The two ladies (10, 11) from Lukang, Taiwan, were in such fundamental agreement that it is possible to get the following composite picture from their testimony. It was generally best to start when the child was five or six years old, for the feet were still small and soft. This was also the age when the child was beginning to think of being pretty. Pain was endured more easily at a later age. At first, only a white cloth was wrapped around the foot to prevent its growth. When a little more than ten years of age, the child’s foot was bound tightly for the first time, and the bandage was made increasingly tighter. By the age of about fifteen, pain was frequently felt. If the foot was not constantly bound, it could easily get larger, even when the girl was in her teens.
One of the areas most renowned for tiny feet was Ta-t’ung in Shansi Province, a stronghold of conservatism and tradition. Footbinding there started when the child was about five or six years old, with bones neither too soft nor too hard. The parents chose an auspicious day, burned incense, and prayed for good fortune. Before beginning, the belly of a lamb was sometimes cut open, and both of the girl’s feet were forced into it. The lamb cried out piteously and soon expired, but the girl’s feet were kept in its belly for about two hours. The child invariably cried aloud because of the fright and pain. The feet were then removed, with the fresh blood dripping from them, and bound at once with white silk by an old woman who specialized in this. She was finished in three or four minutes, while the feet still felt the softening effect of the hot blood. Neighbors then came by to offer congratulatory toasts. The girl lay down and didn’t get up for a week, by which time the feet, minus one layer of skin which had peeled away, had to be rebound.
G. Could you walk unaided with bound feet; was it painful?
The ability to walk was directly influenced by the tightness of the binding. “If the binding was let out a little when you started, you could walk.” (6) “If bound tightly, you couldn’t walk.” (9) Mrs. Feng (1) stated that one could walk without undue difficulty if the feet were bound well. “I started at three to have my feet bound and for the next five years rarely walked on them. The process was completed when I was eight years old, and from that time on they never hurt me.”
The first steps must have been the hardest. At the beginning I couldn’t walk. But I had to practice walking in my room, so that I could get used to it and it would not fell painful. (3)
When I started footbinding, I could’nt walk, for when I stood up it hurt. I had to sit down. A person’s support wasn’t needed, for I was later able to walk by holding on to the wall. I sat most of the day. My family were very good to me, and would take food in for me to eat. (7)
Walking was an absolute necessity for the girl reared in poorer circumstances: I had many household tasks to do, so I had to walk with my bound feet from the very start. I could walk by myself unaided, but at first not too far at any one time. I had to rest every once in a while and rub my feet. By the age of sixteen, I was completely used to walking. Women in the wealthy families, however, never did manual labor but only learned to sew and embroider. (5)
When going out or to parties, one usually walked with the support of maid servants, to show one’s nobility. (3)
At that time, a woman rarely left the gates of her home. If she did go out, she went in a sedan chair and rarely walked. (1)
Where was the pain felt? When I walked, I felt pain on the bottom of my toes. I walked on the heel of my foot because of the pain in my toes. (13)
Our two ladies from Lukang (10, 11), in central Taiwan, presented a detailed picture of how walking was influenced by the practice of footbinding. There was no hindrance to walking at first, because at the age of five or six a white cloth was merely wrapped around the foot to inhibit its growth. But after ten the binding was more tightly applied, causing pain to be felt. This pain could be alleviated by exposing one’s feet to the breeze. Some girls, at the age of eleven or twelve, had the feet compressed with bamboo tubing to prevent their getting larger; even though hampered by these contrivances, they were able to walk.
... at about fifteen, walking became a problem [to me] because of the tight binding. If I wanted to go out, someone had to help me get into a sedan chair. Because of this, women rarely went out. . . . One could walk, but not very steadily. . . . Most of a woman’s activities took place in either the home or garden; formerly women rarely walked on the streets, except for amahs or servants. (11)
But old ladies, or young ones whose feet were just then feeling the pain of tight binding, were supported by servants when they walked. I think footbinding was a painful and immoral thing. (10)
Matignon, the French doctor in China in the late nineteenth century, stated that footbinding produced a forced flection of the foot and caused the weight of the body to rest completely on the heel-bone. And because this point of support was inadequate, women had to use walking sticks as they became slightly advanced in age. They walked with their arms held lightly apart as if for balance, with their chests thrust forward and their pelvic region pushed backwards, as if they were pursuing their centers of gravity. Matignon said that they maintained an unstable equilibrium and, with heels together, might easily lose their balance. He was working in a Peking hospital one day when a woman about forty came to see him about her teeth. “At a given moment, wishing to make her incline her head slightly to the rear, I exercised pressure with my thumb vertically against her upper dental arch. The pressure was slight but sufficient to make my client fall over backwards.”
Our Nan-t’ung informant revealed that one cure for badly swollen feet was to immerse them in urine. This was supposed to bring quick relief. Another Taiwanese stated that when the foot was let out, it was immersed in urine, for in that way the foot did not feel too painful. (11) “When the Japanese sent down their order [outlawing footbinding in Taiwan], I began to let my feet out. I immersed them [for one week] in a jar of clear urine to soften the bones.” (7) This technique of soaking the feet in urine may have been fairly common in the Taiwanese countryside, as two other ladies corroborated this in discussions with our assistant in Lukang. There were also women in Hunan Province who soaked their feet daily in urine and then bound them tightly, believing this to be most efficacious.”
Urine was also used medicinally, both on the mainland and in Taiwan. A Taiwanese once told me that her mother was revived during a fainting spell in the 1930’s by being made to drink the urine of a young boy. A thirty-year-old friend from Peking said that when he was about seven and enrolled in a private school, someone asked him for’a specimen of his urine in order to cure an illness. He added that only the urine of boys was used. I interviewed sociologist Nagao Ryuzo on August 19, 1961, and questioned him briefly on this point. Mr. Nagao stated that the drinking of urine represented a very old tradition in China, and that, while living in Fengtien, Manchuria, he had never seen this done but had heard about it. A child’s urine was used, but he did not know which sex it was. He had never heard of soaking the feet in urine, but it was a general custom among the uneducated to wash cuts with it. A Chinese pharmaceutical treatise of the Ming dynasty indicated that urine was used in the following ways: it was efficacious in curing headaches, chills, blood spitting, various blood diseases, dog, snake, spider, and bee bites, cuts from wounds, and obstructions of the bowels. It also served as a demulcent medicine in alleviating cases of fatigue. The urine of boys under the age of twelve was best, and it was made more palatable by mixing with either cooked vegetables or soups. It sometimes cured supposedly incurable illnesses. Its quality was coolness, and therefore it was particularly effective in the treatment of fevers. An old lady of eighty was once seen who looked only half her age. When asked the reason, she replied that she had drunk urine daily for more than forty years. Its multiplicity of uses included that of being an underarm deodorant. The person with underarm odor was advised to wash his armpits several times daily with his own urine, heating it prior to application.