The Shoes Fit, but Feet Grow Rare

Death has already claimed many of the Zhiqiang Shoe Factory’s loyal customers. With more likely to succumb in the next decade or two, the company has had to think creatively to stay in business.

But as long as there are clients who need them, the factory plans to manufacture the products for which it is known: the tiny shoes worn by women whose feet were bound as young girls.

Across China, the number of such women is diminishing by the year. Most are in their 80s and 90s, their very bodies serving as reminders of a bygone era in the world’s most populous nation.

For centuries such women were toasted as the epitome of feminine beauty and allure. Then they were scorned as the embodiment of backward, feudal thinking. Now they’re the object of study by sociologists, physicians and historians.

But to Du Guanghua, such women are flesh and bone, however disfigured. They still need to get around, and she is determined to keep them well-shod.

“We don’t make much money from it,” said Du, the boss at Zhiqiang. “We’re doing this now more as a contribution to society.”

Her company is among the last in China to manufacture such shoes. Most other cobblers, seeing only dwindling returns in a dying market, either scrapped that part of their business long ago or switched to selling the slippers as daintily embroidered souvenirs rather than as footwear.

The Zhiqiang factory has watched demand plummet for “little shoes,” as the Chinese call them, by nearly two-thirds in 10 years. It now clears a mere 700 pairs a year, most of them destined for customers here in northeastern China, but some for women elsewhere. “People from other provinces come to put in orders because they know of this factory,” Du said.

In Tianjin, southeast of Beijing, a shoemaker that has been around for nearly a century sells about 20,000 pairs annually but also has suffered a steep drop in business.

The market almost certainly will vanish within the next two decades, and the deaths of the women who wore such miniature slippers will close a chapter of social history that lasted a thousand years and still fascinates people.

Books have been written about the phenomenon, which involved wrapping young girls’ feet to restrict their growth. A Columbia University professor devotes a class to the subject. A few years ago, the discovery of a village in Yunnan province with 300 elderly women with bound feet made headlines, especially after they were found to enjoy disco dancing and playing croquet.

But foot-binding is a topic that many Chinese approach with reluctance and embarrassment, preferring to forget what seems a shameful legacy of their imperial past.

The government is highly sensitive to anything that might tarnish China’s image as a modern country, and women with bound feet seem too apt a metaphor for the encrusted ideals and practices that crippled this society in the early 20th century and impeded progress.

It took American academic Pam Cooper several years to overcome the suspicion of her contacts in China when she tried to track down women with bound feet for interviews during the mid-1990s.

“I knew it would be somewhat of a struggle,” said Cooper, who teaches at Northwestern University. “I was surprised that even my friends at the Chinese University of Hong Kong were reluctant to talk about it or put me in touch with people.”

The prevailing attitude, Cooper said, was “it’s past; move ahead; just forget about it.”

Once she found the women, however, they were eager to share stories that even their own children and grandchildren had never heard--stories of the pain involved in foot-binding, but also of pride in the beauty they felt they achieved.

It was a beauty, of course, defined by men. “It’s the same in every culture,” Cooper said. “There’s a standard of beauty, and whoever’s in power gets to determine that. And generally it’s men in power.”

Exactly when foot-binding began in China remains shrouded in mystery. The custom existed at least as early as the 10th century. One story tells of an emperor enchanted by a concubine with small feet who danced atop a lotus-shaped platform, which set off the foot-binding craze and gave such feet the nickname of “golden lotuses.”

Other sources say that “golden lotuses” refer to the shape of the feet themselves, a curled-up form achieved only after years of binding with strips of cloth wound tight enough to break the bones, bend the foot and stunt growth.

Binding began for girls as young as 5 or 6, a tradition passed from mother to daughter. The bandages would fold down the four small toes toward the sole of the foot and force the heel inward, exaggerating the arch. The process was excruciating. Flesh would rot. Girls wept in agony, sometimes unable to eat or drink or think because of the pain.

But at a time when their only value was as a marriageable asset, the girls had no choice.

“Of course it was painful,” said Wang Yixian, 78, casting back to her girlhood in Shandong province. “If you didn’t bind your feet, you couldn’t find a husband.”

Many Chinese men found the feet highly erotic, in part because women’s feet were never exposed and were considered the most private part of their anatomy.

A successfully bound foot was, astonishingly, just 3 to 4 inches long. Walking was difficult; women swayed from side to side, which in flowing robes also evoked the image of lotuses in the wind.

Reformers during the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing, tried more than once to ban the practice but failed. Only after the Communists swept into power in 1949 was foot-binding abolished.

Women who had their feet bound for most of their lives were told to stop as well, though their feet remained deformed. What they once were told was beautiful had become ridiculed as repulsive. Women who had endured pain to match male ideals of beauty were suddenly objects of derision--again by men. In either case, the women were powerless.

“I was a child and had no control when my feet were bound, and I had no control when I was told to unbind them,” Cooper’s interview subjects told her angrily.

The outlawed practice apparently had lasting health effects on women whose feet had once been bound. A 1997 study in the American Journal of Public Health showed that they were more likely to fall and were at greater risk for hip and spine fractures.

Although the custom seems cruel and barbaric to modern sensibilities, scholars note that in the West, some women buy shoes too small in order to appear more attractive and subject themselves to wearing high heels. And in some versions of the fairy tale of Cinderella, the ugly stepsisters mutilate their feet to fit the glass slipper.

In China, finding shoes that fit has become more difficult for the women whose feet were bound. “The great majority of these women are probably still making these shoes for themselves or wearing children’s shoes,” said Du, the head of the Zhiqiang Shoe Factory here in Harbin.

Zhiqiang’s “little shoes” are not of the tiniest variety, the ones designed for women whose feet are barely 4 inches in length. The company’s smallest slippers, about 7 inches long and 2 1/2 inches wide, can still fit in a man’s hand.

The company employs one worker who makes each pair individually, stitching plain black cloth to rubber soles for a soft but sturdy shoe reminiscent of the Mary Janes worn by American girls.

There is no ornate embroidery or anything colorful, partly because the women have no desire to call attention to something that for most Chinese bespeaks a shameful, primitive past.

“Now everybody has big feet,” said Wang, who moved from Shandong to Harbin more than 50 years ago. “Only old people have small feet.”

Wang owns eight pairs of shoes put out by Zhiqiang--four for summer wear and four wool-lined ones for winter. Her children buy them when they can, to build up a reserve for Wang in case production one day ceases.

Zhiqiang long ago stopped relying on the small slippers to keep it in business. Revenue from the sale of little shoes is minuscule. At the department store down the street, the slippers sell for about $3 a pair; the factory’s profit is a fraction of that.

The company, a collective enterprise with about 20 employees, has since branched out into producing regular-sized shoes for men and women.

How much longer does Du expect to go on making shoes for women whose feet were bound?

“At most 10 years,” she said, then added: “And that’s being generous.”