Manchu imitations of the tiny-footed (from Vincent, la Medicine en Chine au XX Siecle, 114)
The failure to eradicate an ingrained custom through legislation was admitted three years later, when the decree was rescinded. The influence of footbinding and other aspects of Chinese culture was increasingly felt by the Manchus as the years went by; men came to prefer the tiny foot, and their wives invented a kind of imitation. They compressed the foot, as did the Koreans, to achieve a slender and narrow knife-like effect, but did not bend the toes under as the Chinese did. The style of footwear which Manchu ladies came to adopt was further evidence that they wished to emulate the tiny-footed, for at the bottom of their ordinary shoes they affixed a small white support, about two inches high, to give the onlooker an illusion of smallness. When the skirt concealed the regular shoe, this support was the only thing which protruded. The Manchu woman became the official target of several later edicts, in which she was strictly ordered not to emulate the footbound.
Manchu efforts against footbinding proved ineffectual throughout their reign, since traditional views in its favor were never seriously challenged. As late as 1847 still another edict was issued, and it was as ineffectual as its predecessors. Part of the argumentation is of interest, for it shows that the appeal for change was directed toward the upper class:
The women of Han have all had bound feet for a long time. This injures the natural harmony. Distinguished families should endeavor to encourage everyone [to have natural feet], in the hope that this old custom can then be eliminated.
The official attempts of the Manchus to bring about the end of footbinding were consistently frustrated, but from the eighteenth century onward advanced thinkers joined in the protest and made their opinions known. One incident during the Ch’ien-lung era (1736-95) aroused considerable comment, for it centered about a natural-footed poetess. A man named Chao Chun-t’ai wanted to buy a concubine. The go-between recommended a young lady who was beautiful in face and figure, but Chao demurred because her feet were unbound. The go-between said that the woman was an accomplished poetess, and Chao therefore requested that she compose an extemporaneous poem about bowed shoes. This was her poem:
Feminine critics of footbinding were a rarity before the close of the Manchu dynasty, and in this instance, significantly, the dissent was made by a woman of intellectual training. When Yuan Mei (1716-98), the liberal scholar whom we have already cited, heard of the incident, he sent Mr. Chao the following letter:
Women revere elegance and gracefulness. It is elegant and graceful for a woman’s neck to be of termite length and for her waist to be neat and trim. But this is certainly not to say that she should stand unsteadily. If a woman has a three-inch bowed foot but a short neck and thick waist, how can she ever give a light appearance when walking, as if she were skimming over the waves?
Yuan Mei based his argument on the inappropriateness of exclusively admiring tiny feet while disregarding other essential attributes of beauty and tried to dissuade one individual. But he did not generally attack the practice as he had elsewhere.
There were advocates of natural feet for women among writers and political leaders of the Manchu period, whose arguments were part of a wider plea for a liberal attitude toward woman and her education. Anti-footbinding and the granting of women’s rights were indivisible. Li Ju-chen (c.1763-c.1830) used fiction as a propagandists device to achieve this goal. He was the first person of note to advocate foot emancipation forcefully and unequivocally, and his fictional technique of having men assume feminine roles probably assured him both an interested and sympathetic reading audience. His liberal sentiments were echoed by Kung Tzu-chen (1792-1841), a foremost scholar and political reformer. Kung was a forerunner of the modern reform movement and expressed the radical opinion that women should be encouraged to have unbound feet. He showed a poetic preference for the natural-footed, stressing that binding and feminine beauty were unrelated. In one poem he said in part:
Taiping Rebellion leader Hung Hsiu-ch’uan prohibited foot-binding in areas under his control, as part of a more general reform which included the outlawing of prostitution and slave trading. During his stay in Kiangsu Province, Hung once ordered women there to unbind their feet and decreed decapitation as the penalty for disobedience. It was later reported that many women in areas under his jurisdiction let their feet out, including more than half of the bound-footed in Kwangsi and Kwangtung. A type of theoretical attack on footbinding, launched with increasing frequency in the two decades preceding the overthrow of the Manchus, is to be found in the writings of Cheng Kuan-ying. Cheng, who worked actively in favor of emancipation in the latter half of the nineteenth century, advanced a series of arguments intended to sway the general populace:
The custom of footbinding is unknown throughout the vast universe, with the exception of China. Now there is nothing that parents will not do through love of their children, with the lone exception of this cruel and senseless custom in which they indulge. When a child is four or five, or seven or eight, parents speak harshly to it, and frighten it with their looks, and oppress it in every conceivable manner so that the bones of its feet may be broken and its flesh may putrefy. They are then happy in their parental hearts, feeling that when she later gets married, they will be very proud of her. But if the foot is round and six inches long [i.e., of natural size], relatives and neighbors all feel that this is shameful. This kind of trivial fashionableness is even more revered in the cities than in the countryside. Great families especially favor footbinding and follow one another in imitation. A person is unfortunate in being born a woman, but still more unfortunate if born a Chinese woman. [Men commonly regarded being born as a female retribution for the evil of a former life; a mother might remind her suffering daughter that she was subjected to the pain of footbinding because of evil done in a previous existence.] Her own person is injuriously maltreated in this way, with injurious effects on health, while her flesh and bones are so tightly restrained that the blood flows unceasingly. It is as if she has incurred a most heavy penalty, contracted a most serious illness, or encountered a major calamity. As a young child, she suffers from having her feet virtually dismembered and her skin despoiled. If she is delicate, her health is damaged. . . . If she is lucky enough to remain alive, all day she requires the support of others. How can she get water from the well or pound the pestle? If there occur calamities such as flood, fire, or bandits, she has to sit and await death, unable to do more than hobble about. The injuring of her physical well-being is looked upon as beautiful, and doing such a profitless thing is regarded as profitable. This is the height of lewdness!