Chapter Two
Origin and Presence
Questions concerning the beginning of footbinding in China have invited learned speculation from the Sung dynasty onwards, with widely varying opinions. The nineteenth-century sinologist Du Halde, for example, believed that the last empress of the Shang dynasty started it in about the twelfth century B.C.:
Her own feet being very small, she bound them tight with fillets, affecting to make that pass for a beauty which was really a deformity. However, the women all followed her example; and this ridiculous custom is so thoroughly established that to have feet of the natural size is enough to render them contemptible.
Chinese folklore attributed the origin of footbinding to a fox who tried in this way to conceal its paws while assuming the human guise of the Shang empress mentioned by Du Halde. And, as the story goes, the imperially-favored fox then set a palace fashion. A similar version alleged that the empress, who had a clubfoot, persuaded her timid spouse to make the compression of feet obligatory for young girls. This enabled the empress to set forth her deformity as a model of beauty and elegance. Scholars attributed the start of footbinding to various later dynasties. They relied largely on veiled classical poetic or prose references, but failed to resolve the persisting problem as to whether the references were to bound or merely small feet. Small feet had been esteemed in China since antiquity, but prior to the tenth century there was no verifiable proof that feet were bound. Even as late as the Tang dynasty, as it was stated in one history of the period, women of the upper class wore dress and shoes in imitation of their husbands. This statement is partially borne out by figurines of the period, which show that both men and women wore a court shoe which resembled a boat with a high prow.
The available evidence for the T’ang weighs heavily against footbinding. Women depicted in eighth and ninth century paintings are robust and vigorous physical types without the slightest hint of needing support or of walking with a hobbled gait. Primary references make it clear that T’ang ladies were encouraged to engage in many athletic events requiring strenuous physical exertion, such as horseback riding, polo, and ball kicking, which were much better suited for a natural-footed participant. Polo and ball kicking were also popular among palace ladies, which would not have been so if tiny feet had already become an imperial harem vogue. The story was told of an old lady at Ma-wei who displayed a tiny shoe of Yang Kuei-fei’s (d.756) after her death, but this version was a late Sung fabrication. The earlier account said instead that the consort’s stocking was shown to curiosity seekers at Ma-wei for a fixed price. This again, as Lin Yutang points out, is evidence that Consort Yang had natural feet, and there is nothing in the historical details of her life which might lead us to believe otherwise. Futher-more, a late-eighth-century manual written by a palace lady gave detailed instructions to women of the time on how to sit, walk, and behave properly, and in so doing gave no indication that any of its intended readers might be hampered in movement by compressed feet.
Chang Pang-chi, a commentator who lived in the early twelfth century, made an unequivocal reference to footbinding. He stated that the practice was a recent one and that former allegations about its much earlier origins were contrary to fact. He cited a reference, no longer extant, to the effect that footbinding had begun during the Southern T’ang dynastic rule of sovereign-poet Li Yu (r.961-75), a ruler who controlled one region of a divided China prior to reunification by the Sung. According to the reference, Li Yu had a favored palace concubine named Lovely Maiden who was a slender-waisted beauty and a gifted dancer. He had a six-foot-high lotus constructed for her out of gold; it was decorated lavishly with pearls and had a carmine lotus carpel in the center. Lovely Maiden was ordered to bind her feet with white silk cloth to make the tips look like the points of a moon sickle. She then danced in the center of the lotus, whirling about like a rising cloud.
The construction of a lotus out of gold represented an old if little-known palace tradition, begun in about 500 A.D. by an emperor of Northern Ch’i. The emperor had his Favored Consort P’an walk on top of the golden structure and said in admiration that she was giving rise to lotuses with every step. The “golden lotus” which became a euphonious term for bound feet was therefore originally a special apparatus on which palace dancers walked and later danced. The making of a lotus out of gold may have been in imitation of Indian tradition, for the fifth-century pilgrim Fa Hsien stated in his travel account that an Indian king made one in honor of an assemblage of priests. The Buddhist pilgrim Hsuan Tsang (596-664) recorded an Indian tale about a deer lady which probably supplied the ideological basis behind the construction of a golden lotus in the Chinese palace. A Rishi was once bathing in a pure stream, said Hsuan Tsang, when a roe-deer who had come there to drink conceived and brought forth a female child. She was beautiful beyond human measure, but she had the feet of a deer. The Rishi adopted her as his child. One day she walked to the hut of another Rishi; wherever her feet trod, she left the impressions of lotus flowers upon the ground. Soothsayers predicted that she would bear a thousand sons; this she did, with each child seated on one leaf of a thousand-leafed lotus flower. It seems likely that this Indian tale was known in the Northern Ch’i court and that the monarch constructed the lotus so that his consort might visually represent the heroine. The popularity of the story may have stemmed from its emphasis on fecundity, and its enactment may have been restricted at first to the imperial harem, as were, for example, special dances in the T’ang period. The story should have been known to Li Yu, reigning in south China more than four centuries afterwards. He therefore may have had his consort bind her feet to represent more faithfully the traditional theme, in which the feet of the beautiful child remained those of an animal and would have been disguised. The consort’s feet may have been bound in a special way to portray the moon over the lotus in dramatic artistic form. Chinese folklore may have adopted the dim outlines of the Indian story to explain the origin of footbinding, replacing the deer with a beautiful fox in human guise. In both instances the feet alone failed to assume human shape.
Twelfth-century writer Chang Pang-chi revealed that, while footbinding had begun in the Five Dynasties period, it was infrequent until the end of the eleventh century. However, by his day (ca.1130) it had become so widely imitated that people were ashamed not to practice it. The custom probably started in the imperial harem in a way similar to that described above, at the end of the T’ang or in the interim period preceding the Sung, at a time when there were myriad trained dancers in the empire. The palace may have, in effect, started a vogue for a special and artistic dancing effect achieved through footbinding which slowly set the fashion for the rest of the Chinese world. The early connection with dancing was unmistakable; we know, for instance, that while Li Yu’s favored danseuse bound her feet in the new moon style, his empress was natural-footed. The pre-Sung binding must have been only slightly constricting in contrast with the much more rigorous later application, which crippled women so that walking could be accomplished only with difficulty. After the Sung, increasingly tighter binding led to stagnation of the art of dancing and its virtual disappearance.The early association of tiny bowed shoes with dancing is further corroborated by a statement in the Sung dynastic history. When a pair of tiny bowed shoes was brought into the palace in 1064, a court official in attendance asked of what use such dancing shoes were to his prince. It was from the early twelfth century onward that such shoes acquired a more general use. “Perhaps the style of shoe in the tenth century required excessively small feet, and the dancer’s solution of the problem was rapidly and widely adopted by other women.” Adoption at first, however, was neither wide nor rapid; there was a gradual evolution from the palace dancer to the upper classes and finally down to the masses, in a north to south geographical direction.