas M. Jessell, Principles of
Neural Science, 3rd ed. [New York, Elsevier Science Publishing Co., 1991], p. 372).
I am grateful to Suzanne Cahill for bringing this book to my attention.
3. The writer Tao Zongyi (ca. 1316–ca. 1403), for example, wrote that: “There-
fore, we know that the binding of feet [zajiao] did not start until the Five Dynasties
period (907–960). Practitioners were few before the reigns of Xining (1068–77) and
Yuanfeng (1078–85) [of the northern Song emperor Shenzong ]. But in the recent
years everybody has been imitating it, and those who do not are ashamed”(Chuo-
genglu, 10.16a-17a, in Qinding Siku quanshu). Modern analyses of material cultures
and gender perceptions do suggest that footbinding as a social practice was likely
to have begun in the tenth century. See my Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), chap. 1. See also Gao Shiyu’s nu-
anced account, which argues that footbinding arose as an aesthetic ideal among court
dancers during the Five Dynasties period and became a regulatory measure restricting
female behavior in the southern Song (“Chanzu zaiyi,” Shixue yuekan 2 [1999]:
20–24, 111).
4. Zhang, Mozhuang manlu, 8.5a–b. Although the line on six inches of succu-
lent flesh was often cited, the rest of Han Wo’s poem is almost never mentioned in
the origin discourse. It reads: “Glowing, glowing, six inches of succulent flesh, / Em-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

broidered shoe in white silk, lined in red. / Not much of a romantic, the southern
dynasty son of heaven, / Yet he prefers the red lotus to green leaves” (Quan Tang-
shi [Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995], p. 1719). The title of the poem, “Jizi,”
originally referred to clogs, a ritual footwear in antiquity, but later became a generic
term for shoes. In some versions “six” (liu) appears as “square” ( fang ), a word almost
identical in shape. The genre of “fragrant toilette” heralded by Han Wo portrays
the gestures, bodies, and dress of beautiful women in the boudoir. See Kang Zheng-
guo, Fengsao yu yanqing [Zhengzhou: Henan Renmin chubanshe, 1988], pp. 239–48.
The scholar Gao Wenxian argued that the Xianglian ji was wrongly attributed to
Han Wo and that its likely author was the Jin scholar He Ning (898–955) (Han Wo
[Taipei: Xinwenfeng, 1984], pp. 63–81).
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5. The only exception was the Ming scholar Shen Defu, who cited a painting
“Embroidering Shoes” depicting Empress Changsun of the Tang and a portrait of
the Tang Empress/Emperor Wu Zetian as proof that Tang women did not bind
their feet (Wanli yehuo bian [n.p.: Fuli shanfang, 1827], 23.26a).
6. Che Ruoshui, Jiaoqi ji, 20a, in Qinding Siku quanshu, zibu 10, zajia lie 3.
7. Hu Yinglin identified the Runan xianxianzhuan reference. See his Dianqian
xinlu, in Shaoshi shanfang bicong (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958), p. 151.
8. For the stories of Consort Yang and the femme fatale tradition in o‹cial his-
tories, see Fan-Pen Chen, “Problems of Chinese Historiography as Seen in the
O‹cial Records on Yang Kuei-fei,” T’ang Studies 8–9 (1990–91): 83–96.
9. Zhou Mi attributed the Yaoniang legend to Daoshan xinwen, a work that is
no longer extant (Haoranzhai yatan [Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000],
p. 19). The Yaoniang story, again attributed to Daoshan xinwen, appeared in a Yuan
scholar’s notation book, Chuogenglu, preface dated 1366 (Tao Zongyi, Chuogenglu,
10.16a–17a). Both Hu Yinglin and Zhao Yi mentioned that the Yaoniang legend
first appeared in Zhang Bangji’s notation, but it is not in the authoritative Qinding
siku quanshu edition of Mozhuang manlu, nor is it in the more recent compilation,
Congshu jicheng chubian.
10. The possible Buddhist influence has prompted the Japanese scholar Furu-
gaki Koichi to hypothesize that footbinding was an import from “the West,” or Cen-
tral Asia (“Chugoku ni okeru josei no tensoku: toku ni jisso to Sodai no kigen ni
tsuite,” Chugoku kankei ronsetsu shiliao 29, no. 1 [1987]: p. 49). For the popularity
of Buddhism in Southern Tang court and society, see Zou Jingfeng, Nan-Tang guo-
shi (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 2000), pp. 141–43, and Nan-Tang lishi yu
wenhua (Chengdu: Sichuan daxue chubanshe, 2000), pp. 110–12. For Li Yu’s accom-
plishments in music and dance and the cultural eªervescence at his court, see Nan-
Tang guoshi, pp. 199–205 and Nan-Tang lishi, pp. 98–109. The Southern Tang king-
dom was also known for its innovative women’s fashions. High chignons, “slender
jackets,” and skirts with form-fitting waists were in style (Zhou Xibao, Zhongguo
gudai fushi shi [Taipei: Nantian shuju, 1992], pp. 256–57). The look resembles that
of a dancing bodhisattva found in Tang Buddhist art (see fig. 10).
11. For Yang Shen’s impressive corpus, the rites controversy, and his reputation,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

see L. Carrington Goodrich and Choaying Fang, eds., Dictionary of Ming Biogra-
phy, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 1531–35. For a
convenient two-volume compilation of Chinese articles on Yang’s life, classical schol-
arship, and lyrical output, see Lin Qingzhang and Jia Shunxian, comp., Yang Shen
yanjiu ziliao huibian (Taipei: Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Acade-
mia Sinica, 1992).
12. Goodrich and Fang, Dictionary of Ming Biography, p. 1532.
13. Yang Shen, “Gongzu,” in Tanyuan tihu, in Congshu jicheng chubian, no. 334
(Changsha: Shangwu, 1939), p. 20 [ juan 3]. One of the scholars Yang chided was
Tao Zongyi.
14. Ibid. For a summary of the theory that footbinding originated in the Qin-
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NOTES TO PAGES 116–121 263
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Han period, see Zhao Yi, “Gongzu,” in Gaiyu congkao (Shanghai: Shangwu, 1957),
p. 656.
15. Yang, Danqian yulu, 11.15b, and Danqian zonglu, 25.15b, both in Qinding
siku quanshu, zibu 10, zajia lei 2. Yang refuted the Daji story without recounting
it, which suggests that it was well-known. It can be found in a Ming-dynasty en-
cyclopedia, Wang Sanpin, Gujin shiwu kao (Taipei: Shangwu, 1973), 6.28b.
16. Yang, Sheng’an quanji, juan 75, cited in Lin and Jia, Yang Shen yanjiu ziliao,
p. 701. Song daoxue learning became the Ming imperial orthodoxy in 1414 with the
compilation of the Great Collection [of commentaries] for the Five Classics and Four
Books. Yang Shen’s privileging of Han learning was a reaction against this Ming or-
thodoxy. For intellectual and institutional contexts of this development, see Ben-
jamin Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), chap. 2. He has argued that the
formation of Song daoxue orthodoxy is primarily the work of early Ming emperors.
17. Yang, Sheng’an waiji, juan 26, cited in Lin and Jia, Yang Shen yanjiu ziliao,
p. 572.
18. Yang, Sheng’an quanji, juan 3, cited in Lin and Jia, Yang Shen yanjiu ziliao,
pp. 808–9. See also pp. 912–32 for the importance of natural emotions in Yang’s
literary theory.
19. Yang, Danqian zhailu, 8.13a–b; Danqian zonglu, 17.9a–b, 18.22a; both in
Qinding siku quanshu, zibu 10, zajia lei 2.
20. Yang Shen’s attitude toward footbinding is unclear. Yang and his wife Huang
E were renowned composers of a genre of amorous songs called sanqu (free songs).
In Yang’s extensive sanqu works, I found several erotically charged references to
“arched shoes” (gongxie). See Xie Boyang, ed., Quan-Ming sanqu ( Ji’nan: Qilu shushe,
1994), pp. 1408, 1417. It is hard to tell, however, if Yang was using a common po-
etic allusion or if he was expressing his own love for the arched foot.
21. Yang, Han zashi mixin, in Xiangyan congshu, ji 3, juan 2, pp. 655–56. The title
is also rendered Zashi mixin. Since these words are ambiguous even in Chinese, I
have opted to adopt an equally inscrutable English title, Han Footles. The obscure
word footles does mean “triﬂes,” which approximates zashi. My act of creative trans-
lation is a tribute to Yang Shen’s playfulness. This work was widely anthologized in
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the Ming and Qing periods, despite early and virtually universal doubts about its
authenticity. For its textual history, see Lin and Jia, Yang Shen yanjiu ziliao, pp.
443–44. It appears that Yang Shen did not try too hard to cover his tracks. This
problem did not deter many subsequent writers, such as Yu Huai discussed below,
from citing it as a Han text.
22. These measurements are supposed to be in Han feet and inches, but the length
of a Han foot is controversial among the philologists (see below).
23. Yu Huai cited both Maiden Ying’s eight-inch foot and Han Wo’s poem about
a six-inch foot to argue that “women’s feet before the Tang were not bent into the
shape of the new moon” (“Furen xiewa kao,” in Tanji congshu, ed. Wang Zhuo and
Zhang Chao, 31.2a; Fei Xihuang’s rebuttal is on 31.3a). Another scholar who cited
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the “eight-inch” statement as proof of absence of footbinding is Hu Yinglin’s con-

temporary, Xie Zhaozhe (Zaihang; 1567–1624), Wenhai pisha (Shanghai: Dada tushu
gongyingshe, 1935), p. 63.
24. Yang, preface to Danqian xulu, cited in Lin and Jia, Yang Shen yanjiu ziliao,
p. 628.
25. For Hu Yinglin’s biography and works, see Goodrich and Fang, Dictionary
of Ming Biography, pp. 645–647.
26. Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects
of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Council of East Asia Studies,
Harvard University, 1984).
27. One example is Hu Yinglin’s friend Shen Defu (1578–1642), who accused
Hu of inconsistency and faulted him for not being comprehensive enough in his
investigation of ancient texts (Wanli yehuo bian 23.27a–b).
28. Cited in Hu Yinglin, Danqian xinlu, p. 145. Yang’s original is in Danqian
yulu, 11.15a–b.
29. A 100-juan collection of Yuefu shiji was compiled in the Song dynasty (Ciyuan
[Hong Kong: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1987], p. 881).
30. Hu, Danqian xinlu, pp. 145–46. Hu’s use of the term guojiao for leg-binding
is confusing, for it was also used to denote footbinding. Leg-binding is also known
as guotui, xingteng, tengyue. A Ming encyclopedia lists guojiao as a synonym of
xingteng and xingchan, suggesting that it was construed as leg-binding ( Yu Tingbi,
Shiwu yiming jiaozhu [Taiyuan: Shanxi guji chubanshe, 1993], p. 194). During the
Zhou dynasty, leg-binding (called bi; xiefu) was a form of respectable clothing
fashioned by juniors in audience with their seniors, such as o‹cials in audience
with their king. In providing support for the leg muscles, it enhanced running or
jumping. In modern times only peasants or soldiers used them (Wang Yuqing, Zhong-
guo fuzhuang shigang [Taipei: Zhonghua minzu yishu wenjiao jijinhui, 1994],
p. 104.
31. Hu, Danqian xinlu, p. 165. Besides cattail shoes, the wooden clog is another
kind of footwear that women gave up after the emergence of footbinding. For its
history, which began as early as Confucius’s times, see Zhou Xun and Gao Chun-
ming, Zhongguo zhuantong fushi xingzhishi (Taipei: Nantian shuju, 1998), pp. 127–32.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

There is, however, conﬂicting information on diªerences between male and female
footwear in antiquity. Although the Zhouli materials suggest that they were virtu-
ally identical, the Taiping yulan, a tenth-century compilation based on earlier
sources, says: “In the past shoes for females had round toes; shoes for males had
square toes. The purpose is to distinguish the sexes” (Taiping yulan [Taipei: Dai-
hua shuju, 1977], 698.4b–5a). Hu’s reading is that in the past, women could freely
imitate male footwear if they so chose. But in the age of bound feet, they could not
wear square toes even if they had wanted to crossdress (147).
32. According to regulations in the Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), lü-shoes are single-
soled ritual footwear. They diªer from xie-shoes, which have raised platform soles,
probably for outdoor ceremonies. In later times, lü became the generic name for
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shoes, as attested to by Hu’s notations. His investigations into female shoes are in
Danqian xinlu, pp. 149–52; on shoes in general, pp. 152–65. These references call
the reader’s attention to a cultural phenomenon that has a strange resonance with
footbinding. In the 148 Tang and Song tales about lü-shoes, about one-tenth de-
pict shoes or shoes and garments as synecdoche of the body-self. A recurring trope:
empty co‹n; no trace of the bodily remains; a lone pair of shoes. There is a long
tradition, then, of viewing footwear and garments as synecdoche of self. Could this
account for the fetishizing of female feet and the fixation on her footwear? Can we
view the bound foot as a synecdoche for the female body-self ?
33. For the dating, discovery, reception, and textual history of Zhouli, also known
as Zhouguan and Zhou guanli, see the informative chapter “Chou li” by William
Boltz, in Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Biographical Guide (n.p.: The
Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, 1993), pp. 24–32. Some believed that it was authored
by the Duke of Zhou. Others suspected it was a forgery by the Han scholar Liu
Xin (46 b.c.e.–23 c.e.), citing the fact that this work was not known before the
Former Han. Modern scholarly consensus holds that it was a genuine pre-Han text,
written in the classical Chinese of late Spring and Autumn and Warring States pe-
riods (ca. sixth to third century b.c.e.). For its influence on the administrative struc-
tures of subsequent dynasties, see Charles Hucker, A Dictionary of O‹cial Titles in
Imperial China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), pp. 6–7.
34. Coincidentally the original “winter o‹ce” section was lost when the Zhouli
first became known in the mid-second-century b.c.e. The Kaogong ji (Records of
the scrutiny of crafts) was substituted in its place, hence its structural anomalies
(Boltz, “Chou li,” pp. 25–26).
35. Yang, Danqian zhailu, 11.2b; Danqian zonglu, 11.18b; Hu, Danqian xinlu,
p. 144.
36. Yang, Danqian zhailu, 11.2b; Danqian zonglu, 11.18b; Hu, Danqian xinlu,
p. 144.
37. Hu, Danqian xinlu, pp. 144–45. For the names, designs, and degree of for-
mality of these shoes, see Wang Yuqing, Zhongguo fuzhuang, pp. 105–7; Zhou Xibao,
Zhongguo gudai fushi, pp. 18, 58.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

38. Hu, Danqian xinlu, pp. 144–45.

39. Hu gave several examples suggesting that even before the advent of foot-
binding, in an age when male and female footwear were identical in form and shape,
embroidered patterns marked the footwear as female. Hence women’s leg-binders
were embroidered, as were shoes (ibid., pp. 146, 147, 150).
40. Ibid., pp. 146–47. The sex of the term for the child who appreciates small
feet (lit., ﬁve-foot child, wuchi tongzi) is ambiguous.
41. Ibid., pp. 147–48. Among the literary works that contributed to footbind-
ing’s popularity after the Yuan dynasty is the late-Ming erotic novel Jinpingmei, dis-
cussed in chap. 6.
42. Ibid., p. 148.
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43. Ibid., p. 147. Hu hypothesized that the silk socks (luowa) eulogized in Tang
poetry may resemble these knee-high leggings.
44. Ibid., p. 146. If one interprets the “bamboo shoots” being measured and re-
duced in size as the foot, then Du Mu’s poem can be construed as signaling the be-
ginning of footbinding as social practice. Conversely, if one interprets them as toes,
then the poem describes slender toes being packed in socks. They are thus indica-
tive of a cultural preference for slender feet, but not the arching of the foot. Hu’s
lack of a clear-cut stance was faulted by Shen Defu as “wa›ing” (Wanli yehuo bian,
23.27a–b).
45. Hu, Danqian xinlu, p. 149. Hu did not elaborate on the connections between
printing and footbinding beyond their chronological overlap. We may speculate
that both are related to the breakdown of aristocratic society. Instead of heredity,
new determinants of power and new markers of wealth and status are needed. The
dissemination of knowledge aªorded by printing enabled the scholar-o‹cial class
to dominate the bureaucracy starting in the Song. Footbinding is their form of con-
spicuous consumption. The problem, of course, is that such speculations are easy
to make and very di‹cult to prove.
46. Ibid., p. 149. By Hu’s own admission, he was neither the ﬁrst nor the only
one to subscribe to the tenth-century theory. We may recall that it started with Zhang
Bangji, and was the predominant view of authors of notations in the Yuan and Ming
(p. 146).
47. Yu Huai, “Furen xiewa kao,” in Tanji congshu, ed. Wang Zhuo and Zhang
Chao, 31.2b–3a. The Tanji congshu was ﬁrst published in 1695. In late-Ming writ-
ings, urban fashion is often referred to as “dressing the human prodigy” ( fuyao).
See Lin Liyue, “Yichang yu fengjiao: Wan-Ming de fushi fengshang yu ‘fuyao’ yilun,”
Xinshixue 10, no. 3 (1999): 111–57; and Wu Renshu, “Mingdai pingmin fushi de liu-
xin fengshang yu shidafu de fanying,” Xinshixue 10, no. 3 (1999): 55–109.
48. Zhao Yi, “Gongzu,” in Gaiyu congkao, p. 656. Alternative reading for the
third sentence: The same is true for the Luomiao (“naked Miao”) and Boyi (“bar-
barian Bo”) peoples in Yunnan and Guizhou.
49. The Manchu rulers issued prohibition edicts in 1636, 1638, and 1664. I have
argued that they had the opposite eªect: in making footbinding an ethnic marker,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the attempted ban led to a spread of the practice among Han women during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See my “The Body as Attire: The Shifting
Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth-Century China,” Journal of Women’s His-
tory 8, no. 4 ( Winter 1997): 8–27. Susan Mann has suggested that “we can plausi-
bly assume that” in the Qianlong reign “the desirability of footbinding and the
spread of women’s home handicrafts in peasant households were systematically
linked.” Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 168.
50. According to Bai Ting, “Huai, the sixth-generation grandson of the [Song
Neo-Confucian philosopher] Cheng Yichuan [Yi, 1033–1107] lives in Chiyang. The
women in this family have kept up their tradition of not binding their feet, nor do
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NOTES TO PAGES 134–138 267
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they pierce their ears.” The implication is that other families of their standing often
did. Tao Zongyi, in turn, flatly stated that “footbinding only started in the Five Dy-
nasties period.” Cited in Zhao, “Gongzu,” in Gaiyu congkao, p. 656.
51. The discourse of footbinding in a small body of vernacular plays and songs
will be taken up in chap. 5. Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this book to
consider the wealth of information on footbinding in Ming-Qing fiction, nor can
it analyze the large body of Tang and Song poetry on the allure of small feet. For
poetry as a conduit of footbinding’s aura, see Wang Ping, Aching for Beauty: Foot-
binding in China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). On the large
number of Song poems eulogizing small feet and dainty steps as well as an analy-
sis of the terminologies used, see Tao Jinsheng, “Geji wuji yu jinlian,” in Tang-Song
nüxing yu shehui, ed. Deng Xiaonan (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2003),
pp. 365–74.
52. Zhao Yi, “Jinfeng ranzhi,” in Gaiyu congkao, pp. 656–57.
53. Zhao Yi, “Zanhua,” in Gaiyu congkao, pp. 657–58.
54. One significant exception is that footbinding (nürenzu, women’s feet) ap-
pears under the “body” category in the encyclopedia Gezhi jingyuan compiled by
Chen Yuanlong ([Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1992], pp. 155–56).
55. Zhao Yi, “Tuowa dengxi,” in Gaiyu congkao, pp. 652–53. The expressions
“defilement” and “obscenity” are from the notation “Zhuxue,” p. 654. Zhao ob-
served that the leg-binders fashioned by envoys and dancers from Siam to the Qing
imperium are “colorful and quite lovely” (654). So perhaps the leg-binders in Chi-
nese antiquity were just that.
56. Zhao Yi, “Zhuxue,” in Gaiyu congkao, pp. 653–54.
57. Zhao Yi, “Furen bai,” in Gaiyu congkao, pp. 659–60; “Guren guizuo xiang-
lei,” pp. 660–61. Zhao did not describe how people sat on low platforms. Sarah
Handler has suggested that they sat with legs tucked up instead of hanging over the
edge (“The Chinese Bed,” in Chinese Furniture: Selected Articles from “Orientations,”
1984–1994 [Hong Kong: Orientations Magazine Ltd., 1996], p. 5). There is a large
secondary literature on the history of chairs in China; see the bibliography of my
Every Step a Lotus. A recent syncretic discussion with a good bibliography is Ke Jia-
hao, “Yizi yu Fojiao liuchuan zhi guanxi,” Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishiyuyan yan-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

jiusuo jikan 69, no. 4 (Dec. 1998): 727–63.

58. Handler, “Chinese Bed,” pp. 5, 9.
59. For the emergence of the concept of gender distinctions in the Han, see Lin
Weihong, “Chastity in Chinese Eyes: Nan-Nü Yu-Pieh,” Chinese Studies 9, no. 2
(Dec. 1991): 13–40. See also Lisa Raphals, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women
and Virtue in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
60. See my “Footbinding as Female Inscription,” in Rethinking Confucianism:
Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, ed. Benjamin Elman, John
Duncan, and Herman Ooms (Los Angeles: Asia Paciﬁc Monograph Series in Inter-
national Studies, UCLA, 2002). The explanation that footbinding safeguarded
female chastity was certainly known to Chinese and European readers, but no se-
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rious scholar seemed to have found it a plausible or su‹cient explanation. In Chi-

nese, the argument was advanced in Langxuanji, a purportedly Yuan text forged in
the late Ming. See Yi Shizhen, Langxuanji, 2.19b–20a, in Xuejin taoyuan, ed. Zhang
Haipeng ( Yangzhou: Guangling guji keyinshe, n.d.).
61. Qian Yong, “Guozu,” in Lüyuan conghua (Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1969),
23.15a–b.
62. This is part of Li’s argument that the classic description of gendered divi-
sion of labor in Chinese society, “men plow, women weave,” did not become a re-
ality until the professionalization of male agricultural labor in the late-Ming. For
this argument, see his “Cong ‘fufu bingzuo’ dao ‘nangeng nüzhi,’” Jing jishi yanjiu
3 (1996): 99–107. For his estimates of female textile income, see “ ‘Nangeng nüzhi’
yu ‘funu banbiantian’ jiaose de xingcheng,” Jing jishi yanjiu 3 (1997): 10–22. The
economic historians Song Lizhong and Fan Jinmin have suggested that Li confused
domestic division of labor with social division of labor, resulting in a muddled defini-
tion of professionalization. See their review of Li’s book, Jiangnan de zaoqi gongye-
hua, 1550–1850, in Xinshixue 12, no. 4 (Dec. 2001): 193–205.
63. Qian also speculated that the “sharp shoes” mentioned in Shiji referred to
dancing slippers. “Dancing slippers are red in color, with design patterns and flat
soles. The front is pointy and decorated with pearls, very similar to women’s shoes
today” (Lüyuan conghua,23.14b–15a). Reference to “mean people” is on 23.16a.
64. Ko, “Footbinding as Female Inscription.”
65. The writer Yang Yang interviewed an eighty-seven-year-old widower in his
native village of Liuyi about boudoir rituals. The man, Mr. Zhou, recounted five
sexual plays involving the naked bound foot. One was “hanging,” whereby the hus-
band untied the binding cloth and used it to hang the wife’s foot from the canopy
of the bed (Xiaojiao wudao: Dian-nan yige xiangcun de chanzu gushi [Hefei: Anhui
wenyi chubanshe, 2001], pp. 48–49). But the taboo against exposed feet did not
vanish in the twentieth century. When Yang was a young boy, his aunt once let him
watch her wash her feet. But she muttered while unwrapping the cloth, as if cast-
ing oª a spell: “They should not be seen—they are stinky and poisonous!” (xiu
dudu de, buneng kan; 37).
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

5. THE EROTICS OF PLACE

1. For descriptions of the Datong style of shoes and a photograph, see my
Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), p. 114.
2. CFL: 274–75. The second half of this passage, not translated here, suggests
that “in the past” refers to a time before Yan Xishan’s anti-footbinding campaigns,
which the author deemed successful in diminishing the prestige of footbinding. Li
Hong’s account has spun textual imitations. One writer from the 1930s noted that
women in Datong, Suiyuan, and Baotou placed benches in front of their boudoir
instead of in fair grounds (CFL II: 309–10). A similar description to Li’s of the grand-
stand can be found in a contemporary compilation, Lu Zhengwen, Qi Fengyi, and
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Nie Yuanlong, eds., Shanxi fengsu minqing (Taiyuan: Shanxi sheng difangzhi bian-
hui weiyuanhui bangongshi, 1987), p. 269.
3. Su Fu, Xianggui xiewa dianlue (Haining Zoushi shizu youlanshi manuscript
edition, 1879), pp. 90–91. For an almost identical description attributed to a diªer-
ent source, see CFL: 273. For composite descriptions of feet contests in recent pub-
lications, see Yao Jushun, Zhongguo chanzu fengsu (Shenyang: Liaoning daxue
chubanshe, 1991), pp. 25–26; Lin Qiumin, “Yan Shishan yu Shanxi tianzu yundong,”
Guoshiguan guankan, fukan n.s. 18 ( June 1995): 129; Zhang Zhong, Xiaojiao yu bianzi
(Taipei: Youshi wenhua shiye gongsi, 1995), pp. 61–62. No photographic docu-
mentation for feet contests can be found, although it may well have existed. Nor
can I locate references to their existence before the nineteenth century.
4. Nagao Ryuzo, Shina minzoku shi (Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai, 1973), 2:
846–47. See also p. 461 for feet contests in Gansu. Nagao, who graduated from the
To-A dobun shoin (East Asian Common Culture Academy) in Shanghai in 1906,
joined the Southern Manchurian Railway Company in 1932; he resigned in 1936,
but stayed in Manchuria to continue his ethnographic research under the auspices
of the Japanese Foreign Ministry and Mantetsu. He was said to have conducted the
interviews himself; several Chinese assistants then compiled the field notes into “re-
search reports” (chosa hokoku). Nagao compiled the book on the basis of such re-
ports and his own “verification” (kosho), in part from textual sources (“Shina min-
zokushi hihan ippan,” in appendix, p. 5). Nagao also supplied the dates of the
gatherings but did not specify his source. They are: Datong, the fifteenth day of
the eighth month; Yongping, ten days before and after Qingming; Xuanhua, twice
yearly: ten days before and after Qingming as well as three days before and after
the fifteenth of the fifth month. For similar descriptions by Chinese writers, see
CFL: 272–74; CFL II: 242–43; CFL IV: 163–64. For scenes of feet contests in fiction,
see CFL II: 194–95, 244. In these accounts, the dates for feet contests in each lo-
cale vary considerably. For Datong, the following has been suggested: the thirteenth
of the fifth month (CFL: 341), the sixth of the sixth month (CFL II: 197, 201), the
fifteenth of the eighth month (CFL: 273). It is not clear if these occurred concur-
rently or in diªerent decades.
5. The blame for misinformation is always cast on “nonlocals” or “outsiders.”
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

See Xuanhua xian xinzhi (1922), in Zhongguo difangzhi minsu jiliao huibian, Huabei
juan (Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1989), p. 135. See also Lu Zhengwen et
al., eds., Shanxi fengsu minqing, p. 269. Some of the towns associated with feet
contests—Yongping, Zhangjiakou, Xuanhua, and Datong, for example—were sit-
uated along established trade routes that crisscrossed northern China. They, and
others, were later linked by the Beijing-Suiyuan railroad. It is tempting to hypoth-
esize that the culture of feet contests had spread along trade routes. But equally
plausible is the simple fact that it was more likely for reports on customs along bet-
ter traveled roads to surface. For northern trade routes, see Man Bun Kwan, The
Salt Merchants of Tianjin: State-Making and Civil Society in Late Imperial China
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), pp. 21–26.
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6. “Xijiao dahui,” Dainshizhai huabao, no. 127 (1887), no page. See also de-
scriptions based on this lithograph in CFL II: 245. Yang Yang interviewed a sev-
enty-year-old woman, Mrs. Luo, née Wang, who took part in a feet-washing gath-
ering in 1948 by a spring in front of Sanjiao si, about 2 kilometers from Liuyi village.
No men were present (Xiaojiao wudao: Dian-nan yige xiangcun de chanzu gushi
[Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 2001], pp. 114–17). The women also remembered
a more public feet contest in Tonghai held on the sixteenth day of the first month,
but a renowned Optimus from the contest in 1925 had just passed away when Yang
managed to locate her family. So there is no conclusive evidence for the latter
(111–14).
7. Su Fu, Xianggui xiewa dianlue, p. 90; Xuanhua xian xinzhi (1922), p. 135. The
word liang (to air) is often used as a synonym of sai (to air), as in “liangjiao hui.”
The word jia (armor) also means “examination status,” which is yet another ex-
ample of the conflation of footbinding with the examination discussed in chap. 3.
On the origins of confusing “armor” for “feet,” Yao Lingxi cited a source published
in 1912 but attributed to a writer who flourished around 1765 (CFL II: 317–18). For
another explanation of the confusion, see CFL II: 316. Yao rejected this origin myth,
which he had earlier helped to transmit, by arguing that the sounds of jiao (feet)
and jia (armor) are too divergent in northern dialects for the confusion to occur
(CFL II: 317–18).
8. CFL IV: 165–66. See also CFL II: 245–46.
9. CFL II: 193–205. Included here are some graphic descriptions of Datong foot-
binding customs, which almost certainly were the source for similar episodes in Feng
Jicai’s novella Three-Inch Golden Lotus. For example, professional footbinders were
also expert shoemakers. Among their specialties were “plum-sole shoes” (meihua di)
with hollow heels, which left traces of fragrant powder in the shape of blossoms
(CFL II: 196–97). Another ritual was the slitting of the belly of a lamb on a girl’s
initial binding day and inserting both feet into the belly. The warm blood was sup-
posed to soften the bones. After seven bedridden days, the girl would remove the
binding cloth and shed one layer of skin as white as the fat (zhi) of a sheep (199).
Binding is thus construed as a rebirth for the girl.
10. CFL II: 315.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

11. CFL II: 315–26.

12. On the building of the Ping-Sui railroad, see Ling Hongxun (H. H. Ling),
Zhongguo tielu zhi (Taipei: Changliu banyuekan she, 1954), pp. 183–86. The cargo
tra‹c was largely one-way, with hides, grain, crystal, and coal going eastward. Tea,
paper, and other products for daily use were shipped westward, but in less signiﬁcant
amounts. Joshua Goldstein has analyzed the northwest development project that
ensued from the Ping-Sui railroad as a form of “utopic modernity” (“Getting from
Here to There on the Pingsui Railroad,” unpublished seminar paper, University of
California at San Diego, 1994). On the impact of railroads on indigenous societies,
James Zheng Gao has argued that the initial beneﬁts of employment creation were
oªset later by the creation of social hierarchies and uneven development (Meeting
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Technology’s Advance: Social Change in China and Zimbabwe in the Railway Age
[Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997]). For an assessment of the economic
impact, see Ralph William Huenemann, The Dragon and the Iron Horse: The Eco-
nomics of Railroads in China, 1876–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1984).
13. CFL II: 315–17. Yao provided no attribution for his historical narrative. He
claimed that scenes of contests from the second stage were told to him by some
“old men from the past” (gulao), one of his favorite tropes.
14. In his book on the history of Wunderkammer (cabinets of curiosity), Lawrence
Weschler has described wonder as involving a “leap in rhetoric.” Before the triumph
of positivist certainty in the mid-1700s, wonder was a form of learning, “an inter-
mediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind that marks
the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing” (Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Won-
der [New York: Vintage Books, 1996], pp. 42, 89–90).
15. See n. 48 below on the geographic parameters of “Northwest”: Qin (Shaanxi),
Jin (Shanxi), Yan (Hebei), and Zhao (northern Shanxi and southern Hebei). As
this chapter seeks to demonstrate, however, the “Northwest” (or “the south” for that
matter) was less a geographic place than a cultural imaginary.
16. One such story is Pu Songling, “Zengbu xinyun qu,” in Liaozhai liqu ji (Bei-
jing: Guoji wenhua chubangongsi, 1999), discussed below. Another example is Mao
Qiling, Wuzong waiji, in Xiangyan congshu (Shanghai: Guoxue fulun she, 1914),
vol. 6, ji 11 juan 2, pp. 3001–24. For the trope of an emperor’s amorous journey that
aªorded the pleasure of substitution for the male reader, see Kang Zhengguo, Chong-
shen fengyuejian (Taipei: Maitian chuban, 1996), pp. 182–99.
17. Li Yu, “Shouzu,” in Xianqing ouji (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000),
p. 136; emphasis mine. For a more elegant but slightly less literal translation, see
Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1988), p. 68. Hanan has pointed out that Li’s claims notwithstanding, he had trav-
eled only occasionally; his ﬁrst trip was not taken until 1666, when he was already
a best-selling author, and took him to Beijing, Shaanxi, and Gansu. In 1668 he went
to Guangzhou; 1670, Fuzhou; 1672, Hanyang; 1673, Beijing (6–7). Li Yu used the
same trope of an all-seeing narrator in his novel The Carnal Prayer Mat, trans. Patrick
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Hanan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), in the character of the Knave,
a thief. If not for his comprehensive knowledge, gained from hovering on rooftops
at night, his friend Vesperus would not have known that his natural penis was too
tiny for his outsized fantasies.
18. My translation of the titles of the eight sections roughly follows that of Hanan
(Invention, pp. 28, 196). See chap. 8 of Invention of Li Yu for Hanan’s structural
analysis of the prose (xiaopin) of Xianqing ouji and its signiﬁcance to Li’s corpus
and literary history. Hanan has also shown that Li “used the book . . . in his quest
for patronage” (196). He dispatched copies of the book to his most powerful for-
mer patrons as soon as they came oª the press in late 1671, followed by letters and
a visit to the capital seeking further commissions (1–6). At the same time, Li in-
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tended his book for a broad literate readership, explaining that wenren (literatus)
means “any one who can read” (199).
19. The heads and subheads of the “Feminine Beauty” section are suggestive of
Li’s priorities in his connoisseurship of women (Xianqing ouji, passim):
I. Natural endowment (xuanzi)
A. Skin
B. Eyebrows and eyes
C. Hands and feet
D. Glance, gesture, and air (taidu)
II. Embellishments
A. Caring for face and hair
B. Fragrance
C. Facial make-up
III. Attire
A. Hair ornaments
B. Clothing
C. Shoes and stockings
Appended: “On shoes and stockings for women,” by Yu Huai
IV. Training and skills
A. Literature
B. Musical instruments
C. Song and dance
Li’s advice on desirable gait in general and binding feet in particular appear in essays
B and C of section I and C of section III.
20. Li Yu, Xianqing ouji, p. 138, see also p. 134. More advice on how to “size up”
(xiang) potential concubines is on pp. 132–42.
21. Ibid., p. 136. Li Yu received Miss Qiao as a gift in 1666 and Miss Wang in
1667 (Hanan, Invention, p. 8). For Hanan’s arguments about their inﬂuence on Xian-
qing ouji, see Invention, pp. 29, 67.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

22. One interesting example of the latter is a bundle of essays in Chu Jiaxuan’s
Jianhu ji. I have discussed one of them in an earlier essay, “Footbinding as Female
Inscription,” in Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea,
and Vietnam, ed. Benjamin Elman, John Duncan, and Herman Ooms (Los Ange-
les: Asia Paciﬁc Monograph Series in International Studies, UCLA, 2002).
23. Hanan, Invention, p. 1; for Li’s personae and contributions to the xiaopin-
essay, see pp. 45–58.
24. This same attitude of “footbinding is natural” is also discernible from the
early-Qing anti-footbinding edicts, as I have argued in an earlier article, “The Body
as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth-Century China,”
Journal of Women’s History 8, no. 4 ( Winter 1997): 8–27. Here my reading of Li Yu’s
love of footbinding diªers from that of many modern critics. Chun-shu Chang and
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Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, for example, have discerned a contradiction between Li

Yu’s “traditional sexist views of women”—treating them as sex objects—and his more
woman-friendly views as evinced by his condemnation of Miss Carry. “Li Yu let his
obsession with the beauty of tiny feet dominate in his intellectual reasoning. This
is a serious contradiction in Li Yu’s character and intellect” (Crisis and Transforma-
tion in Seventeenth-Century China: Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li Yü’s World
[Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992], p. 70). This is a contradiction
only to us, who start with the premise that footbinding is deplorable. This mod-
ern liberationist premise was not widely shared in Li Yu’s times.
25. Li Yu, Xianqing ouji, p. 136.
26. Ibid., p. 134.
27. Most representative of the latter is Zhang Dai’s essay “The Thin Horses of
Yangzhou.” See my Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-
Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 261–63, for
a translation and discussion. The courtesan of Yangzhou is a trope in Li Yu’s po-
ems, novels, and plays. See Huang Qiang’s analysis in Li Yu yanjiu (Hangzhou: Zhe-
jiang guji chubanshe, 1996), pp. 282–86. Using previously ignored episodes from
fiction, Wang Hongtai has made an original argument that the grooming of thin
horses represented a form of commodification of the late-Ming literati’s sensory
experiences (“Liudong yu hudong: You Ming-Qing xian chengshi shenghuo de tejing
tance gongzhong changyi de kaizhan,” Ph.D. diss., National Taiwan University, 1998,
pp. 427–31).
28. Li Yu, “Xiewa,” in Xianqing ouji, pp. 160–62. At the end of this essay Li ap-
pended his friend Yu Huai’s essay “Furen xiewabian,” which discourses on the ori-
gins of footbinding. The last paragraph of Yu’s essay, radically diªerent in tone, con-
tains a recommendation that contrasting colors between socks and shoes would
accentuate the smallness of the feet, as would shoes that contrast in color with the
floor (163). Here smallness, or the optical illusion thereof, recurred as an overrid-
ing concern despite Li Yu’s warnings. This paragraph is absent from Yu’s essay “Furen
xiewakao,” in the collectanea Tanji congshu, published in 1695, which is otherwise
identical. I suspect that the paragraph was written by Li Yu. See Wang Zhuo and
Zhang Chao, eds., Tanji congshu, 31.1a–4b. For Li Yu’s views on fashion in general,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

see Huang Qiang’s chapter “Li Yu yu fushi wenhua,” in Li Yu yanjiu, pp. 147–62.
29. Feng Erkang has suggested that the purpose of Wang Jingqi’s trip was to seek
patronage from Hu Qiheng, a provincial administrative commissioner and a pro-
tégé of Nian Gengyao in Xi’an (Yongzheng zhuan [Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1985],
p. 118). “Private advisor” is an imprecise rendition of muyou (tent-friend), one of
the several classes of personnel hired by a high-ranking o‹cial using his private
coªers: xuli, muyou, mensheng, jianü. The xuli acted as intermediaries between the
o‹cial and the runners. One of the jobs of the muyou was to supervise the xuli.
Miyazaki Ichisada has argued that the importance of muyou grew during the
Yongzheng reign; the secret memorial system he instituted created a paper trail that
required enhanced assistance from advisors with literary and practical skills (“Shindai
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no shuri to bakuyu: toku ni Yosei cho o chushin toshite,” chap. in Toyoshi ken-
kyukai, ed., Yosei jidai no kenkyu [Kyoto: Dohosha, 1986], pp. 215–42).
30. An older generation of scholars tended to follow the explanation of the em-
inent Qing historian Meng Sen (1868–1937) that Yongzheng had to dispose of Nian
because Nian knew too much about his subjugation of his brother Yinti, Kangxi’s
favorite son. See Meng, “Qingchu sanda yian kaoshi,” in Xinshi congkan, wai yi zhong
(Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1986), pp. 279–330; see especially his arguments on Nian
on pp. 295, 312. Fang Chao-ying’s entry on Nian [Nien Keng-yao] in Arthur W.
Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govern-
ment Printing O‹ce, 1943), pp. 587–90, followed this argument. See also his entry
on Wang Jingqi [Wang Ching-ch’i], pp. 812–13. Recent scholars tend to eschew a
single-cause explanation. Feng Erkang, for example, has argued that Nian’s arro-
gance, corruption, and factionalism accounted for Yongzheng’s gradual change of
heart (Yongzheng zhuan, pp. 104–20). For a brief but vivid account of Yongzheng’s
rage at Wang Jingqi and Nian Gengyao, see Jonathan Spence, Treason by the Book
(New York: Viking, 2001), pp. 30–33, 40, 51–52.
31. Wang Jingqi, Dushutang xizheng suibi (Hong Kong: Longmen shudian, 1967).
This is a facsimile copy of the 1928 typeset edition published by the Zhanggu bu
(Section for Historical Documents) of the Palace Museum, Beiping. Yongzheng’s
handwritten comments are reproduced on page 1a following the preface. Details of
the conﬁscation of Nian Gengyao’s papers at his residence in Hangzhou are in a
memorial by the two investigating o‹cers, Fu Min and E Minda, cited in the pref-
ace by Li Wei, 1a–b. The last emperor Xuantong (personal name Puyi) vacated the
palace on Nov. 5, 1924; on Nov. 20 a Commission for the Custody of the Property
of the Manchu House (Qingshi shanhou weiyuanhui), headed by Li Shizeng, was
established, and inspection of the palace began. In their initial inventory report,
Gugong wupin diancha baogao, 6 vols. (Beiping: Qingshi shanhou weiyuanhui,
1925–26), there is no entry with Wang’s name or the book under its present title.
But item no. 1047 from the “Maoqin dian, Shangshufang” list (vol. 1, book 4, p.
114) refers to “two volumes of books” logged as “kuangyu fuzhe” (wild and stupid
to the extreme). Could this be the one? The Maoqin Hall (Maoqin dian) in which
the locked box was discovered is a western chamber inside the inner palace behind
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the Qianqing gate; it was where Yongzheng read documents, summoned minis-
ters, and stored part of his archives. One of the committee members was Zhuang
Yan; see his memoirs, Shantang qinghua (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1980)
for a fascinating account of the inventory-taking process. For the formation of the
Palace Museum, see Hermann Köster, “The Palace Museum of Peiping,” Monu-
menta Serica, vol. 2 (1936–37): 167–90. I am grateful to Susan Naquin for this ref-
erence. See also James Cahill, “Two Palace Museums: An Informal Account of Their
Formation and History (Ching Yüan Chai so-shih IV),” Kaikodo Journal (Spring
2001): 30–39.
32. The story of Wang Sizhong is in “Yulin tongzhi Wang Yuanshi,” Dushutang
xizheng suibi, pp. 40a–41a; that of Zhang Pengge is in “Suining renpin,” pp. 41a–
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43b. Yao Lingxi was so taken with this story that he quoted it in his Siwuxie xiaoji
(n.p., Caihua shulin, 1974), pp. 191–92. For the successful bureaucratic career of
Zhang, see Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, pp. 49–51. He was said to be an
“ardent Confucianist” who persecuted Christians in 1691 while serving as governor
of Zhejiang (271). Jonathan Spence has recounted the Zhang story as told by Wang
Jingqi in Treason by the Book, pp. 32–33.
33. This is one of those statements that cannot be proved. I say “probably” in
part because the tone of Wang’s letter to Nian Gengyao with six appended poems
(Xizheng suibi, pp. 20a–22b) is solicitous if not downright obsequious. This sug-
gests that Wang had intended to send the missives to Nian when he wrote them.
34. The ten towns are: Pingding zhou, Shouyang, Yuci, Pingyao, Jiexiu, Huo-
zhou, Hongdong, Quwo, Anyi, Puzhou (Dushutang xizheng suibi, pp. 19b–20a).
35. Wang, “Buguang xiaozhuan,” in ibid., pp. 5b–8b.
36. Ibid., p. 6a. The Gushe Mountain is located west of Linfen county, Shanxi,
which was near Houma, where Wang met Lightning Steps. The name also appeared
in the Shanhaijing, and Qing scholars debated if it is the same as the one mentioned
in Zhuangzi. See Ciyuan (Hong Kong: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1987), p. 403.
37. Ibid., p. 6b. The titles of the three songs: “Fengguang hao” (Beautiful
scenery), “Wang moulang xin buzhi” (He hasn’t written), and “Moulang boxing”
(He is heartless).
38. Ibid., p. 7a.
39. Wang’s father, Wang Bin, was selected an Erudite in a boxue hongci exami-
nation of 1679 and served subsequently in the Imperial Academy and the Ministry
of Revenue. Jingqi’s elder brother, Jianqi (b. 1670), won a jinshi degree in 1709 and
served as a secretary at the Ministry of Rites (Eminent Chinese, pp. 812–13).
40. Wang, Dushutang xizheng suibi, pp. 7b–8a. Ironically, Wang’s spiteful remarks
about southern scholars could have come from the mouth of Yongzheng, who har-
bored a visceral disgust toward Jiangnan scholars, especially those from Zhejiang.
After he executed Wang Jingqi, in 1726 Yongzheng created a new o‹ce, Guanfeng
zhengsu shi, which Spence renders “Supervisor of Public Morality,” for the Prov-
ince of Zhejiang (Treason by the Book, p. 26). Later, in 1729, similar o‹ces were in-
stituted in three other troublesome southern provinces, Fujian, Hunan, and Guang-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

dong. See Yokoyama Hiroo, “Kanfu seizokushi kao,” chap. in Toyoshi kenkyukai,
Yosei jidai no kenkyu, pp. 782–800.
41. Wang, “Yu Hongshicun sannü ji,” in Dushutang xizheng suibi, pp. 8b–14b.
42. Both the terminology and deﬁnition of “pictorial cosmology” are from
Jonathan Hay, “Beyond Style in the Connoisseurship and Interpretation of Chi-
nese Painting,” unpublished paper, 2002, pp. 18–20. See also his Shitao: Painting
and Modernity in Early Qing China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
pp. 277–81. Hay uses “pictorial cosmology” to refer to the ordering of a painting’s
surface, one that shares a structural homology with social cosmologies or hierar-
chies. I use the term here to denote the ordering of space in a written text.
43. Wang, “Yi tuzhong suojian,” Dushutang xizheng suibi, pp. 19b–20a.
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44. Ibid., p. 20a.

45. Ibid., pp. 15a–17a. Wang included a list of names and deeds of martial prowess
of a score of the other Red Rock rouge bandits. He asked Chang: “Have you heard
of any lewd behavior on their parts?” and the answer was, “Never. I heard that they
made a pact with each other; whoever served two husbands would be punished by
the rest. The men they keep at their disposal outside their rooms and do not allow
them to share a table with them.” The translation for “divine-shouldered bowman”
is Spence’s (Treason by the Book, p. 32).
46. Wang, “Furen wa,” in Dushutang xizheng suibi, p. 52a.
47. Ibid., p. 16b.
48. Wang, “Furen chanzu,” in ibid., pp. 51a–52a. Wang, following a common
practice in Chinese, used names of four ancient kingdoms to denote the north-
western region: Qin (Shaanxi), Jin (Shanxi), Yan (Hebei), and Zhao (northern
Shanxi and southern Hebei). Here I have simplified them to three modern provinces.
Both this and the “Furen wa” entry that follows are dated the twenty-sixth of the
fifth month.
49. The red satin and gold style is typical of wedding shoes in the north. For a
photograph of several examples, see Every Step a Lotus, p. 53.
50. These liqu circulated only in hand-copied format before the twentieth cen-
tury. My primary Chinese text is a recent compilation arranged by Pu Xianming,
Songling’s twelfth-generation grandson, who has been collecting hand-copied man-
uscripts of the liqu from the Zichuan area for decades. It is published as Pu Songling,
Liaozhai liqu ji. For reference I have consulted an earlier compilation with eleven of
the titles (billed as ten in the book, which lists “Molan qu” under “Fugui shenxian”):
Liu Jieping, comp., Qingchu guci liqu xuan (Taipei: Zhengzhong shuju, 1968). Pu
wrote most of the liqu when he was in his sixties and seventies (ca. 1699–1711).
For a study of the probable dates of composition, see Zou Zongliang, “Qianyan,”
in Pu, Liaozhai liqu ji, pp. 5–9. The plots of seven of the liqu are adopted from
Liaozhai zhiyi tales. For titles, see Zou, “Qianyan,” p. 10. For a pioneer study of the
tunes and structures of the fifteen liqu, see Fujita Yuken, “Ryosai zokyoku ko,” Gei-
bun kenkyu no. 18 (1964): 29–43. See also an analysis of one play, “Rang duzhou,”
by Zhou Yibai, Zhongguo xiju shi (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1953), 3: 491–93.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

51. Pu Songling, Liaozhai liqu ji, p. 903. All of the songs in the play are set to
the same tune, “shua haier,” which has eight lines. Only seven are translated here;
the ﬁrst line reads: “Your Majesty, your humble servant reports:”. Fujita Yuken has
argued that among the ﬁfteen liqu “Zengbu xingyun qu” most resembles a novel.
The use of “shua haier,” a tune in vogue at the time, and colloquialisms allowed Pu
to highlight the humanness of the characters and the richness of their mundane life
(“Ryosai zokyoku,” pp. 41–42).
52. Pu, Liaozhai liqu ji, p. 964.
53. Ibid., pp. 936, 959. Following a trope, Fo Dongxin is said to be a native of
Yangzhou, daughter of a military o‹cer, who was sold to the brothel when orphaned
at age eight (945).
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54. Ibid., p. 936. For Fo Dongxin singing Kunqu, see p. 1019. Other examples
of the expression “half-a-zha” are on pp. 455, 483, 487, 524.
55. Purple cotton cloth (zihuabu) is a light reddish brown fabric made from pur-
ple cotton. Although coarse, it was popular and commanded prices double the stan-
dard varieties. See Nishijima Sadao, “The Formation of the Early Chinese Cotton
Industry,” in State and Society in China: Japanese Perspectives on Ming-Qing Social
and Economic History, ed. Linda Grove and Christian Daniels (Tokyo: University
of Tokyo Press, 1984), p. 54.
56. Pu, Liaozhai liqu ji, pp. 954–55. The fine gradation of domestic women with
bound feet is expressed or sustained by way of fabric, color, and design of their shoes
in the novel Hu Xueyan waizhuan discussed in chap. 3. The fabric and design of
male clothing also marks their status distinctions. See a graphic scene of Zhengde
and Dragon Wang dueling while disrobing in the bathhouse on pp. 1004–5. With-
out revealing his dragon robe, Zhengde trumped Dragon in displaying an under-
garment made of pearls.
57. Pu, Liaozhai liqu ji, p. 557.
58. Ibid., pp. 618, 620.
59. Ibid., p. 648.
60. Ibid., p. 642. Zhang’s mortal wife, Madame Fang, is repeatedly signified by
her handiwork. In a later scene, the virtuous wife sat up with her son into the night.
While he studied, she did fine embroidery using as many as fifteen strands of silk
floss (659).
61. Ibid., p. 930.
62. “Zhang Hongjian,” in Pu Songling, Liaozhai zhiyi ( Ji’nan: Qilu shushe,
1981), pp. 1789–1803; the term liren is on p. 1791. This is a facsimile reprint of the
“Ershisi juan chaoben” (24-fascicle manuscript). For a comparison of this manu-
script with two others, the earlier “Zhuxue zhai chaoben” and Pu’s own manuscript,
see the appendix to Liu Jieping, Pu Liuxian Songling xiansheng nianpu (Taipei:
Zhonghua shuju, 1985), pp. 193–211. For a history of the publication and reception
of Liaozhai zhiyi during the Qing dynasty, see Judith T. Zeitlin, Historian of the
Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1993), pp. 16–42. He Manzi has compared Pu Songling’s tales and seven
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

subsequent liqu that were based on the same plots, including the Zhang Hongjian
story. He concluded that Pu “in his old age was leaning more toward the common
people” (Pu Songling yu Liaozhai zhiyi [Shanghai: Shanghai chuban gongsi, 1955],
pp. 41–108; quote from p. 71).
63. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, p. 125; emphases in the original.
64. Both the Liaozhai tales and the vernacular plays depict footbinding as a sign
of natural femininity and as part of the female toilette. There are two salient diªer-
ences, however. The plays abound in ridicule of big or poorly bound feet (see be-
low in the chapter), which is absent in the tales. The tales, in turn, include several
allusions to the explicit eroticism of bound feet, which is absent in the plays. In a
provocative tale, “Zhinü” (The weaving maid), a pair of bound feet was called xiati,
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which usually means “genitals” (Liaozhai zhiyi, p. 1783). The bound feet were
conflated with private parts akin to genitals, the exposure of which brought shame
and embarrassment (1077). In the tale “Yanzhi” (Rouge), the erotic charge of feet
was extended to embroidered slippers, which were called xiewu (lewd object) and
were construed as a love token (2004).
65. “Shang Sanguan,” in Pu, Liaozhai zhiyi, pp. 571–76; quote from p. 574.
“Hansen qu,” in Pu, Liaozhai liqu, pp. 271–343; quote from p. 295.
66. Ibid., p. 351. “Qinse le” was considered so erotic that it was missing from
many of the earlier editions of Liaozhai liqu, such as Liu Jieping’s edited volume
cited above. A copy is preserved at Keio University and was studied by Fujita Yuken.
The version reprinted in Liaozhai liqu ji is based on this manuscript and another
copy collected by a “Mr. Sheng Wai” (35–36). Judith Zeitlin has discussed a colophon
by fellow liqu-writer Gao Heng ( jinshi 1643) who defended its propriety (Historian
of the Strange, p. 224 n.7). “Qinse le” was reprinted as an erotic ballad with a new
preface and afterword under the title of “Guiyan qinsheng,” attributed to a Gu
Gaoyang Xishan Qiaozi. I have consulted two versions of the latter: Zhongguo guyan
xipin congkan, vol. [ ji] 1, book [ze] 3 (n.p., n.d.), pp. 1–38, which appears to be a
facsimile of a typeset edition compiled by none other than Yao Lingxi, with the
title “Weike zhenpin congchuan” in the margins; and “Guiyan qinsheng,” in Inoue
Kobai, Shina fuzoku (Shanghai: Nihondo shoten, 1920–21), 1: 205–30. The text of
the two versions is similar, but the latter includes marginal comments in the top
margins. “Guiyan qinsheng” diªers only slightly from “Qinse le.” An advertisement
of “recently published books” by Tianjin shuju appended to CFL II identifies the
compiler of Weike zhenpin congchuan as Yao Lingxi. A friend of Yao Lingxi by the
name of Ya Fei discerned that “Guiyan qinsheng” (Romance of the boudoir in
Shaanxi sounds) is a misnomer because the ballad is full of Shandong dialect and
customs. See CFJHL: 144.
67. Pu, Liaozhai liqu ji, pp. 914–15. In another play, a prostitute Lanfang sits
side by side with a patron and flirts with him by “secretly kicking her gilded lilies”
under her skirt (542), as if anticipating his fondling.
68. Ibid., pp. 348, 351–52.
69. Both the bride and groom in “Pleasures of Marriage” are said to be “zaguo”
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

or “zagua” (350). For similar usage in other vernacular plays, see ibid., pp. 455, 906,
936, 997, 1028. “Zagua” can also refer to the renovation or ﬁxing-up of a house (214).
The bride’s song on the morning after continues: “Suddenly remembering the wed-
ding kerchief, / I look for it on and oª the bed. / But look he is holding it in his
hand, / When I try to snatch it he slips away with a smile.” The “wedding kerchief ”
(xijuan; xihong ) is a piece of silk stained with virginal blood. Here Pu Songling ex-
ploits the erotic potential of footbinding-as-toilette, using the bride’s dishevelment
as invitation to the reader to imagine her deﬂowering.
70. Ibid., pp. 55, 57. “Gufu qu” is based on a Liaozhai tale, “Shanhu.” The same
scene in the tale is brief: “Every morning she pays respect to [her mother-in-law]
in brilliant make-up and attire [ jingzhuang ].” Upon being reprimanded as “pro-
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moting licentiousness,” she “destroys her decoration [weizhuang ] before entering”

(Pu, Liaozhai zhiyi, p. 2067). See Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, pp. 127–31, for a
discussion of this tale in the context of Pu Songling’s treatment of the shrew, a stock
figure in Ming-Qing literature.
71. Pu, Liaozhai liqu ji, p. 472. Lie carries a similar, but more violent, connota-
tion in another play, “Fan yanyang.” To punish a loan shark, a magistrate orders a
“ripping” of his clothes, which promptly disintegrate into strips upon strips of fine
silk (basi duan). Workers at the yamen (government o‹ce) vied to take them home
to be restitched into purses for tobacco (192).
72. Unlike imperial silk, there was no standard width for a bolt of cotton. Ye
Mengzhu, a keen observer of fashion in the early Qing wrote of three common
kinds of everyday cotton fabrics: biaobu, zhong ji, and xiaobu. The narrowest and
shortest was xiaobu, handwoven on a narrow loom, which was over one foot wide
and sixteen feet long. See Nakayama Mio, “Shindai zenki Konan no bukka doko,”
Toyoshi kenkyu 37, no. 4 (March 1979): 88–90. See also Nishijima, “Formation of
the Early Chinese Cotton Industry,” pp. 53–54; and Zhou Xun and Gao Chun-
ming, Zhongguo yiguan fushi dacidian (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1996),
pp. 524–25. Extant samples of nineteenth- and twentieth-century binding cloth are
generally 4–5 inches wide and several feet long. Some are torn from a larger piece
of fabric, as described here. Others are woven on a very narrow loom and are stored
rolled up like a roll of bandage. For a photograph of the latter, see my Every Step a
Lotus, p. 55.
73. Pu, Liaozhai liqu ji, pp. 212–13. Duan is a measure for the length of a bolt of
fabric, but its exact length varies with time and context. In its early textual appear-
ance, in Xiao erya and Zuozhuan, it means 2 zhang (1 zhang is 10 chi, or feet). But in
other usage duan may be 1.6, 5, 6, or 8 zhang. The absolute length of one zhang also
varied with time. A duan is also often understood to refer specifically to a bolt of
cotton fabric 6 zhang long; a bolt of silk fabric was called pi, which was 4 zhang long.
But pi and duan came to be used interchangeably for all fabrics (Zhou Xun and Gao
Chunming, Zhongguo yiguan, p. 28). See also Ciyuan, p. 1271, and the editor’s an-
notation to the passage cited here, in Liaozhai liqu ji, p. 218 n. 11. Although chitou
could refer to fabric of all fibers, from a later description we know that it refers to
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

silk here. See also Zhou Xun and Gao Chunming, Zhongguo yiguan, pp. 28–29.
74. Pu, Liaozhai liqu ji, pp. 212–13. Elder Sister, a widow, had returned to her
natal family to care for her ailing stepmother after her son married. Although her
husband left her meager properties, her widow status might have prompted her to
be more humble and resistant to excessive gifts than her mother.
75. Ibid., p. 213. Tenants or renters are called kejiazi (guest people) and their
wives, kejia laopozi (guest granny) or kejia xifuzi (guest daughter-in-law) in Shan-
dong dialect. The women helped with cooking or served as personal attendants (183,
208). Due to regional variations and year-by-year ﬂuctuations, it is di‹cult to as-
certain the purchasing power of 200 coppers (qian). For a discussion of this prob-
lem, see Nakayama, “Shindai zenki Konan no bukka.”
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NOTES TO PAGES 181–183 280
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76. In contrast, the exchange of betrothal gifts was a formal patriarch-to-patri-

arch aªair. Not surprisingly, in material terms that was also a lopsided exchange be-
tween the Fan and the Qiu families. The former sent a pair of boots, a hat, a blue
robe, an embroidered wall hanging, a goat, a jug of wine, forty trays of gifts, and
sixteen bowls of cooked dishes. The Qius’ return gift consisted of sixteen trays of
gifts (Pu, Liaozhai liqu ji, pp. 207). The garments are all male bureaucratic attire.
77. Status anxiety in the late-Ming and early-Qing is a well-studied subject, and
I will not present full references here. In general, social historians have tended to
treat “status” as essentialized social grouping—literati, merchant, artisan, peasant,
and so on. For bibliographic references see Timothy Brook, Confusions of Pleasure:
Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998). Art historians have captured the fluidities of an environment in which the
very definition of a status group was being constantly questioned and reformulated.
See Hay, Shitao, especially pp. 26–56, 200–209, for the fluidity of the category of
shi or literati as a social group and as a painting style. See also Craig Clunas, Super-
fluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), and Pictures and Visuality in Early
Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
78. The term “social skin” is Terence Turner’s; see his “The Social Skin,” in Not
Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, ed. Jeremy
Cherfas and Roger Lewin (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1980), pp. 112–40.
Turner has also made an insightful observation that as a “symbolic medium” that
plays a key role in constructing the individual as a social actor or cultural subject,
bodily adornment is comparable to language (136–37). The concept of an individ-
ual as a socialized self shifts attention from the inside of one’s body as the seat of
“true self ” to the outside. I owe my understanding of the full analytic power of “so-
cial skin” to Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1996), especially pp. 23–28. On “status sense,” see Kishimoto Mio, “Min-
shin jidai no mibun kankaku,” in Min-Shin jidaishi no kihon mondai, ed. Mori
Masao (Tokyo: Kyuko shoin, 1997), pp. 403–28. Rooted in a scholastic tradition
of legal history, the Japanese term mibun is broader than “status” and encompasses
social position or identity either by birth or ascribed.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

79. These expressions appear, in order of discussion here, in Pu, Liaozhai liqu
ji, pp. 519, 956, 953, 518, 404. See p. 456 for a related expression, “a pair of your
shoes takes up two feet worth of silk.” The gendered unevenness of posing in the
vernacular plays is evinced by the disguised emperor Zhengde in “Song of Blissful
Clouds.” His shabby military attire in cotton surely caused him grief, but his faux
pas were mostly verbal and behavioral. Ultimately, he always managed to bail him-
self out of a sticky situation by throwing a handful of gold or pearls at his adver-
saries. In contrast, the women taunted for having poorly bound feet had no recourse.
Women either had perfect feet or ugly feet in these plays. The trope of laughing at
big feet is common in three other eighteenth-century collections of popular songs:
Nichang xupu, Baixue yiyin, and Zhui baiqiu. See Li Xiaoti’s analysis in “Shiba shiji
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NOTES TO PAGES 183–188 281
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Zhongguo shehui zhongde qingyu yu shenti: Lijiao shijie yiwai de jianianhuahui,”

Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 72, part 3 (2001):
570–73.
80. Pu, Liaozhai liqu ji, p. 557. Earlier in the play it was mentioned that the an-
nual salary for the chef was eight shi of grain. The trope of a greedy cook who pil-
fered the master’s pantry is a familiar one. The meaning of sanling (three-twill
damask) is unclear. One possibility is a twill damask fabric thrice-dyed into a deep
red. For thrice-dyeing (sanran), see Zhou Xun and Gao Chunming, Zhongguo
yiguan, pp. 545–46; see also p. 438 (under “luodai”) for a photograph of a sash for
skirts. For leg sashes, see Ke Jisheng [Ko Chi-sheng], Sancun jinlian (Taipei: Chanye
qingbao zazhishe, 1995), pp. 68–69. A pair of red silk leg sashes in the author’s collec-
tion measures 1D inches wide and 34H inches long, plus 5-inch tassels on each end.
81. This song from Wuxi was collected in the early twentieth century by Gu Jie-
gang and his associates. I use a convenient recent reprint: Wuge; Wuge xiaoshi (Nan-
jing: Jiangsu guji, 1999), pp. 487–88. For a variation on the trope of a fashionable
pilgrim, see “Ci’er shan,” in Huaguangsheng, ed., Baixue yiyin, in Ming-Qing minge
shidiao ji (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987), 2: 731–32. The compilation
of Baixue yiyin was ﬁnished by 1804, but the volume was not published until 1828
(Zhou Yibai, Zhongguo xiju shi, p. 493; Li Xiaoti, “Shiba shiji,” p. 549).
82. Wu tunes are often thought of as tunes from Suzhou, but in fact circulated
in a larger area in the Yangzi delta in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Feng
Menglong began to collect Wu “mountain songs” around 1596. For an introduc-
tion, see the preface by Guan Dedong, in Feng Menglong, ed., Shan’ge, in Ming-
Qing minge shidiao ji (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987), 1: 247–67. See
also Oki Yasushi’s informative study, Fu Bo Ryu ‘Sanka’ no kenkyu (Tokyo: Keiso
shobo, 2003).
83. Feng Menglong, Shan’ge, pp. 418–24. I am grateful to Oki Yasushi for bring-
ing this play to my attention.

6. CINDERELLA’S DREAMS
1. The earliest extant socks for both sexes are from the Western Han period.
The shape and fabric of socks from subsequent dynasties may diverge, but the ba-
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sic construction has not changed. For an illustrated history of socks, see Zhou Xun
and Gao Chunming, Zhongguo lidai funü zhuangshi (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe
and Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1997), pp. 290–93. In contrast, socks from the
early twentieth century are three-dimensional and more form-fitting (see fig. 8).
2. The state and whereabouts of the woman’s bodily remains are unknown. The
binding cloth is now flat and resembles the socks in shape. It is 21.5 cm (8.6 inches)
long from the tip to the heel area. Understandably, I was not allowed to unwrap
the bundle to examine its inner layers. Although the shoes and socks are typical,
the binding cloth is curious and raises a number of questions about its use. The
knot, for example, seems too bulky to fit under the narrow shoes. Is this style of
binding feet reserved for dressing a corpse? These rare artifacts deserve further re-

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search. A chemical analysis of the composition and dating had yet to be performed
when I visited the museum in June 2003. I thank Dr. Zhao Feng, vice director of
the museum and a foremost authority of ancient textiles in China, for his hospi-
tality and generous assistance.
3. I have discussed the problems of knowing others’ pain and sympathy in an
early article, “The Subject of Pain,” now collected in From the Late Ming to the Late
Qing: Dynastic Decline and Cultural Innovation, ed. David Wang and Wei Shang (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). For the poetry of the Ming
gentrywoman Shen Yixiu (1590–1635) and her daughters on the subjects of body
and feet, see my Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-
Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 167–71. For
the works of other women poets, see Women Writers of Traditional China: An An-
thology of Poetry and Criticism, ed. Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). Although often vivid and poignant in con-
veying female sentiments and everyday life, these poems are by and large silent on
women’s bodily sensations and subjective feelings of footbinding.
4. See a similar pair from a Yuan tomb excavated in Wuxi, Jiangsu, in Zhou and
Gao, Zhongguo lidai funü zhuangshi, p. 305.
5. Gongxie is an ambiguous term; in itself it does not indicate the design or
shape of the shoes. For an array of textual references to the term from the Five Dy-
nasties to the Qing, see Zhou Xun and Gao Chunming, Zhongguo yiguan fushi
dacidian (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1996), p. 299. Similarly, “phoenix-
head ” is a generic name. For the wide-ranging varieties of “fengtou xie,” see Zhou
and Gao, p. 298.
6. Jiangxisheng wenwu gongzuodui, “Jiangxi Nancheng Ming Yixuanwang Zhu
Yiyin fufu hezang mu,” Wenwu 8 (1982): 20, 22. The length and width of the shoes
are not given in the archaeological report, but are furnished by the costume histo-
rians Zhou Xun and Gao Chunming (Zhongguo lidai funü zhuangshi, p. 298). For
evolution of high-heeled footwear, see also their Zhongguo chuantong fuzhuang
xingzhi shi (Taipei: Nantian shuju, 1998), pp. 125–26. Focusing on the height of the
platform soles, they have suggested that Madam Sun’s shoes from the Jiangxi tomb
belong to the emergent fad of high-heeled shoes in the late Ming. Focusing on the
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

physiology of the foot and way of binding, I opt to classify them with the ﬂat-soled
footwear tradition from the Song and Yuan.
7. Yang Shen, Han zashi mixin, in Xiangyan congshu (Shanghai: Guoxue fulun-
she, 1914), p. 652. The anecdote about “Quick-mounting” in Song Lizong’s court is
from Songshi (Dynastic history of the Song), Wuxingzhi; cited in Gao Shiyu, “Chan-
zu zaiyi,” Shixue yuekan 2 (1999): 23; and Su Fu, Xianggui xiewa dianlüe, p. 45.
8. Fujiansheng bowuguan, ed., Fuzhou Nan-Song Huang Sheng mu (Beijing:
Wenwu chubanshe, 1982), p. 19. See also Fujiansheng bowuguan, “Fuzhou shi bei-
jiao Nan-Song mu qingli jianbao,” Wenwu 7 (1977): 1–17. Quanzhou silk was ex-
ported to Persia and Southeast Asia. Huang Sheng’s shoes were made of fancy gauze
woven with three-ply warps; two pairs were edged with gold-printed plum motifs.
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Her six pairs of shoes are 13.3–14 cm (5.3–5.6 inches) long and 4.5–5 cm (1.8–2
inches) wide. The plain silk socks are all lined, measuring 16.4 cm (6.6 inches) from
toe to heel, with shafts 16 cm (6.4 inches) tall. For Huang Sheng’s shoes, see also
my Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), pp. 21–22. A modern photograph of the bare feet of a Mrs. Wu Han shows
her toes curling upward (Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a
Curious Erotic Custom [Taipei: Nantian shuju, 1984], p. 256).
9. Jiangxisheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo and De’an xian bowuguan, “Jiangxi De’an
Nan-Song Zhoushi mu qingli jianbao,” Wenwu 9 (1990): 1–13. The shoes are 18–22
cm (7.2–8.8 inches) long and 5–6 cm (2–2.4 inches) wide. The socks are all made of
golden-yellow gauze; three pairs are knee-high (40 cm or 16 inches from heel to top),
two are medium-length (20.5 cm or 8.2 inches), and two are short (17 cm or 6.8
inches). The binding cloth is 200 cm (6 ft. 8 in.) long and 10 cm (4 inches) wide.
10. There are two diªerences in the footwear fashion of the two ladies. Although
their binding cloths are equal in length, Madam Huang’s are ribbon-like, only 0.9
cm (0.4 inches) wide, whereas Madam Zhou’s are 10 cm (4 inches) wide, a tad wider
than the usual modern ones. This could be due to Huang’s younger age, as young
girls did tend to use narrower binding cloths in the modern period. A second diªer-
ence is that Huang was buried with two styles of decorated silk leg-binders (Fu-
jiansheng bowuguan, “Fuzhou shi beijiao Nan-Song mu qingli jianbao,” Wenwu 7
[1977]: 9). There is no counterpart in Madam Zhou’s tomb.
11. Yu Huai, “Furen xiewakao,” in Tanji congshu, ed. Wang Zhuo and Zhang
Chao (copy in Naikaku bunko), 31.2b–3a.
12. Liu Tingji, Zaiyuan zazhi, in Jindai Zhongguo shiliao congkan, ed. Shen Yun-
long (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1969), 4.21a. The description begins with nam-
ing three types of fashionable footwear: “Female footwear include gongxie [arched
or bow-shaped shoes], embroidered shoes, and phoenix-head shoes.” It is not clear
from Chinese syntax if all three types of footwear or only gongxie had high heels.
Liu also wrote that after women adopted high heels, they abandoned socks with
soles in favor of socks without soles. This is not accurate. Textual and material evi-
dence show little correlation between the soles of socks and the heels of shoes.
13. Yu Huai, Banqiao zaji, 3.7a, in Xiangyan congshu (Shanghai: Guoxue fulun-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

she, 1914), p. 3665. Both gong and wan were used to describe feet before the six-
teenth century, but the use of each adjective alone does not automatically imply a
curved arch. For a similar use of gongwan as Yu Huai, see Xie Zaihang, Wenhai pisha
(Shanghai: Dada tushu gongyingshe, 1935; preface dated 1609), p. 63. Xie stated:
“The ancients did not curve their arches, but it does not mean that they did not
bind feet.”
14. In the myths of Consort Pan and Yaoniang, the golden lotus was a prop for
palace dancers and retains traces of its Buddhist origins. In Song poetry, it became a
euphemism for desirable women’s feet or footsteps. See “jinlian” entry, Ye Dabing and
Qian Jinbo, Zhongguo xielü wenhua cidian (Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian, 2001), p. 25.
15. Ye Mengzhu, Yueshibian, juan 8, cited in ibid., pp. 24–25.
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16. Tian Yiheng, Liuqing rizha (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1985; fac-
simile of 1609 edition), 20.6a–b. Most intriguing is Tian’s description of the fash-
ionable footwear in Guangdong, a province on the far southern edge of the em-
pire: “Nowadays women in Guangdong wear wooden clogs even for bright sunny
days and broad daylight.” In a bit of doggerel Tian made it clear that the feet of
these women were bare and that they did not bind their feet. He wrote: “Not that
they lack the support of a lotus, / But they detest the shrinking of [the foot into]
the bud of a bamboo shoot” (Liuqing rizha, 20.7a–b).
17. Gao Jiangcun, Tianlu shiyu, cited in Su Fu, Xianggui xiewa, xia 12b [p. 68].
In the nineteenth century, each region had also developed distinct styles for em-
broidered slippers. See my Every Step a Lotus, chap. 4. There is insu‹cient mate-
rial evidence to ascertain the beginnings of these regional diversities. Wang’s and
Gao’s remarks suggest that a broad north-south diªerence was evident by the late
seventeenth century.
18. Xuehong xiaoji, cited in Su Fu, Xianggui xiewa, shang 11a–b [pp. 23–24]. This
description is not in the Xiangyan congshu version of Xuehong xiaoji (ca. 1787) and
its sequel, both attributed to Zhuquan jushi, and is likely to have been added later.
Complaints about the feet of Yangzhou prostitutes are particularly common. In Feng-
yuemeng (preface dated 1848), a courtesan novel set in Yangzhou, all the women wore
wooden soles. One had feet over six inches long; her soles were extra-small but the
vamps were roomy. Her shoes were forcibly strapped onto her feet by the shoelaces
(Cao Wugang and Hanshang mengren, Wan-Qing yanqing xiaoshuo congshu—
Meilan jiahua; Fengyuemeng [Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe, 1993], pp.
221–24).
19. For an analysis of this dynamic in the ﬁeld of the civil service exam, see Ben-
jamin Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
20. Xue Ji, Xue Ji yian, 8.296, in Tushu jicheng yibu quanlu, xin jiaoben (Taipei:
Xinwenfeng chuban gongsi, n.d. [1979]). I thank Charlotte Furth for her help with
information on Xue Ji.
21. Jujia biyong shilei was ﬁrst compiled during the reign of Shizu (r. 1260–94)
of the Yuan dynasty. I have compared the Ming Neifu edition in the Naikaku bunko,
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

the microfilmed version of the Ming Silijian edition in the Fu Ssu-nien Library,
and a Japanese edition issued in 1673. The recipes are identical. For the sake of con-
venience I cite the widely available Japanese edition (Kyoto: Chubun shuppansha,
1984 [facsimile of 1673 edition printed in Japan]). Shilin guang ji is catalogued in
today’s libraries as a Yuan dynasty work, but it was first compiled before the fall of
the Southern Song by the scholar Chen Yuanjing (fl. 1195–1264), about whom lit-
tle is known. The Song work is no longer extant. For a history of the diªerent edi-
tions, see the preface to Chen Yuanjing, comp., Shilin guang ji (Kyoto: Chubun shup-
pansha, 1988), pp. 1–27. This is a rather poor facsimile of the almanac published in
the Yuan Zhishun reign (1330–33). The recipes in the two other editions I consulted
at the Naikaku bunko, a magnificent Yuan edition and a Ming printing using Yuan
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blocks, are identical. The order of the sections diverges. In the two Yuan editions,
the recipes are in the first (houji) of four sequels. In the Ming printing using Yuan
blocks, they are in the last sequel (waiji).
22. Chen Yuanjing, comp., Shilin guang ji, Yuan edition, houji, 10.13b–14b. Copy
in the Naikaku bunko. See also pp. 658–59 of the 1988 facsimile.
23. Jujia biyong shilei, geng ji, 64a–b.
24. Ibid., 64b; Shilin guang ji, houji, 10.14a.
25. All four recipes from the Jujia biyong and Shilin guang ji were reprinted in
Wanbao quanshu, a popular late-Ming almanac. They have now been separated from
“Guige shiyi” and placed under their own category, “Binding and swaddling”
(“Chanzha lei”). See, for example, Wanli quanbu wenlin miaojin wanbao quanshu
(Shulin [ Jianyang, Fujian]: Anzheng tang, 1612), 34.21b–22b; copy in the Harvard-
Yenching Library. For the myriad versions of the Wanbao quanshu, their classification
schemes and contents, see Wu Huifang, Wanbao quanshu: Ming-Qing shiqi de min-
jian shenghuo shilu (Taipei: Guoli Zhengzhi daxue lishixi, 2001). An abridged ver-
sion of the Shilin guang ji tonic recipe is in Zhang Dai, Yehang chuan (Hangzhou:
Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1981), p. 673. New recipes were added to the repertoire.
See Shi Chengjin (b. 1659), Chuanjia bao (Family treasures, pub. 1692–1739), duo-
neng ji, cited in CFL III: 153–54, and the two new recipes “Lianxiang shan” and
“Xiao jinlian fang” in Su Fu, Xianggui xiewa, xia, 21a–22a [pp. 85–87]. The tradi-
tion lasted into the modern times, but the recipe in Jujia yiji, an 1850 almanac, is
much simplified ([n.p., preface 1820–50], sanxulu [third sequel, preface 1850],
42a–b); copy in the Fu Ssu-nien Library. A handful of these traditional recipes ap-
peared before new recipes for letting out feet in CFL III: 153–55.
26. I thank Dr. Michael Fuhr, director of the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Ha-
gen, Germany, for inviting me to participate in the “Museutopia” project. Work-
ing with him, Thomas W. Rieger, and Hope Wurmfeld taught me a great deal about
the utopian implications of the concept of overcoming the body.
27. Zhao Jingshen, “Tan Ming Chenghua kanben ‘shuochang cihua,’” Wenwu 11
(1972), reprinted in a promotional brochure appended to Ming Chenghua shuochang
cihua congkan (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1979).
28. Anne E. McLaren has discerned a “hierarchy of reading practices” whereby
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

those of women and other less-educated readers were denigrated (Chinese Popular
Culture and Ming Chantfables [Leiden: Brill, 1998]; quote from p. 49). See also Zeng
Yongyi, Shuo xuwenxue (Taipei: Lianjing, 1984), pp. 67–74.
29. “Xinke shuochang Bao Longtu duan Cao Guojiu gongan zhuan,” 4a, in Ming
Chenghua shuochang cihua.
30. Not only princesses and maids, but also people from all walks of life are in-
troduced by way of what they wear. Fine examples are the patched clothing and
lice-infected hairdo of a beggar woman in “Rencong renmu zhuan” (3a–3b) and
the frivolous, up-to-the-minute fashionable outﬁts of a pair of ne’er-do-wells in
“Duanwai wupan zhuan” (20a, in Ming Chenghua shuochang cihua).
31. “Xinbian shuochang quanxiang Shilang fuma zhuan,” 2a–3b, in Ming
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Chenghua shuochang cihua. “Shiyang jin” refers to a famous pattern of ten auspi-
cious motifs, among them bamboo, lozenge, and tawny daylily, first found on bro-
cades from the Shu kingdom in Sichuan during the Five Dynasties. The pattern re-
mained popular in the Yuan and Ming dynasties. Shen Congwen, Zhongguo gudai
fushi yanjiu (Taipei: Nantian, 1988), p. 364; Zhou Xibao, Zhongguo gudai fushi shi
(Taipei: Nantian shuju 1998), p. 256.
32. The princess’s toilette, with an emphasis on her fashion sense (shixin), is in
“Zhang Wengui zhuan,” 7b–8a. The entertainer with bound feet appears in “Zhang
Wengui zhuan,” 14a; the master weaver’s wife is in “Liu Dusai zhuan,” 2b–3a, 3b–4a,
29b, in Ming Chenghua shuochang cihua.
33. Anne McLaren, “Crossing Gender Boundaries in China: Nüshu Narratives,”
Intersections (1998): 1–16; quote from p. 6.
34. In a fluid society, the dangers of downward mobility are real and keenly felt.
Hu Shilan, an eighteenth-century gentrywoman who fell upon hard times in midlife,
expressed this pathos eloquently in a poem. See my discussion of this poem in “Foot-
binding as Female Inscription,” in Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in
China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, ed. Benjamin Elman, John Duncan, and Her-
man Ooms (Los Angeles: Asia Pacific Monograph Series in International Studies,
UCLA, 2002) and “The Sex of Footbinding,” in Good Sex: Women’s Religious Wis-
dom, ed. by Radhika Balakrishnan, Mary E. Hunt, and Patricia Beattie Jung (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001).
35. “Xiuru ji” was first written in the Chenghua and Hongzhi reigns. The present
version was revised by Xu Lin (1462–1538). Xu Shuofang estimated the year of re-
vision to be around 1493 or before (“Xu Lin nianpu,” in Xu Shuofang ji [Hangzhou:
Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1993]); the expression “jiaoxiao xiegong . . . wo xingzou
buguan” is cited in this study (5).
36. Xu Sanyou, ed., Xinqie quanbu tianxia simin liyong bianguan Wuche bojin
(Fujian: Jianyun chai, 1597), 9.3a; copy in the Library of Congress. The other chant
for the arrival of the bride also calls attention to her feet: “Bright red candles cast
a bright red shadow, / The peacock displays its feathers, adding to the happiness. /
Please bride, step oª the palanquin with joy, / Gently moving your lotus steps to
the reception hall” (9.3a).
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

37. Suzanne E. Cahill, “Discipline and Transformation: Body and Practice in

the Lives of Daoist Holy Women of Tang China,” in Women and Confucian Cul-
tures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, ed. Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush,
and Joan R. Piggott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 251–78.
38. According to the o‹cial report published over three decades after the exca-
vation, this pair ( X16:3) was found in a box placed on the southern edge of Xiao-
jing’s co‹n. Also in the box were ten other pairs of high-heeled shoes that have
badly decomposed, leaving only the heels. Thus this is the only complete pair of
high-heeled shoes extant from the Ding mausoleum. Both Xiaojing and Empress
Xiaoduan were buried with ﬂat fengtou shoes on their feet. The former pair ( J131)
measured 10.8 cm (4.3 inches) long and the latter (D114), 13.5 cm (5.4 inches). See
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Zhongguo shehuikexue yuan et al., Dingling (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1990),

1: 39, 121–22, 299, 325–26. For a color photograph of Xiaojing’s high-heeled shoes,
see Wang Yan, Wanli dihou de yichu: Ming Dingling shizhi jijin (Taipei: Dongda
tushu gongsi, 1995), pp. 111–12. The album of photographic highlights of the mau-
soleum suggests that Xiaojing’s high heels were found in her co‹n; this is proba-
bly incorrect (Zhongguo shehuikexue yuan kaogu yanjiusuo, ed., Dingling duoying
[Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1989], p. 21).
39. All Ming palace ladies were recruited from commoner families in the vicini-
ties of the capital. Lady Wang’s son, Zhu Changlou, was designated heir apparent
only in 1601. Wanli never favored Lady Wang after their fateful encounter and
wanted to install the son of Lady Zheng, born 1586, against the wish of his Grand
Secretary. See Ray Huang, 1587: A Year of No Significance (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1981).
40. The yuntou shoes are numbered X17:11; the fengtou shoes, J78 (Zhongguo
shehui kexueyuan, Dingling, 1: 121–22, 325–26). For a pair of flat phoenix-head shoes
in the collection of Dr. Ke Jisheng, see his Qianzai jinlian fenghua (Taipei: Guoli
lishi bowuguan, 2003), p. 23. He has dated it as fifteenth century.
41. Shang Wei, “The Making of the Everyday World: Jin Ping Mei Cihua and
Encyclopedias for Daily Use,” unpublished paper. For a summary of the plot and
a discussion of authorship, editions, dating, and techniques, see David Roy’s “Intro-
duction” to the first installment of his magisterial translation of the novel, The Plum
in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, vol. 1: The Gathering, trans. David Tod Roy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Roy has suggested that the implied
author was an adherent of the Confucian philosopher Xunzi (third century b.c.e.),
who bemoaned the disorder of the world and attributed it to evilness in human na-
ture. Paraphrasing J. Hillis Miller’s discussion of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Roy
has concluded: “In writing the Jinpingmei, the author constructed a model in little
of Chinese society in his time” (xxvii).
42. Plum in the Golden Vase, 1: 83. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of this
novel are Roy’s. I have, however, changed the Wade-Giles romanization that he used
to Pinyin.
43. The competition between Jinlian and Huilian is most vividly conveyed in a
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

scene of almost identical footwear in chapter 28. Looking for her lost shoe, Jinlian
also found one of Huilian’s, both of which Ximen had kept in his stationery box:
“they were both embroidered shoes of scarlet silk, figured with flowers from each
of the four seasons and the symbolic representations of the ‘eight treasures,’ with
flat, white satin soles, green heel lifts, and blue hook and eye fastenings. Only the
chain stitching of the two shoes was slightly diªerent.” Huilian’s willful act of im-
itation was all the more threatening because her shoes were slightly smaller than
Jinlian’s. The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, vol. 2: The Rivals, trans.
David Tod Roy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 155.
44. Plum, 2: 53. According to the insightful analysis of Ding Naifei of the role
played by the accoutrements of footbinding in the concealed sexual politics in Xi-
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men’s household, Huilian is both Jinlian’s competitor and “narrative double” who
relives Jinlian’s life at a lower social stratum (“Qiuqian, jiaodai, hong shuixie,” in
Xing/bei yanjiu duben, ed. Zhang Xiaohong [Taipei: Maitian chuban, 1998], pp.
23–60).
45. Ida Pruitt, A China Childhood (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, Inc.,
1978), p. 118. In chapter 23 of Jinpingmei, Song Huilian declined to braise a pig’s
head and trotters, using the excuse that she was “stitching shoe soles for the mistress”
(Plum, 2: 44). Kitchen help was even lower in the hierarchy of labors than stitching
soles.
46. Plum, 2: 166–69; the sleeping-shoe episode of the night before is on p. 163.
Ding Naifei has suggested that Ximen’s love of red shoes on Jinlian’s feet was a substi-
tute for his own desire to wear red shoes (“Qiuqian, jiaodai, hong shuixie,” pp.
24–25).
47. In her analysis of the female fashion culture in Jinpingmei, Zhang Jinlan has
reminded us that footwear was merely a part of the sartorial regime in Ximen’s house-
hold, from hairstyle, headdress, jackets, and skirts, to footwear (“Jinpingmei nü-
xing fushi wenhua yanjiu,” master’s thesis, Department of Chinese literature, Na-
tional Cheng-chi University, Taipei, Taiwan, 2000). I thank Hsiung Ping-chen and
Ms. Zhang for making this thesis available. Having tabulated all the footwear men-
tioned in the novel, Zhang has concluded that the shoes of “wives” were made of
mostly satin or damask; high heels predominated, although ﬂats were also used;
only three of the maids, all Ximen’s favorites, were said to have bound feet (81–83).
48. To ingratiate herself to Jinlian the morning after Huilian spent the night with
Ximen in the garden grotto, Huilian oªered to pick up Jinlian’s sleeping shoes and
binding cloth, presumably for the laundry maid (Plum, 2: 55). These two items thus
appear to be similar to underwear: erotically charged, “dirty,” and deﬁling. In the late
Qing, sleeping shoes are virtually indistinguishable from socks. See the photograph
in my Every Step a Lotus, p. 71; and in Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou-
sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1997), p. 48.
49. Plum, 2: 144. Ding Naifei (“Qiuqian, jiaodai, hong shuixie,” pp. 49–50) has
pointed out that the binding cloth was used to vastly diªerent eªect by Huilian,
Jinlian’s narrative double, who fastened them to the doorpost and hanged herself
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

in chapter 26 (Plum, 2: 123). In the mid-Qing erotic novel Lin Lanxiang, there is a
scene in Geng Lang’s household in which his second wife Xianger stripped ﬁfth
wife Caiyun naked, “not leaving her even her footbindings.” Like the grape arbor
scene in The Plum, this scene also epitomizes the sexual abandon of the men and
women in a degenerate household. See Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polyga-
mists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 214–15.
50. Li Yu, The Carnal Prayer Mat, trans. Patrick Hanan (Honolulu: The Uni-
versity of Hawaii Press, 1990), p. 50.
51. Hu Yinglin, Dianqian xinlu, in Shiaoshi shanfang bicong (Beijing: Zhonghua
shuju, 1958), p. 145.
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52. Fan Lian, Yunjian jumucao, 2.2b (p. 2628), in Biji xiaoshuo daguan, bian 22,
ze 5. Many writers, including Hu Yinglin (Dianqian xinlu, p. 165), commented on
the fad of straw shoes (puxie) for men.
53. C. R. Boxer, ed., South China in the Sixteenth Century (London: The Hak-
luyt Society, 1953), p. 124. Gaspar da Cruz’s work, Tractado, was printed in Evora
in 1569–70 (lxii). For other anecdotes on the shoe market in China, see Wang Hong-
tai’s rich study, “Liudong yu hudong: You Ming-Qing jian chengshi shenghuo de
texing tance gongzhong changyi de kaizhan,” Ph.D. diss., National Taiwan Uni-
versity, 1998, pp. 450–52. In arguing that “everyday tastes were dictated by the styles
from the market” (452), Wang may have underestimated the resilience of domestic
shoemaking and overstated the power of the market forces.
54. Yu Xiangdou, comp., Santai wanyong zhengzong ( Jianyang, Fujian: Yushi
Shuangfang tang, 1599), 21.19b–20a; copy in the Toyo bunka kenkyujo, University
of Tokyo. “Shoes” were listed in a checklist of commodities, after “summer cotton
cloth” and “bamboo and wooden boards.” Also mentioned were the pros and cons
of straw shoes (caoxin xie) from various villages.
55. Ibid.
56. Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life, trans. Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-
hui (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 44. Shen described the attire
of prostitutes in Guangzhou: “Those with bound feet wore skirts, those without
bound feet wore short stockings, butterﬂy shoes, and long trousers” (120).
57. Lin Sumen, Hanjiang sanbaiyin ( Yangzhou: Jiangsu Guangling guji keyin-
she, 1988), 6.2a–b. This collection was originally published in the Jiaqing reign
(1796–1820), with a preface dated 1808. I thank Tobie Meyer-Fong for giving me a
copy of this text. The jet butterﬂy motif is abstract, more like a bat or a cloud. Lin
also mentioned that Yangzhou perfume stores made a sleeping shoe with a strong
fragrance, possibly in powder form, sandwiched between the vamps and lining and
also in the soles (6.3b–4a). Over a century later, Yao Lingxi reported that stores sell-
ing toiletry items and embroidered purses also sold sleeping shoes for several cop-
pers; these were love tokens that prostitutes dispensed freely to their clients, often
in sizes much smaller than their feet (CFJHL: 142–43). Perhaps the Yangzhou fra-
grant shoes were also so intended.
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

58. Zhang, a native of Taiyuan, Shanxi, moved to Jinzhou in 1730. He was Wang’s
neighbor before she married (Neige xingke tiben, bundle 150, Qianlong 3.3.27). The
erotic charge attached to sleeping shoes was also evident in the south. In a case from
Funing, Jiangsu, a casual laborer, also named Zhang, desired to marry a fellow vil-
lager named Zeng. Zhang showed a ring and a sleeping shoe to a matchmaker, claim-
ing that these items were love tokens. When Zeng’s parents refused the proposal
because of Zhang’s low social status, the matchmaker mentioned the shoe and ring.
Zeng’s mother, assuming that her daughter had indeed slept with Zhang, slapped
and upbraided her. That night, the daughter committed suicide (Neige xingke tiben,
“Marriage and illicit sex” [hunyin jianqing ] category , #209–3, microﬁlm reel 1–33,
Qianlong 8.6.17). I am extremely grateful to Matthew Sommer, who has taken the
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trouble to share these episodes, the one in the following note, and a number of other
cases involving shoes and feet through the years.
59. Neige xingke tiben, “Marriage and illicit sex” category, #208–2, microfilm reel
1–33, Qianlong 8.6.10.
60. Tongxi manshi, Tingyu xiantan (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983),
p. 104. Pu was also skilled in carving wood and ivory. See also Huaipu jushi, Liu
Rushi shiji (Beiping: Wenzi tongmengshe, 1930), 7a. Although leather was occa-
sionally used for boots and for toe reinforcements, traditional Chinese shoes for
men, women, and children were made of vegetable fiber. Children’s tiger shoes, pop-
ular tourist souvenirs in China today, are remnants of the old domestic female shoe-
making tradition. Flat-heeled shoes for bound feet from remote areas were still made
of homespun cloth in the twentieth century. See Every Step a Lotus, pp. 118–19.
61. Li-Young Lee, whose mother was a granddaughter of Yuan Shikai, the late-
Qing general and president of the Republic, recalled that in the family compound
in Tianjin there was a building called the sewing room: “Lined with tables at which
thirty women sit behind mounds of various fabrics of any color, the room whines
and rings with the rapid pounding of several hand-operated sewing machines. For-
bidden to wear against their bodies any piece of cloth cut or sewn by men, all the
female members of the nine households have their clothes made by women in the
sewing hall”(The Winged Seed: A Remembrance [New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995], p. 21). Although the strictures are excessive, it seems reasonable to expect that
wealthy and large households in an earlier period would have hired sewing women
to supply the needs of the family.
62. For wedding shoes and gift shoes for the in-laws, see Every Step a Lotus, pp.
69–72; CFJHL: 143–47.
63. Tian Yiheng, Liuqing rizha, 20.8a. Tian did not say if the entire vamp was
made of gilded leather. In Plum in the Golden Vase, it is used only for edging or tip
reinforcements. My analysis of the styles of footwear in Ximen’s household benefits
from the table compiled by Zhang Jinlan, in her “Jinpingmei nüxing fushi wenhua,”
pp. 81–83. In the Song, monochrome was so normative that soles made of diªerent-
colored fronts and backs (known as Cuo daodi ) elicited special comment (Tian,
Liuqing, 20.8b).
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

64. The reference to brush-painting is from CFJHL, diagram 11, between pp. 86
and 87. For a full translation of the captions to this series of diagrams, see fig. 22. For
auspicious symbols on shoes, see Every Step a Lotus, pp. 105–9. For the history of
auspicious symbols on Chinese objects and their proliferation in the Qing, see Kissho:
Chugoku bijitsu ni komerareta imi (Tokyo: Tokyo National Museum, 1998).
65. CFJHL: 98. Information about vendors calling out and the filing tool is from
a diªerent report, CFJHL: 110–11.
66. CFJHL: 98. For photographs of a string of five wooden heels from Shan-
dong and a set of ten from Shanxi, see Ke Jisheng, Qianzai jinlian fenghua, p. 110.
For curvatures of the wooden soles and detailed instructions for carving them, see
CFXB: 33.
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67. The earliest extant paper shoe patterns were excavated from the tomb of
Madam Zhou (1240–74) in De’an, Jiangxi. Among an array of garments, toiletry
items, and sewing implements found were two patterns for the sole (length 20–24
cm, or 8–9.6 inches) and two for the uppers (length 19–22 cm, or 7.6–8.8 inches)
of shoes. See Jiangxisheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo and De’an xian bowuguan,
“Jiangxi De’an Nan-Song Zhoushi mu qingli jianbao,” p. 12.
68. Tanmian daoren [Zhang Lüping ], comp., Kunde baojian (n.p.: Yuxiutang,
1777), juan 8–9. Although not identical, the rectangular skirt panels look remark-
ably similar to the Qing-dynasty skirts in Western collections studied by Mary V.
Hays. The patterns of ﬂower, bird, landscape, and lucky symbols appear to be
generic. See Hays, “Chinese Skirts of the Qing Dynasty,” The Bulletin of the Needle
and Bobbin Club 72, nos. 1 & 2 (1989): 4–41. I thank Terry Milhaupt for supply-
ing me with this article.
69. Kunde baojian, “Zixu,” 2b–3a. Chapters 1–2 consist of stories of woman
exemplars from such classics as Liu Xiang’s Biographies of Women (Lienü zhuan).
Chapter 3 continues with stories of retribution recycled from popular religious texts.
The same set of thirteenth-century recipes for treating bound feet that we have seen
above appears in chapter 4, on textile work and the toilette. Chapters 5–7 are cook-
ing recipes. Although its contents are recycled except for the sewing patterns, Pre-
cious Mirror marks the beginning of an encyclopedic knowledge that was explicitly
gendered female. Previous almanacs, even as they dispensed ministrations for trou-
bled feet and other body- or home-management techniques, presented such infor-
mation to a presumed male readership.
70. Entitled Zengshan kunde baojian (Precious mirror of feminine virtues, with
additions and deletions), the copy is bound in two separate volumes and is signed
“Kuimiutang zhuren xuancao” (selected and copied by the Master of the Ashamed-
of-Mistakes Studio). I list this in the Works Cited under Tanmian daoren, although
the name of the original editor does not appear on the copy. The ﬁrst volume (the
original chapter 8) is numbered chapter 4 and given a new title, “Nanpei chengshi”
(Patterns for male ornaments); the second (the original chapter 9), is now chapter
5 under the title “Nügong chengshi” (Patterns for women’s work). It is not clear
what chapters 1–3 could have been. I thank Don J. Cohn for so generously sharing
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

these modern volumes in his collection with me.

71. Huang Sheng’s binding cloth was the only narrow, ribbon-like specimen that
we know of (Fujiansheng bowuguan, “Fuzhou shi beijiao,” p. 9). The choice of
silk recalls the legendary description of Yaoniang’s binding cloth, which was said
to be made of silk (bo). The pair of binding cloths of Madam Xiong (1482–1537),
whose tomb was found in De’an, Jiangxi province, is made of plain-woven cotton.
Each cloth is 216 cm (86.4 inches) long and 21 cm (8.4 inches) wide. Xiong appears
to be the wife of a low-ranking o‹cial. See De’anxian bowuguan, “Jiangxi De’an
Mingdai Xiongshimu qingli jianbao,” Wenwu 10 (1994):34. The use of cotton might
have become customary by the sixteenth century. Among the conﬁscated house-
hold goods of former grand secretary Yan Song (1480–1565) were 85 pairs of cot-
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NOTES TO PAGES 222–224 292
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ton binding cloths (assessed at 2.55 ounces of silver for the lot). Also included were
“female boots of various colors” (70 pairs; 10.5 ounces); “female shoes: (1,700 pairs;
54 ounces); “embroidered leggings and socks” (20 pairs; 2 ounces). Tianshui bing-
shan lu, Congshu jicheng chubian, vol. 1502 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1937),
pp. 302–3.
72. See p. 251, n. 63. For photographs of one such loom from Taiwan and rolls
of binding cloth in plain, red, and indigo cotton, see Ke Jisheng, Qianzai jinlian,
pp. 106–7.
73. Sunü, “Gaozubu shi bin gongyong,” CFJHL: 95–96. There was also an abbre-
viated ﬁve-layered regimen. Yang Yang’s description of the binding routine in Tong-
hai, Yunnan, is almost identical to this passage (Xiaojiao wudao, pp. 38–39); in all
likelihood Yang had copied his information from Caifeilu.
74. Footbinding ended in Tonghai in the 1950s, the last area in China to eªec-
tively outlaw the practice. The remoteness of this area on the Yunnan plateau seems
to account for this belatedness. In 1933, local authorities in Tonghai established a
Tianzu weiyuanhui (Natural feet committee) and dispatched male foot inspectors
to the villages. Local son Yang Yang has suggested that Liuyi village, which is the
closest to the county seat, was ironically the most successful in the cat-and-mouse
game of defeating the inspectors because those villagers were best-informed about
the timing of the visits (Xiajiao wudao, p. 71). One example of the recent tourism
literature is Li Xu and Huang Yanhong, “Xiaojiao nüren cun,” China Tourism 208
(Oct. 1997): 40–51. In 1997, over three hundred women with once-bound feet, about
a third of them over sixty, still lived in Liuyi village. The golden-lotus snooker team
and dancing troupe garnered one page in the o‹cial album that the local authori-
ties produced to promote tourism. See Zhonggong Zhongyang xianwei xuan-
zhuanbu and Tonghai xian wenxue yishujie lianhehui, ed., Tonghai: Xiujia nan Dian
(Tonghai, Yunnan: Zhonggong Tonghai xian wei and Tonghai xian renmin zhenfu,
n.d. [1999]), p. 37.
75. Yang, Xiaojiao wudao, p. 6.
76. Interview with Ma Qiaofen, June 30, 2003. See also Yang, Xiaojiao wudao,
pp. 206–7.
77. The cloth, “Hexi tubu,” was named after Hexi, a market town near Tong-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

hai. It was woven from imported machine-spun yarn which became available in
southern Yunnan in the late 1880s, and especially after the building of the Tonkin-
Kunming Railway in 1895–99. Laurel Bossen has argued that the continued via-
bility of weaving as a livelihood in areas more accessible by trade routes saved women
from having to work in the ﬁelds and allowed them to continue footbinding. Hence
the irony that footbinding ended earlier in the more remote and less commercial-
ized areas (Chinese Women and Rural Development, chap. 3, especially pp. 70–78).
Although plausible, this argument is difﬁcult to prove. See also Yang, Xiaojiao wu-
dao, p. 7.

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GLOSSARY

ailian qiaosheng R¨¥Õ

Bai Lewen f÷Â

Bai Ting ’º
bancha be
ban chanjiao bÒ}
banchi bu de guojiao bÿ¨∫q}
banghe Œ‹
banlan jiao bÊ}
ban lanzi jiao bÛl}
banwa b˚
bi M
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

bu ˘
Bu chanzu hui £Ò¨|
Bu guozu hui £q¨|

Cai Aihua ≤R·

Caifeng caifei/ wuyi xiati ˆ±ˆ·,LHUÈ
changyou qi shen @u‰≠
chanjiao Ò}
chanzu Ò¨
che mudi ÆÏ≥
Chen Jitong ØŸP

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GLOSSARY 294

chenshe
chi ÿ
chi luoluo ™rr
chitou ÿY
chuai chuantou ¢ÓY
chuang …
cun o

dajiao j}
dai yi guiren xiangqie N@QH¤c
dangzhi zi fengren Ìæß_H
Deng Changyao H¯£
dengtan n¬
diban chan xie ≥OH«
dili az
dingnan Bk
dingnü Bk
duan ›

etoujiao ZY}

Fameng xuetang oX«Û

fangzu Ò¨
fangzu jinian hui Ò¨ˆ¿|
fanrao œ∂
fantou jiao ΩY}
Fei Xihuang O¸X
fengjian ?ÿ
Fengren ∑H
fengsu shi ∑Uv
fengtou ÒY
fenli ¿Q
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

fugong ¸u
fuke ¸Ï
fushi guanren AÕxH
fuyang zhijian, yicheng chenji ¡ıß°,w®ØÒ
fuyao AØ

gaifang tianzu ÔÒ—¨

gaodeng xiaoxue ™•p«
gaodi ™≥
gaodi xunlü ™≥˚i
gaoxie ™a
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GLOSSARY 295
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

gongshi ΩΔ
gongwan }s
gongwan xianxiao }s÷p
gongxian }÷
gongxian zhuang }÷¨
gongxiao }p
gongxie }c
gongxing }Œ
gongzu }¨
guancheng ﬁ∞
guangfu guti ˙_GÈ
guangfu guwu ˙_G´
guanren xH
guige shiyi ”’Δy
guojiao q}
guolairen L”H
guozu q¨

huafang e–
Huajian ji ·°∞
huaji tuti Δ]Ë
huajuishi ·∂¤
huang huashiling ¿·hO
huazhuang jiangyan Δ©øt
hudie lü π∫i
huizhu |D
Hu Yanxian JPÂ

jia “
jianzhe zhifu ‚ÃßA
jiaotong Êq
jiaoxiao xiegong xingbuwen }pc}Ê£≠
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

jiaoxiao xiejian nanxingzou }pcy¯Ê´

“Jie chanzu lun” ŸÒ¨◊
jiefang —Ò
jiepi ‰}
jieyou suoju “≥“⁄
jinguo yilao yˆÚ—
jinlian ˜¨
jinlian juechang, wenji qiwu ˜¨¥¤,D˚_R
jishi OÍ
jiyuan ˆ∏
jizi jl
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GLOSSARY 296
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

lei ÷
lianban ¨§
liang (ounce) ‚
liang (to air) Ω
liangjia guixiu }a”q
li gaodi ÿ™≥
lilü Q¢
Liucun fuyuan guangzhizhi ªoßÍ˙oo
Liuyi village ª@¯
lujiaocai ¿§Ê
luowa π˚
lü i
lüren iH

Ma Qiaofen ®Ï‚
mianhua taozi ÷·Ml
minsu xue ¡U«
mudi Ï≥

neijia zhilü ∫aßi

nei sifu ∫qA
niang laole, you buxiang mai yangzi Q—FMS£QÊÀl
Ni Mu’ou Ÿ}⁄
Ni Yuanzhen (Zan ) Ÿ∏Ì(–)
nügong kı
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

pi }
pingquan pingdeng ≠v≠•
pojia Ca
pudu zhongsheng ∂Á≥Õ
Pu Jifen ‰ˆ‚
Pu Zhongqian ‰Úæ

qian ˙
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GLOSSARY 297

qiangwu gushi
queyou mingju Ã≥˙⁄
qunzhong s≥

renyao HØ
ruan xiewa nc˚
Runan xianxian zhuan ºn˝Â«

sai (to air under the sun) Œ

sai (to compete) …
saijiao hui …}|
sanling T
shangdeng renjia W•Ha
shen ≠
shengji yuhong gao Ÿ…ıI
shenli ´O
shenshou ≠¸
shexiang chuanling ao gªtÕ
sheyue ¿˘
shidafu hj“
shinü Õk
shishu p—
shizu zhi nü @⁄ßk
shoushu weiru jinzhong ¨ÙLpT§
shuanggou ˘_
“Shuang xingchan” ˘ÊÒ
shunrao ∂∂
shuzu xianzhi Ù¨÷ß
suanteng ƒh
subai ¬Ù
sui ≥
suoshi æΔ
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

suzu ¿¨
suzu nü ¿¨k

Tang Yisuo ˆ[æ

taowa M˚
tengchen hØ
tianbu —B
Tianfeng bao —∑¯
tianguan —x
tianran zhi zu —Mß¨
tianwen —Â
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GLOSSARY 298
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tianxing zhi ziqiang —Êß¤j

tianzu —¨
Tianzu hui —¨|
tianzu sixiang —¨‰Q
tongqun Ps
tongzhi P”

wai n
waike ~Ï
wanzhuan rugong s‡p}
weizhi bokao ºß’“
wenming sixiang Â˙‰Q
wo nu shen ⁄£≠
wujiao LÊ

xian ÷
xiang ¤
Xiangjiang shuilang qun øÙˆ»
Xianglian ji ª›∞
xiangxie Ta
xianxiao ÷p
xianzu n¨
xiao wailagu pn∂©
xiaoxian ¯¢
Xiao Xiuxiang Ωqª
xiaozu hui p¨|
xichuan shiyang jin ËtQÀA
xiefu ∏T
xiegong jiaoxiao bunanxing c}}pB¯Ê
xijiao dahui ~}j|
xiku •«
xingchan ÊÒ
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

xingteng Ê
xinxue s«
Xiuqiu (elegant autumn) qÓ
Xiuqiu (embroidering Earth) ∏y
xiuzhuang ∏¯
xizu ~¨
xuanjiang yuan ≈ø˚
Xu Ke }V
xunya ˚ﬁ

yanshuo t°
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GLOSSARY 299
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yaoji ØV
yaojing ØÎ
yibo raojiao H≠∂}
yi butiao lanzhu H¨¯dÌ
yicheng pianduan w®˘q
yilao Ú—
yi yanjian wei zhun H¥£∞«
yong Œ
youjiao ≥Ê
you kuaikuai zoushi liao ≥ÙÙNOF
youxi C∏
yuexian powa ˘÷¢˚
yuntou ≥Y

za „
zagua „E
zaguo „q
zajiao „},æ}
zaoxie mc
zazu æ¨
zha J
zhangjue teng »±h
zhanglao ¯—
Zhanyuan jingyu ÔWRy
zhen u
zhending Eª
zheng ø
zhengti FÈ
Zhou Ying Q^
zi shu ¤z
zuxin ¨ﬂ
zuzhi gongxiao ¨ß}p
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INDEX

Amoy, 14, 36, 235n10 armor, 151, 270n7

“analytic distance,” 4–5 astronomy, 25, 26
anti-footbinding legislation: as “gigantic Axiu, Madam, 100–101, 102, 260n48
history,” 12; Manchu, 132, 251n61,
266n49; of Sun Yat-sen, 234n3; of Bai, Mrs., 20, 22, 23
Yan Xishan, 53–55, 248n30; in Yunnan, Bai Ting, Quiet Words from Deep Water,
292n74. See also feet inspection 133, 266n50
anti-footbinding movement: and bias bamboo shoots, 129, 266n44
in scholarship, 4, 67; and binding style, Baoan she (Peace-Keeping Association),
195, 221; bureaucratization of, 65–66; 50
Chinese and Western, 18, 237–38n22; bare feet, 41–42, 143, 212, 245n8, 268n65,
of 1895–98, 17, 18, 237n19, 244–45n6; 288n49
facilitated binding of feet, 66, 81; lit- “bare-legs-tiny-feet” pageant, 64
erature of, 255n20, 260n47; and philo- Baudrillard, Jean, 258n39
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

logical origins discourse, 142; power Beiping Women’s Normal College, 27

inequalities in, 61, 67–68; program of, big feet, 183, 280n79
41, 141; photography and, 42, 245n11; biji (notation books), 111. See also origin
rhetoric of, 27–28, 30–31, 96, 113; soci- discourses
eties founded by women, 246n15; songs binding cloths: from burials, 188, 281n2,
of, 81; success of, 67–68. See also fangzu 283n10, 291n71; collection of, under
movement; Tianzu hui; Yan Xishan Deng Changyao, 64, 66, 251n64;
antique collecting, 81, 87, 256n22, 260n50. exhibition of, 65; manipulation of,
See also connoisseurship and changes in fashion, 48, 221–23;
arch-shaped foot, 112, 125, 143, 170, 190, price of, 291–92n71; referred to in
221. See also curved arches; shoes, Yuefu song, 124; size of, 279n72; Suzhou
arched-soled ladies’ instructions for eliminating, 48;
archives, 112, 122, 133 as symbol of footbinding, 64, 251n63;

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binding cloths (continued) Che Ruoshui, 113–14, 142

as token of exchange, 179; use of, in Chen Jingyun, Madam, 254n9
Plum in the Golden Vase, 212, 288n49; Chen Jitong, 38, 243n2
weaving of, 222, 251n63, 292n72 Chen Shoupeng, 243n2
binding styles, 189–91, 192, 193–94, 195, Chen Yuanjing. See Shilin guang ji
221. See also upturned toes Chinese Girls’ Progress (Nü xuebao), 26, 38,
Biographies of Ancient Sages from Runan, 239n39
113 Chinese Girls’ School, 38, 244n4
Bo Juyi, 175 Chow, Rey, 231–32n4
body: burdens and uses of, 22, 189, 206; Christianity, 15–17, 236–237n17. See also
effects of footbinding on, 11, 121, 190– missionaries
92, 234n4; as machine, 17, 30, 44, 195, Chu Jiaxuan, 142, 236n16; Jianhu ji,
236n20; natural geometric, 15, 236n16; 272n22
privacy of, 47, 56, 119, 170; as self, 205– Chunyu Fen, 166
6; stagnant, 27, 29, 204; stubborn, 13, circulation, 24, 27, 29, 37, 47, 48, 237n20,
40, 47, 54, 60, 98, 198, 259n46, 260n49; 240n45
use of term, in chantefables, 205; in civil service exam, 76, 78–79, 195, 270n7
Tang poetry, 205 Comprehensive Compendium in the Forest
Book of Changes, 27 of Affairs (Shilin guang ji), 197, 198, 219,
Book of Songs, 26, 27, 71, 126, 253n6 284–85n21, 285n25
Bossen, Laurel, 2–3, 251n63, 292n72, Confucian classics, 27, 29, 116, 125. See
292n77 also Book of Songs
boudoir rituals, 268n65 Confucianism: as culture, 76; and foot-
bound feet, terms for, 14 binding, 138, 233n10, 236n16; and
Bourdieu, Pierre, “habitus,” 39 women, 17, 25, 41; and women’s educa-
Brook, Timothy: The Confusions of tion, 243–44n4; “Thrice Following and
Pleasure, 207 Four Virtues,” 219, 243n4
Brown, Forbes Scott, 240–41n48 connoisseurship: and collecting, 82, 87;
Bu chanzu hui (Anti-Footbinding Society), emotions of, 88; of feet, 70–72, 75,
18, 244n6, 246n15 76–79, 82, 84–85, 87–88, 257n34; and
Buck, Pearl: East Wind: West Wind, 244n5 play, 75–76; and trope of antique, 92,
Bu guozu hui (Do Not Bind Feet 95, 100; women-centered, 96–97, 100,
Society), 19, 236n15 256–57n28. See also Fang Xuan; Li Yu
Buddhism, 45, 114, 262n10 (ca. 1610–80); Yang Tieya
burials, 189–90, 199, 206–7, 281n2, “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen), 2,
282n6, 282–83n8, 283n10, 286n38 4, 266n45
constricted waist, 2, 39
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Cahill, Suzanne, 205 cosmology: female body-centered, 110;

Cai Aihua, 43–47, 100 Copernican, 24–25; pictorial, 167; of
Cai Lünong, 43, 44, 45 quotidian things, 6, 182; in the Rites
Caifei jinghualu (The best of picking of Zhou, 125–26
radishes), 73, 252n2. See also Picking cotton: industry, 22, 132, 139, 238n32,
Radishes 266n49; from Tonghai county, 224,
Cailefu. See Picking Radishes 292n77
Carlyle, Thomas, 32 courtesans: of Datong, 152–53, 156, 158–
castration, 2, 231–32n4 60, 171–72, 206; from Shanxi and
chairs, 137, 138 Shaanxi, 167–68; status ranking among,
chantefables, 199–202, 202–4, 205, 206 172–73; of Yangzhou, 273n27; wooden
chanzu (bound feet), 14, 17, 79–80. See soles of Liu Rushi, 216. See also
also tianzu prostitutes

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covenant of patriarchs, 41, 53, 58, 140 278n64; regional styles, 284n17; from
Cruz, Gaspar da, 213 tombs, 180, 190, 206. See also shoes
cult of the golden lotus, 193–95 “Embroidering Shoes” (painting), 262n5
Culture Fever, 10 embroidery stores, 220, 289n57
“cultureless custom” (Gates), 3 emotions: male, 88, 188; natural, 117–18
curved arches, 192, 193, 283n13. See also encyclopedias, 134, 196–97, 207, 219,
arch-shaped foot 267n54, 291n69
end of footbinding, 5, 10–11, 13–14, 17–
Dai Liang, 113 18, 109, 237–38n22
Daixi (Zhejiang), 43–46 eroticism: of bound feet in Pu Songling’s
Daji, 116, 263n15 tales, 177–78, 277–78n64, 278n67,
Dalu (The continent) magazine, 26, 278n69; and female labor, 177; fondling
239n40 of feet, 178, 208, 278n66; and prose
Daly, Mary, 233n13 genres, 110, 120; in Radishes accounts,
dancers, 95, 114, 223–25. See also Yaoniang 85–87, 88–91, 257n32, 257n33; turn-off,
dancing slippers, 140, 268n63 94, 212, 258n39
Daoism, 205, 206 erotic prints, 260n1
Daoshan xinwen, 262n9 Essentials of Domestic Living ( Jujia biyong
Daqiao Shiyu. See Unofﬁcial Biography shilei), 196–97, 198, 219, 285n25
of Hu Xueyuan ethnic minorities, 131, 134, 224
Datong: courtesans of, 152–53, 156, 158– ethnography of footbinding, 72, 140, 150,
60, 171–73, 181, 192, 206; feet contests 168, 234n2
of, 146, 148, 151–52, 168, 172–73, 269n4,
269n5; footbinding customs of, 270n9; Faithful of Lotus-ism, 85, 88–91, 97,
lotus shoes of, 146, 270n9; mentioned, 257n34
268n2; and north-south differences, Fameng xuetang (Germinating Enlighten-
159–60 ment School), 43
Davin, Delia, 232n6 Fan Hong: Footbinding Feminism, and
Deng Changyao, 64–65, 251n64 Freedom, 234n2
Ding Ling, 12 Fan Jinmin, 268n32
Ding Naifei, 287–88n44, 288n46, 288n49 Fan Lian, 213
Ding mausoleum, 207, 286n38 Fang Xuan, 80, 82–85, 91, 94, 242n59,
downward mobility, 186, 203, 286n34 256n24, 256n28
dream of Huai’an, 155 fangzu (letting-feet-out) movement:
Du Mu, 129, 133, 136, 266n44 drama and entertainment of, 63–66;
Duke of Donghun of the Southern Qi, effectiveness of, 62–63, 67; in Henan,
112, 114, 235n10 251n64; literature of, 41; male-initiated
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Dworkin, Andrea, 233n13 efforts, 43–44, 45, 46; mentioned, 5;

and nationalism, 46; props used by,
Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), 97 42; school rallies, 43–46; and sense
economic productivity, 174–76. See also of national shame, 63; in Shaanxi, 64,
female labor 251n64; in Sichuan, 247n21; social
Elman, Benjamin, 123 agenda of, 40–41; songs, 47, 65; state
embroidered slippers: and the cultural enforcement of, 53–55, 55–56; in
imaginary of the Northwest, 149, 151; Taiwan, 247n18; use of visual exposé
ephemerality of, 211; as evidence in tactic, 63, 245n11. See also unbinding
Qing courts, 215–16; as female sign, Fangzu hui (Letting Feet Out Society), 48
265n39; and hierarchy of domesticity, fashion: and appeal of footbinding to
175; in Plum in the Golden Vase, 208, women, 130, 156, 190, 228–29; cycles
287n43; in Pu Songling’s tales, 180, of, 211, 220–21; denigration of, 30, 128;

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fashion (continued) feng jian (feudal), 9, 13, 35

effect of anti-footbinding movement Fengren, 148–49
on, 54, 97, 221; Li Yu on, 156; in Plum fetishism, 2, 3–4, 66, 84, 95, 232n4,
in the Golden Vase, 211, 288n47; and 257–58n34, 261n2, 265n32
status anxiety, 183–86; and use of fiction, 77, 97–98, 254n13, 255n17, 267n51
binding cloth, 221–23. See also shoes fingernail staining, 134
feet contests: and cultural imaginary, 151; Fo Dongxin, 172–73, 276n53
in Datong, 168; ethnographic reports of, folk songs, 183–86, 281n82
148–50, 269n4; held in temple grounds, foot: anatomy of, 73; in sensory system
186; origins of, 146–148, 269n3, 269n5; map, 261n2
and status ranking among courtesans, foot fetish. See fetishism
172–73 foot powders, 198. See also recipes for
feet inspection, 55–58, 60–61, 66–67, 120, foot care
249n39, 292n74 footbinding: classification of, 134, 267n54;
feet-washing festival, 148, 170n6 distinguishing characteristics of, 112;
Fei Xihuang, 121 irreversibility of, 11, 40, 234n11, 259n46;
female agency: in corporeality, 13, 100; as a lifelong process, 1, 231n3; as meta-
and desires, 170, 186, 218, 259n45; fore- phor, 29; names used for, 143; as national
closure of, 68, 98; lack of interiority, 28– shame, 51–52, 57; origins of, 235n10,
29; legal, 54, 141; and pleasures, 257n33; 261n3; rituals, 270n9; and status, 171–
realized in pain, 102; realized in self- 74, 193, 203, 204. See also body; north-
display, 152 south differences; origin discourses
female chastity, 115, 138, 163, 267–68n60 Footbinding Village, 224
female labor: footbinding as protection footwear: children’s tiger, 290n60; com-
from, 34; hierarchy of domestic, 175– mercial production of, 213–15, 217, 218;
76, 181, 209, 217, 277n56, 277n60; mys- embroidery of, 265n39; fashion in, 183;
tification of, 2–3, 4; shoemaking and, gender-specific, 124, 264n31; inner high
126, 175, 216, 217; textile work, 139, 177, heels, 48–49, 247n18; layers of, 221; leg-
225, 290n61; value of, 39, 128; in vernac- binders, 124, 135, 221, 283n10, 264n30;
ular plays, 176, 177; and women’s self- leg sashes, 183, 281n80; in Plum in the
reliance, 20–21 Golden Vase, 208. See also embroidered
female sexuality, 98–99 slippers; shoes; socks
female testimonies, 100–102, 104, 260n47, “fragrant toilette” genre, 111, 131, 143, 194,
260n48 261n4
female toilette: ornamentation, 134, 185, free choice, 228
237n21; in Pu Songling’s tales and plays, Freud, Sigmund, 2
177–79, 180, 277n64, 278n69; recipes Furth, Charlotte, 261n2
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

for foot care, 197. See also tidying-up Furugaki Koichi, 262n10
female voices: of modern women, 12;
passive, 10; public speech-making, gait, 136, 141, 154, 174, 183, 201, 203–4
15, 246n15; secondhand, 13, 22, 29, Gao Baisu, 246n15
46, 87, 91, 102; shifty narrative, 89, Gao Heng, 278n66
105; of women with bound feet, 61, Gao Hongxing, 231n2, 234n2, 260n2
100, 260n48; of Xue Shaohui, 39 Gao Jiangcun, 194
femininity, 124, 128, 140, 177, 277n64 Gao Shiyu, 261n3
Feng Erkang, 273n29, 273n30 Gates, Hill, 2–3
Feng Jicai: Three-Inch Golden Lotus, gender equality, 16, 17, 24–25, 99
270n9 geography, teaching of, 25–26, 248n27
Feng Menglong, 257n34; Mountain Songs, “gigantic history,” 12, 31, 57, 68, 76
184, 281n82 Globe Society (Diqiu she), 27

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golden lotus, 283n14; three-inch, 191, Hershatter, Gail, 235n9

270n9 Hinton, Carma, Small Happiness, 13
Gong Dafeng, 148–49 History of the Later Han Dynasty, 113
gongxie (bow-shaped shoes), 189, 282n5 History of the Southern Dynasties, 111, 112
goose-head feet, 170. See also arch-shaped Honolulu Chinatown, 251n63
feet Hu Qiheng, 273n29
Gordon, Richard, Small Happiness, 13 Hu Shi, 33, 35
Great Learning, 29 Hu Xueyan, 87, 91, 92–93, 94, 258n37
Gu Hongming: calligraphy of, 32, 241n51; Hu Yanxian, 73
defender of footbinding, 31, 34–35, Hu Yepin: “Two Women in a Small
36; early days of, 32, 240n48, 241n49, County Town,” 97–99
242n54; as “lotus lover,” 35; nationalism Hu, Ying, 239n33, 240n44
of, 31–33, 35, 36; queue of, 33, 242n54; Hu Yinglin: concern with shoes, 124–25,
valorization of classical Chinese, 32, 135, 143, 212, 265n32; on footbinding
241–42n53; Western learning of, 32; and female beauty, 128–29; on foot-
241n52; on women, 34, 242n57 binding and printing, 129–30, 266n45;
Gu Lihuan, 240n48 interpretation of “slender,” 129; inter-
Gu Mei, 192 pretation of the Rites of Zhou, 126–28;
Guandi, 148, 151 mentioned, 170, 262n9, 289n52; origins
Guangdong, 131, 139, 244n6 discourse of, 118, 122–25, 129–30;
Guangxi, 131, 139 Revised Scarlet and Lead Scrolls, 123
Guangxu emperor, memorial to, 38, 39, Huajian ji (Among the ﬂowers), 129
42, 238n26, 243n1, 243n3 Huang Sheng, tomb of, 190, 282n8,
Guizhou, 131, 139 283n10, 291n71
guojiao, 264n30. See also leg-binders Huang Xiuqiu. See Tang Yisuo
Gushe Mountain, 159 Huang Zhi, 25–26, 27
gynecology, 261n2 Huang Zunxian, 244n6
Hubei, 139
hairpin: female, 184–85, 201; male, 134 Hunan, 139
half-bound feet, 54, 183, 195 Hundred Days Reform (1898), 18, 237n21
half-stockings (banwa), 129
Han Wo: “Eulogy to Shoes,” 111, 133, 136, incense-burning wife, 183–84, 186, 188,
195, 258n40, 261n4, 263n23 193
Hanan, Patrick, 153, 271n17, 271n18 individualism: autonomous, 12, 67, 99;
Han Chinese identity, 132, 266n49 free choice, 208; free will, 205; social-
Handler, Sarah, 137, 267n57 ized, 182, 280n78; volitional female,
“hanging” (boudoir ritual), 268n65 28, 46, 60
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Han learning, 116–17, 263n16 inner high heels, 48–49, 247n18

Han zashi mixin (Han footles), 119–21, interior space, changes in, 137–38
263n21 interviews, 3, 13, 232n8, 235n9, 244n5,
Hay, Jonathan, 275n42 268n65, 270n6. See also female
He Manzi, 277n62 testimonies
He Mojun, 19
He Ning, 261n4 jade soles, 93, 258n38, 258n39
Heavenly Foot Society, 14–15, 16, jade terrace, 111, 131
235–36n11, 236n15. See also tianzu Japanese invasion, 63
Hebei, 139, 146, 170 Ji Yun, 94
Heilongjiang Museum of Ethnography, 9 Jia Shen: Zhonghua funü chanzu kao,
Henan, 146, 251n64 255n20
Hengsan, 148–49 Jialin Bao Tao, 237n22

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Jiangnan, 139, 186; scholars, 159–60, 161, Li Yu (937–78), 114–15

163, 275n40. See also Wang Jingqi Li Yu (ca. 1610–80): advice on shoes and
Jiangsu, 244n6 socks, 156, 192, 273n28; aesthetic of
Jiangxi, 64 function, 154, 170, 173, 174, 206; Carnal
Jie chanzu hui (Quit Binding-Feet Prayer Mat, 212, 271n17; Casual Expres-
Society), 16, 236n15 sions of Idle Feeling, 152–53, 271n18,
Jin Suqing, 101–2, 260n48 271n19; compared with Pu Songling,
Jing Yuanshan, 38 181–82; compared with Wang Jingqi,
Jingdezhen kilns, 95, 259n44 159; concubines of, 153, 272n21; con-
Jingzhong ribao (Tocsin Daily), 43 noisseurship of women and feet, 80,
Jinpingmei. See Plum in the Golden Vase 83, 84, 154–56, 182, 192, 272–73n24;
jottings, 111. See also origin discourses “Hands and Feet,” 152, 153; mentioned,
Judge, Joan, 237n21, 238n29 168, 256n27; parody of “Miss Carry,”
“Judge Bao Judging the Case of Imperial 154, 193; travels of, 271n17
Uncle Cao,” 199–202, 202–4, 205 Liang Jinghe, 234n2
Jujia biyong shilei (Essentials of domestic Liang Qichao, 23, 38, 237n18, 237n21,
living), 196–97, 198, 219, 285n25 244n4; essay “On Women’s Education,”
21, 238n29, 239n33
Kang Aide (Ida Kahn), 244n4 Liaozhai zhiyi. See Pu Songling
Kang Guangren, 38 liberation ( jiefang ), 66, 251–52n69
Kang Youwei: cofounder of Bu guozu hui, Lightning Steps (courtesan), 158–60
236n15, 238n26; memorial to Guangxu Lin Menghuan, 43
emperor, 38, 39, 42, 238n26, 243n1, Lin Qiumin, 238n22
243n3; mentioned, 237n21 Lin Weihong, 236–37n17, 237–38n22,
Kangxi emperor, 251n61, 157, 274n30 244n6, 244n15, 252n70
Karl, Rebecca, 21, 238n29 Lin Yanmei, Madam, 260n49
Keeper of Shoes, 126, 127 Lin Lanxiang, 288n49
Kishimoto Mio, 182 liqu. See vernacular plays
Kristeva, Julia, 231–32n4 literati, 18–19, 76–77, 79, 84–85, 95, 158,
Ku Hung-ming. See Gu Hongming 255n17, 271–72n18, 273n27, 273–74n29.
kuai shangma (quick-mounting) style, 190 See also connoisseurship; Jiangnan
Kunde baojian (Precious mirror of femi- Little, Mrs. Alicia, 16, 245n7
nine virtue), 219–20, 291n69 Liu, Lydia, 235n7
Kunqu, 173 Liu Rushi, 216
Kun-shoes, 54, 68, 221, 248n32 Liu Tingji, 191
Liu Xiang: Biographies of Women, 291n69
Langxuanji ( Yi Shizhen), 268n60 Liuyi village ( Yunnan), 223–25, 292n74
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Lanzhou, 152 Lo, Hui-min, 34–35, 240n48

Lao Xuan, 96–97, 259n45 Long Bow Village, 13
leather boots, 136 lotus, 112, 114, 283n14. See also “three-inch
leg-binders, 124, 135, 221, 264n30, 283n10 golden lotus”
leg sashes, 183, 281n80 Lotus Addict (Lianchi), 80–81
letting feet out. See fangzu movement; lotus lovers. See Fang Xuan; Gu Hong-
unbinding ming; Li Yu; Overseas-Chinese-Lotus-
Levy, Howard S., 70, 231n2, 244n5 Lover; Tao Baopi
Li Bo, 117–18, 133, 136 Lotus-Seeking Club, 74–75, 254n9
Li Bozhong, 139, 268n62 lotus steps, 136, 201, 202, 203. See also gait
Li Ciming, 91 Lu Zhilan, 235n9
Li Hong, 146 Luo Jialun, 35
Li Shangyin, 82, 129 Luo Zhitian, 244n5

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Ma Jianzhong, 241n49, 242n54 Nian Gengyao, 156–57, 158, 273n29,

Ma Qiaofen, 224 273n30, 274n31, 275n33
MacGowan, Rev. John, 14–16, 205, Ning Lao-t’ai-t’ai, 3
235n10, 236n14, 247n19 Northern Expedition, 150
MacLaren, Anne E., 199, 203, 285n28 north-south differences: in binding
maids, 86, 173–74, 196, 202, 279n75 practice, 139, 170, 194; in embroidered
male haircutting campaign, 51, 52 slippers, 284n17; and male-female
male ventriloquist, 80–81, 91, 99, 102, desire, 169; status and, 159–60, 161–
250n57 63, 185–86
Manchus, 132, 266n49 Northwest: as cultural imaginary, 145,
Mann, Susan, 266n49 151, 271n15; feet contests in, 146–47,
marriage: bride’s figts, 180; footbinding 150; erotics of, 150, 167, 168, 169; in
and, 54, 57, 59, 249n34; “marrying-up” travelogues, 151. See also Datong
thesis, 3, 4; subjugation of women in, nostalgia, 76, 85, 88, 150, 256n22
98–99; teenage, 57 Nürenjing, 253n10
matchmakers, 3, 53, 54, 179, 289n58 Nü xuebao (Chinese Girls’ Progress), 26, 38,
May Fourth New Culture Movement, 35, 239n39
76, 242n53
measurements, 73, 102, 121, 122, 263n22 obsession, 88, 93–94
medical treatment, 196. See also recipes for Okamoto Ryuzo: Tensoku monogatari,
foot care 234n2
Meng Sen, 274n30 opera troupes, 54, 248–49n33
miniaturization, 12, 25, 192, 196, 254n12; oppression of women, 10, 233n13
as containment, 12–13, 37 oral history, 235n8. See also female testi-
missionaries, 14, 35, 235n10, 238n22, monies; interviews
241n49. See also Heavenly Foot Society; origin discourses: and anti-footbinding
MacGowan, Rev. John rhetoric, 5–6, 142; established parame-
Miyazaki Ichisada, 273n29 ters and definitions of footbinding,
mother-daughter relationships, 15, 46–47, 143; and faith in texts, 111–12, 113; Five-
103, 139, 231n3 Dynasties theory, 114, 129, 132, 138,
motherhood, 61, 142 267n50; Han theory, 121, 133; and harem
mother-in-law, 179, 278n70 dancers, 115; history of manners and
“mystification of female labor,” 2–3, 4 gestures, 135–37; as philology, 118, 133–
34, 142–43; and regional variations,
Nagao Ryuzo, 146–47, 269n4 131–32, 139; Six-Dynasties theory, 116,
Nanjing regime, 63, 252n70 118, 135. See also Che Ruoshui; Hu
nanxi (southern drama), 199, 204 Yinglin; Qian Yong; Yang Shen; Yu
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

national feminism, 23, 67, 96–97 Huai; Zhang Bangji; Zhao Yi

National Silk Museum (Hangzhou), 187 Ou Eliang, 238n26
nationalism, 5, 17, 18–23, 26, 30–33, 46, Overseas-Chinese-Lotus-Lover (Ailian
96–97 Qiaosheng), 66–67
national shame, 51–52, 57, 63
natural feet. See tianzu pain, 28, 43, 49, 59, 100–102, 104
needlework. See embroidered slippers; Pan, Consort, 80, 112, 114, 283n14
female labor; textiles Penang, 31, 240n48, 242n54
New Fiction (Xin xiaoshuo), 23, 239n33 philologists. See origin discourses
New Songs from Jade Terrace, 111 “phoenix heads.” See upturned toes
Ni Mu’ou, Mrs. ( Wang Shouzhi), 43, photo albums, 41, 245n8
44, 45 photography, 33, 41–42, 72–73, 87, 109–
Ni Yuanzhen, 94, 259n42 10, 245n8. See also visuality; X-rays

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physical mobility: agility of women with 260n50, 275n34, 284n18. See also
bound feet, 152, 154, 158, 170, 174, 175; courtesans
crippling of women with bound feet, Pruitt, Ida, 3, 232n8, 209, 244n5
154, 193, 196, 204, 232n10; gestures and Pu Jifen, 224–25
manners, 135–37; female seclusion, 137– Pu Songling: “Immortals with Riches
38; of male scholars, 152, 160; modern and Honor,” 174, 176; “The Pleasures
veneration of, 24, 150. See also gait; of Marriage,” 177–78, 278n66, 278n69;
lotus steps Records of the Strange from Liaozhai,
Picking Radishes (Cailefu): accounts of 171, 176, 277n62, 277n64, 278–79n70;
erotic contacts with the bound foot, “Shang Sanguan,” 177; “Song of Bliss-
85–87, 88–91, 257n32, 257n33; “Admo- ful Clouds,” 171–72, 175–76, 276n51,
nitions” section, 102, 260n47, 260n48; 280n79; “Song of the Cold and the
as an archive, 105–6; criticism of anti- Dark,” 177; “Song of Tribulation,”
footbinding movement, 96; female 176; status anxiety in works of, 182–
voices in, 99–102, 104, 250n57, 254n10, 83; “tidying up” in vernacular plays of,
260n47, 260n48; on footwear, 73, 218, 178–79, 182, 278n69; treatment of the
221–22; inventiveness of, 81, 82, 105; shrew, 179, 279n70; use of footbinding,
male-centeredness of, 95, 231n2; men- 172–76, 177–78, 181–82, 278n69; “The
tioned, 5, 83; “An Overview of Foot- Wife and Her Mother-in-Law,” 179;
binding” in, 104–5; photography in, “Zhang Hongjian,” 176, 277n62. See
72–73; pornography and ethnography, also vernacular plays
70, 72; readers’ contributions to, 74; Pu Xianming, 276n50
shifty voice in, 89–91, 102–3, 105; as Pu Zhongqian, 216, 290n60
source of data, 231n2; structure of, 69, Puyi, 157, 274n31
70, 252n2, 253n3; tables and measures
in, 73, 101–2, 122; title of, 71, 253n6. See Qian Yong: “On Binding Feet,” 138–42
also Lotus-Seeking Club; Yao Lingxi Qingshi (manifesto of the cult of qing),
“pictorial cosmology” (Hay), 167, 275n42 257n34
Pingshan Hall ( Yangzhou), 83, 256n27 Qiu Jin, 12
plain-footed girl, 117–18, 129, 133, 136 Quan fang jiao tushuo, 255n19
plastic surgery, 233n13 queue: of Gu Hongming, 33, 241n49,
Plum in the Golden Vase ( Jinpingmei): bare 242n54; Yan Xishan’s campaign against,
feet in, 212; contributed to popularity 51–52
of footbinding, 265n41; encyclopedic quick-mounting (kuai shangma) style, 190
quality of, 207–8; footwear in, 208–
11, 216–17, 287n43, 288n47; Roy on, Rafﬂes, Stamford, 240
287n41; sexual politics in, 287–88n44 railroads, 150, 270n12
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

poetry: female socks and shoes in, 115, recipes for foot care, 196–98, 284–85n21,
136, 228; “lotus steps” in, 136; modern 285n25, 291n69
allusions, 81; praise of natural and Record of the Historian, 116
bound feet, 80–81, 111–12, 117–18, Red Rock Village, 158, 161–66, 166–69,
267n51; used in philology of footbind- 276n45
ing, 128–29, 133; use of word shen, 205 Refusing to Marry Footbound Brides
poorly bound feet, 183, 184, 280n79 associations, 58, 250n48
positivism, 73, 253n7 regional variation: in binding practice, 2,
Precious Mirror of Feminine Virtues (Kunde 10, 131–32, 139, 194, 234n3; in embroi-
baojian), 219–20, 291n69 dered slippers, 284n17. See also north-
printing, 129–30, 266n45 south differences
prose-essay, 153 remnants: footbound women as, 9, 13–14,
prostitutes, 45, 61, 94, 158, 202, 221, 72; literati men as, 76–77, 89

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Repentant Scholar ( Juefei sheng), 102–3, shoes: arched-soled, 53, 54, 64, 148–49,
260n50 263n20; Banner, 73; bow-shaped, 189,
revolutionaries, 99 282n5; in burials, 187–88, 189–90,
Richards, Thomas, 105 281n2, 282n6, 282–83n8; butterfly, 215,
Rites of Zhou (Zhouli): history of, 265n33, 289n56; cattail, 124, 264n31; claimed to
265n34; interpretations of Yang Shen be in Hu Xueyan’s mansion, 92; clogs,
and Hu Yinglin, 125–28; on shoes, 264n31; cloud-tip, 207; colors of, 217,
264n31, 264n32; solemn bow in, 136–37 290n63; cotton, 214; dancing slippers,
Roland, Madame, 28, 239–40n43 140, 268n63; described in Picking
rouge bandits, 168–69, 276n45. See also Radishes, 73; designs of, 217–18;
Red Rock Village drinking wine from, 93–95, 258n40,
Roy, David, 287n41 259n41, 259n44; with embroidered
Runan xianxian zhuan (Biographies of motifs, 128, 265n39; of Empress Xiao-
ancient sages from Runan), 113 jing, 206–7, 286n38; as evidence in
court, 215–16, 289n58; as extensions
sanqu (free songs), 263n20 of private parts, 216; fengtou, 189, 207,
Sanyou (Three Friends), 92 286n38; as fetish object, 95; fragrant,
scholar-officials. See literati 289n57; high-heeled, 130, 131, 191, 193,
school curriculum, 25–26 195, 206, 207, 211, 216, 217, 220, 282n6,
Scott, Joan, 4 286n38; insoles of, 179; kun-style, 54, 68,
self-strengthening, 20–21, 39 221, 248n32; leather, 136, 217, 290n60,
Shaanxi, 64, 170 290n63; Li Yu’s advice on, 156; lü (single-
Shandong, 116, 139, 171, 235n9 soled), 125, 214, 264–65n32; of the
Shang Wei, 207 Northwest, 170; patterns for, 43, 219–
Shanghai: commercial photography in, 20; “plum-sole,” 270n9; premade com-
41, 245n8; Tianzu hui in, 16, 18, 42, ponents, 218; prostitutes and, 221,
240n43, 246n13, 246n15; and Western- 260n50, 284n18; in Pu Songling’s tales
ization model, 30, 240n43 and plays, 177, 278n64; removal of,
Shanxi: fines collected in, 57–58, 61; foot- 135–36; sleeping, 211–12, 215–16, 221,
binding in, 139, 170; gathering places 288n48, 289n57, 289n58; soles of, 93,
for prostitutes in, 158, 275n34; Refusing 189–90, 258n38, 258n39, 282n6; straw
to Marry Footbound Brides associa- and hemp, 213, 214, 289n52, 289n54;
tions in, 58, 250n48; Tianzu hui in, 52– studied by Hu Yinglin, 124–25; as
53, 58, 59. See also Datong; north-south synecdoche of the self, 265n32; three-
differences; Yan Xishan inch, 201, 202, 203; with upturned
shen (body), 205 toes, 190–91; wedding, 171, 276n49;
Shen Defu, 94, 259n42, 262n5, 264n27, and womanly work, 126; wooden heels
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

266n44 and soles, 130, 207, 218–19, 248n32; xie,

Shen Fu, 215 264n32; zaoxie, 248n32. See also embroi-
Shen, Madame, 38 dered slippers; footwear; shoemaking
Shen Yixiu, 282n3 shoe-shaped curiosities, 94–95, 105
Shenbao, 65 shoe stores, 214–15
Shi Jingkai, 20–22, 30 shrew, 179, 279n70
Shi Meiyu (Mary Stone), 244n4 Shuofu (comp. Wang Wenru), 256n24
Shilin guang ji (Comprehensive compen- Sichuan, 3, 25, 247n21
dium in the forest of affairs), 197, 198, sizing up: female manipulation, 212; as
219, 284–85n21, 285n25 male gaze, 120, 153, 173, 182, 200; return
shoemaking, 9, 209–11, 212–13, 216–17, gaze, 155–56
220, 289n53, 290n60. See also embroi- Small Happiness (Hinton and Gordon),
dered shoes 13, 235n9

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“small talk” (xiaoshuo), 23, 77, 111 “three-inch golden lotus,” 9, 191, 270n9
“social skin” (Turner), 182, 185, 280n78 Tian Yiheng, 194, 217
socks: in burials, 187–88, 190–91, 281n1, tianbu (natural strides), 28
281n2, 283n8; described in Picking Tianfeng bao (Heavenly wind), 60, 252n2
Radishes, 73; removal of, 135–36, 137, tianzu (natural feet): discourse of, 36–37,
143; with upturned toes, 190–91 46, 79–80; and the end of footbinding,
solemn bow, 136–37 17–18; and gender equality, 16; national-
soles. See shoes, arched-soled; shoes, soles ism and, 5, 18–23, 96–97; use of term, 14,
of; shoes, wooden heels and soles 18–19, 27–28. See also anti-footbinding
Song Lizhong, 268n62 movement; Heavenly Foot Society;
Song learning, 116–17, 263n16 Tianzu hui
southern drama, 199, 204 Tianzu hui (Natural Feet Society):
Southern Manchurian Railway Company, distributed fangzu literature, 41, 42,
269n4 245n7, 245n11; female founders of, 44,
Southern Tang dynasty, 114, 262n10 245n15; ineffectiveness of, 244–45n6;
spatial diversity. See regional variation meetings of, 246n13; mentioned, 28,
Spivak, Gayatri, 228 237n19, 243n3; in Shaanxi, 64; in Shang-
status: anxiety, 152, 180, 182–86, 280n77; hai, 16, 18, 42, 240n43, 246n13, 246n15;
footbinding and, 132, 171–74, 203, 204 in Shanxi, 52–53, 58, 59; in Xiamen,
Stewart, Susan, 12, 254n12, 256n22 236n15. See also Bu Chanzu hui; fangzu
stilts, 54, 248–49n33 movement; Heavenly Foot Society
Suiyuan province, 147, 268n2 “tidying up” (zaguo), 178–79, 184
Sun, Madame, tomb of, 190, 282n6 tokens of exchange, 179–82, 380n76
Sun Yat-sen, 64, 234n3 Tonghai ( Yunnan), 224–25, 292n74,
Suzhou: arched heels of, 191; footbinding 292n77
in, 139; ladies instructions on unbind- tourism, 224, 292n74
ing, 48–49, 246n17; natural feet in, 20, trade routes, 214, 269n5
22, 131, 132 “transitional figures,” 23, 75, 79
suzu (unadorned feet), 19, 27, 117, 129 transitional period, 13, 36, 40, 72, 204,
244n5
Taiping yulan, 264n31 transmission of footbinding, 229, 231n2
Tang Yisuo: account of exposure to tianzu Turner, Christena, 234n3
rhetoric, 20–22; attitude toward the
West, 240n43; Huang Xiuqiu, 23–25, unbinding: and Christian miracle, 247n19;
28–30, 78–79, 239n33, 239–40n43, in fiction, 28–29, 97, 98; instructions
259n46; as transitional figure, 75, 79; on, 47–49, 246n16, 246n17; and the irre-
view of the female body, 44 versibility of footbinding, 11, 40; nar-
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Tao Baopi; compared to Tang Yisuo, 75, rative of Madam Lin Yanmei, 260n49;
79; mentioned, 93, 253n4; short story in older women, 47–48, 49, 54, 60;
“Excising Small Feet,” 77–78, 255n17; by relaxing the arch and retaining toe
view of footbound woman, 71, 101 narrowness, 195; in younger women,
Tao Zongyi, 261n3, 262n13; Notations 47. See also fangzu movement
from Resting the Plough, 133, 267n50 universal patriarchy, 233n13
technological change, 232n7 Unofﬁcial Biography of Hu Xueyuan,
temple grounds, 148, 186 92–93, 258n37
textiles: cotton fabrics, 279n72; as medium upturned toes 189, 190–91, 206, 282n5
of exchange, 180–81, 280n76. See also urban-rural gap, 132, 160
female labor
Thiriez, Régine, 41, 245n8 Veblen, Thorstein, 2, 4
Three Ills, 51 vernacular plays: bound feet in, 177–78,

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267n51, 277n64; of Pu Songling, women’s self-reliance, 20–21, 39

171–72, 179, 181–82, 276n50, 276n51, wooden clogs, 264n31
277n62, 278n66 wooden lasts, 9, 233n1
viewpoints: female, 100, 182, 199, 206; written word, status of, 109–10
difference between male and female, Wu Woyao, 254n14, 254n17
145, 181; omnipresent, 104, 140, 152; Wu Zetian, Empress, 262n5
of Westerners, 73 Wushi Girls’ School (Gao’an, Jiangxi), 61
visual exposé, 37, 42, 63, 245n11. See also Wuzong (Zhengde emperor), 171–73,
feet inspection 175–76, 178, 277n56, 280n79
visuality: and nationalism, 26, 30–31,
33, 255n18; and representation of bare Xiangyan congshu, 256n24, 256n28
bound foot, 41–42, 245n8; and social Xiao Xiuxiang, 224–225
status, 182, 185; and women, 41–42, 60. Xiaoduan, Empress, 207, 286n38
See also photography; X-rays Xiaojing, Empress, 206, 207, 217,
voyeurism, 83, 85–86, 91, 143, 257n32 286–87n38
Xiaoman, 175
Wang Bin, 275n39 Xie Zhaozhe, 264n23
Wang Hongtai, 273n27, 289n53 Xishi, 197, 198
Wang Jianqi, 275n39 Xiurui ji (The embroidered jacket), 204,
Wang Jingqi: and the aesthetics of feet, 286n35
169–74; compared with Pu Songling, X-rays, 42, 244n5, 245n9, 245n11
174, 181–82; execution of, 157, 166, Xu Ke: China-centered narrative of tianzu
275n40; Jottings of My Westward Journey, movement, 18–19, 22–23, 27, 118; life
157–58, 160, 167, 169; journey west, and associates of, 19–20; mentioned,
156–57, 273n29; and Lightning Steps, 258n38, 259n42; as transitional ﬁgure,
158–60, 167, 169; on north-south dif- 75, 79; treatises of, 80
ferences in binding, 194; and women Xu Lin, 286n35
of Red Rock Village, 161–66, 166–671, Xu Naichang, 256–57n28
185, 276n45 Xu Shuofang, 286n35
Wang Shouzhi (Mrs. Ni Mu’ou), 43, 44, Xu Xinhua, 238n30
45 Xu Zehua, 43, 44, 45, 47
Wang Sizhong, 157 Xuan, Madame, tomb of, 199
Wang Tao, 30, 240n45 Xuanhua (Hebei), 146, 151
Wang Wenru, 256n24 Xuanzong (Tang), 114
Wang Zheng, 235n8 Xue Ji, 196
Wang Zichong, 119 Xue Shaohui, 38–40, 96, 243n3, 243–44n4
Wanli emperor (Ming), 206, 207, 208, Xu family collection, 256–57n28
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

287n39 Xunhuan ribao (Circulation daily),

water chestnuts, 86 240n45
weddings, 204, 286n36
wedding shoes, 171, 276n49 Ya Fei, 278n66
Weschler, Lawrence, 271n14 Yan Fu, 237n21
West, Stephen, 1 Yan Xishan: campaigns to eradicate foot-
womanly work, 126. See also female labor binding, 50–52, 57–59, 62–63, 247n23,
“women as slaves,” 21, 238n29 247n25; inspections and ﬁnes ordered
women’s community: divided by class, 61, by, 55–58, 60–61; mentioned, 130,
174, 250n57; of shared labor, 181, 21 268n2; order to enforce fangzu among
women’s education, 20–21, 39, 104, older women, 62, 250n58; “Regulations
237n21 for the Strict Prohibition of Footbind-
women’s history, 12 ing,” 53–55, 248n30; rhetoric of, 59–60,

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INDEX 332
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

Yan Xishan (continued) Yu Huai, 121, 130–31, 191, 192, 263n23;

248n28; Six Policies of, 50–51; three “On Shoes and Stockings for Women,”
duties of the people, 57; What the 272n19, 273n28
People Should Know, 52, 248n27 Yuan Hongdao, 82
Yang, Consort, 80, 113, 114, 133, 283n14 Yuefu poems: “Double Bindings,” 116,
Yang Nianqun, 244n5 124, 133; as source for jottings, 111
Yang Shen: anatomical descriptions, 119– Yueyue xiaoshuo (Stories every month),
20, 125, 129, 135, 190; attitude toward 77, 254n14
footbinding, 129, 263n20; critique of, Yunnan: feet-washing festival in, 148,
by Hu Yinglin, 122–25; forged Han 270n6; footbinding in, 3, 131, 139,
Footles, 118–22, 133, 263n21; interpreta- 251n63
tion of the Rites of Zhou, 125–27; men-
tioned, 133, 143, 170; scholarship on zaguo (tidying up), 178–79, 184
origins of footbinding, 115–18, 123, 133; zazuan (genre), 82
unadorned foot as metaphor for natural Zeitlin, Judith, 82, 176, 278n66
emotions, 117–18 Zeng Guofen, 104
Yang Tieya, 93–94, 258n40, 258n41 Zhang Bangji, 111–12, 113, 190, 262n9,
Yang Xingmei, 244n5, 252n70 266n46
Yang Yang, 235n9, 257n31, 268n65, 270n6, Zhang Dai: “The Thin Horses of
292n73, 292n74 Yangzhou,” 273n27
Yangzhou, 83, 93, 153, 215, 273n27, 284n18 Zhang Jinlan, 299n47
Yao Jushun: Zhongguo chanzu fengsu, Zhang Pengge, 157–58, 275n32
234n2 Zhang Xiushu, 25–26
Yao Lingxi: accounts of feet contests, Zhang Yushan, 118
148–50, 168, 271n13; authority on Plum Zhang Zhidong, 32
in the Golden Vase, 75; compiled edition Zhangjiakou, 146
of Pu Songling’s “Qinse le,” 278n66; Zhao Yi, 134–37, 143, 262n9; “The
connoisseur of footbinding, 70–72, Arched Foot,” 131–34; “Zhuxue,”
75–76, 88, 257n34; editor of Picking 267n55
Radishes, 69, 70, 231n2; and the Hu Zhao Yixin, 257n31
Xueyan story, 93; mentioned, 81, 83, Zheng Guanying, 30, 38, 240n45
255n16, 255n19, 257n32, 259n37, 260n47, Zhengde emperor ( Wuzong), 171–73,
270n7, 275n32, 289n57; playfulness 175–76, 178, 277n56, 280n79
of, 75–76; poetry of, 252n1; story of Zhiqiang Shoe Factory (Harbin), 9,
drinking wine from a shoe, 95, 259n43. 233n1
See also Picking Radishes Zhou (queen), 115
Yaoniang, 80, 114, 262n9, 283n14 Zhou, Madame, burial of, 191, 283n10
Copyright 2007. University of California Press.

Ye Dehui, 79 Zhou Mi, 114

Ye Mengzhu, 193 Zhou Songyao, 61, 255n20
Ye, Reverend, “Discourse on Quitting Zhou Ying (Zhu Chengyu), 71, 74, 83,
Footbinding,” 16–17 87, 93, 95, 253n5, 257n31
Yilan (maid with natural feet), 20, 21 Zhou Zuoren, 35, 240n48
Yong Jiaxiang, 243n3 Zhu Changlou, 287n39
Yongzheng emperor, 157, 274n30, 274n31, Zhuangzi, 159
275n40 Zito, Angela, 236n16

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