The Manchus were opposed to footbinding from the start. But during their centuries of rule, attempts at eradication were sporadic and unsuccessful; the custom continued to grow in popularity. A detailed Western description of how footbinding flourished in the decades before organized opposition to it got under way is recorded in The Chinese Repository, an early-nineteenth-century journal of sinological scholarship and missionary observation. One writer stated that in 1835 it prevailed more or less throughout the entire empire, but only among the Chinese. It was socially sanctioned; a majority of women in the large towns and cities, as well as in “the most fashionable parts of the country,” had their feet compressed. The writer estimated that five to eight out of every ten females had bound feet, depending on locality. He reports that the process began in infancy, with a tendency towards applying the bindings more tightly and rigorously as one went up the social scale. Ladies of rank and fashion might be rendered quite unable to walk. “The effects of this process are extremely painful. Children will often tear away the bandages in order to gain relief from the torture; but their temporary removal, it is said, greatly increases the pain by causing a violent revulsion of the blood to the feet.” Women in Canton and vicinity who could avoid it seldom appeared outside the confines of their homes, except in sedan chairs. However, since such seclusion was impossible for members of the poorer classes, in order to walk any considerable distance they had to rely on a stick or the shoulder of a matron or servant. “In walking, the body is bent forwards at a considerable inclination, in order to place the centre of gravity over the feet; and the great muscular exertion required for preserving the balance is evinced by the rapid motion of the arms, and the hobbling shortness of the steps.” The remainder of the article consisted of a paper written by a surgeon to Guy’s Hospital named Bransby Blake Cooper read before the Society on March 5, 1829. Doctor Cooper medically analyzed a bound foot amputated from a woman’s corpse which had been found floating in the river at Canton; it had been sent to England for scientific evaluation.
While footbinding started solely as a Chinese custom, some Manchu ladies imitated it in defiance of official decree; upper-class Korean women also practiced a less severe form of foot compression. Professor Francis L. K. Hsu, writing in 1953 about a former Jewish colony in Honan, said that these Jews had lived like Chinese, using Chinese forms of their Hebrew names:
". . . and their elderly women, like their Chinese sisters, had bound feet.” Non-Chinese peoples living in China such as the Mongols, Tibetans, Hakka, and Miao were natural-footed, as were most Mohammedans in Kansu Province. But Mohammedans who moved elsewhere often bound their feet in imitation of the Chinese. The Hakka, originally from Shansi and Honan, gradually moved southward from the late ninth century onward; the fact that their women never had other than natural feet is evidence that footbinding was little practiced, if at all, in these northern areas during the late Tang and Sung periods.
The difference in the extent to which footbinding was adhered to in China depended largely on social class. Women of the poorer classes, such as those who worked in the fields, were often barefooted; in areas such as Kwangtung and Kwei-chow, meticulous footbinding was associated with families of wealth and eminence. A tiny-footed concubine in Kwangtung was politely referred to as “aunt,” but if natural-footed she was derisively called “bare foot” and was not allowed to wear socks and slippers until after one of her sons married. The best “lotus” specimens in this area tended to be round and so short that they could be placed on a small dish. There were both tiny and natural-footed Cantonese prostitutes; the large-footed came from poor village families. The domestic who attended to boudoir needs was usually tiny-footed and attractive looking, in contrast to the homely servant who performed manual tasks.
Footbinding was uncommon in that part of Kiangsu Province north of the Yangtze River, villages in Kwangsi and Szechwan Province, northern Anhwei, Kiangsi, Fukien, Hunan, and parts of Hupei and Chekiang. But in northern provinces like Suiyuan, Chahar, Shensi, Shansi, Honan, and Hopei, footbinding still flourished as late as the first two decades of the twentieth century. The women in Shansi and Shensi provinces and vicinity reputedly had the smallest feet in China:
I have wandered about everywhere. The places which have the smallest feet, still capable of being walked upon, are undoubtedly Lanchow in Shensi Province and Ta-t’ung in Shansi Province. The feet of Lanchow women are three inches at the most or less than three inches.
Another who traveled through Honan and Shensi in the Manchu era noted that even women of the lowest classes there, such as beggars and water carriers, had tiny and regular feet which pointed upwards like water chestnuts. These remarks were equally valid for the period before the revolutionary insistence on change achieved effect. Ta-t’ung women were known for their tiny feet as early as the Ming, and a lotus style emerged which consisted of being slender, small, pointed, bowed, fragrant, soft, and regular. Perfume was used in the washing; however, this failed to blunt the criticism of a southern apologist about the odoriferousness of northern women:
Northern women have three offensive odors. They like to eat onions, so their breath is offensive. They don’t wash their private parts, so these are offensive. And they don’t wash their feet, so their feet are offensive.
To reinforce his last remark, the critic mentioned the experience of his friend, a Mr. Yang, who was once sitting beside a northern prostitute.
The prostitute suddenly placed her lotus hooks on Yang’s knees, and he inhaled such a strong odor that he hurriedly put them down. She did this again, almost causing him to go into a faint. The odoriferousness of the seldom-washed bound foot must have been repugnant to all but the confirmed lotus lover, for it was made a part of the Chinese language in the form of a popular saying about a Mrs. Wang’s binding cloth being both long and smelly.
The women in several counties in southern Suiyuan were alleged to be fanatically devoted footbinding enthusiasts. They opposed prohibitionists and surreptitiously continued the practice in defiance of governmental decree even in the early nineteen-thirties. They dressed rather shabbily but went in for elegant shoe adornment. Women almost always made their own shoes and worked on them diligently; very few were sold commercially. Red and green were the preferred colors; white was used only on shoes to be worn at funerals or to indicate mourning. It was concluded that while these Suiyuan women did not dare publicly to advocate footbinding, those in average and wealthy families were still striving to keep the custom alive.
Inoue Kobai, a Japanese observer who compiled a three-volume study of Chinese customs, described the presence of foot-binding in Shanghai and vicinity during 1919 and 1920. Mr. Inoue apologized in his preface for having been prejudiced in favor of the five pleasures of eating, drinking, gambling, opera, and prostitution. He said that footbinding had declined more because of the effect of the Revolution than the efforts of foreign missionaries. He alleged that poor parents in Yangchow, famed from antiquity as a center of beauty, still hoped that by compressing a daughter’s feet they could sell her later for greater profit. Inoue noted that tiny shoes of Yangchow were extremely pointed and widely admired for their superlative beauty.