Teacup Feet

Reeve 2408
Attribution License by otisarchives3

World War I era photo of Chinese woman’s feet from the Otis Historical Archives at the National Museum of Health & Medicine in Washington, D.C.

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This entry (permalink) was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 11:45 PM by dgc and categorized in China.

  • http://chinayouren.com/eng Uln

    Man, its awful. It is the first time I see such a clearpicture of the results. There is probably quite a few older women still alive with the binded feet, would be interesting to interview the last ones before they are all gone.

    See also this link for some explanations and pics.
    http://proto5.thinkquest.nl/~lle0016/bindedfeet.html

  • http://ya.iyee.cn Yee

    haha, there are many interesting stories about the old time Chinese women’s small feet, one popular saying is the binded feet limit the freedom of women but in the mean time will train the vagina because they have to walk very careful to keep balance.

  • huaizhen

    小脚，也叫“三寸金莲”

    裹足是封建时代对女子的一种束缚，女子不能走上社会、不可抛头露面，这样就实现了男人对女人的完全占有和控制。裹足真是一种变态的审美。民国后提倡放足，逐渐绝迹。

  • http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/ China Business Success

    This is awful to see, thinking about the many women who had to suffer for tradition. I think it’s a cruel and useless. I’m happy that times have changed and that there aren’t more women who have binded feet, at least I hope so. When women are forced to do something like this, they can’t turn it back and repair the damage that has been done. And the women have to suffer the consequences and for what?

  • http://www.tctype.com Chinamatt

    When I was in Malacca, Malaysia, there was a shop that made shoes for bound feet–the owner said they were for decoration only. He had some pretty horrific photos too.

  • http://chicanohek.blogspot.com Hek

    Yo! While it does make my stomach churn just to look at the picture, can you imagine what the feet must look like if you were to remove the shoes and bandages!

    Hek

  • John H
  • John H

    Google “X-ray of bound feet” and you will get all the images of x-rays, diagrams, photos of bound feet, etc. you wish.

    You might want to look into how “reforming” the feet was done in practice.

    Sadly, there are still some ignoramuses who beleve that this is commonly practiced in China today.

  • ralfdh

    Public TV here in Germany r(arte) ecently showed film of Chinese women with these feet moving about and I must say it looked absolutely astonishing, not at all horrible (cannot remember the date exactly, ca. 1910s, from the famous Kahn collection) .

  • Charles Liu

    What’s equally grotesque is historical photos of once-fashionable waist cinching by western wemen, also result of male-centric notion of beauty. Anyone has x-ray of cinched waist?

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