And the Tang Dynasty foot binding has a story about Yang Guifei, saying that Yang Guifei is plump, and the shape of her feet is smaller than that of ordinary people, so she walks with a thousand charms and graces, which is very cute. So for a while everyone imitated Yang Guifei's walking method, in order to make the effect better, they invented foot binding, through human intervention to make the feet not grow.
But the foot binding should be early, you have to use the cloth strip to bend the feet when the child's bones are not yet fully developed, and after the bones of the whole body are fixed, the cloth strips are untied, and the feet that grow out under such a bondage are deformed, but petite. However, it is conceivable that this kind of forced change of body shape will definitely make people suffer a lot, and sometimes the first foot binding fails, and the second foot binding will be carried out.
But the ancients regarded small feet as beautiful, and even Su Shi, Xin Zhiyi and others once wrote lyrics praising women's foot binding. In one of the four famous works, "Dream of the Red Chamber", there is a plot that describes Qingwen's small feet and walking without sound, in the book, the author describes Qingwen's feet with the word "lotus petals", which is an appreciation for the small feet of women.
In "Suiyuan Poetry", Yuan Ming also tells a story about foot binding. It is said that during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, there was a rich man in Hangzhou named Zhao Juntai, who wanted to buy a beautiful concubine to fill the façade, so he chose left and right, and chose a li family girl with a prominent appearance, and after being happily accepted into the palace, he found that this girl had some big feet, and Zhao Juntai immediately began to dislike her.
This also shows that the ancient people did attach great importance to foot binding, and women with large feet are easily disliked by people, and it is difficult to find a good marriage. However, the Qing Dynasty did not recognize the culture of foot binding, the Qing Dynasty royal family was Manchu, after the unification of the world, hoping that the Manchu culture could replace the Han culture as much as possible, so it ordered that women were forbidden to tie their feet.
Both emperors Taiji and Kangxi had ordered the abolition of the custom of women's foot binding, but at that time, people still regarded the three-inch golden lotus as beautiful, so few people obeyed this decree, and the law did not blame the public, and later it was not abolished. It was not until the end of the Qing Dynasty, when the two-thousand-year-long feudal rule was overthrown, that the Chinese people began to come into contact with advanced Western culture, and only then did the foot-binding customs be abolished again.
Since that time, the woman's feet have really been liberated, and it is only about a hundred years old. In 2006, British photographer Joe Farrell expressed curiosity about China's foot bindings, so he spent 13 years searching for the woman who had wrapped his feet in China, and finally found a 90-year-old man.
It is understood that the old man began to be foot-bound when she was about 7 years old, and at the age of 15, she married into a large local family, and in the 90 years of her life, no one except her husband had seen her feet. One of the reasons is because ancient China valued the virginity of women, and the most basic rule was not to expose the feet, and even her children never saw the mother's feet.
However, the bad habit of foot binding has now been completely abolished, and the 90-year-old man was the last person to wrap his feet in that year. Nowadays, people's appreciation level has changed greatly in this regard, paying attention to natural beauty, so women no longer have to suffer that kind of inhuman pain, and they no longer have to damage their bodies in order to cater to the level of appreciation of the public.