Why do Chinese women have the habit of wrapping their feet?

The traditional Chinese women's foot-wrapping has always been taken as a proof of feudalism's persecution of women. In fact, open the history books, it is not difficult to find, in the history of resolutely resisting women's foot-wrapping are those with strong charisma of the Taoist, foot-wrapping, this has been in the history of countless women's evil custom is really a folk circulating beauty techniques, rather than rituals. It is the Confucianists who have always opposed the practice of foot-binding for women, and who have always advocated the practice of Confucianism.

The custom of foot-binding for women in China began in the late Tang Dynasty, centuries after the Han Dynasty's exclusive respect for Confucianism. According to historical records, the originator was the late Tang Dynasty's fallen emperor, Li Houzhu, who was addicted to wine and sex, and who admired the way women with small feet walked, and from then on, the custom of wrapping women's feet in small packages spread.

To the Ming and Qing Dynasty, foot-binding became a trend, the Qing Dynasty, Shunzhi two years and three years of Kangxi had twice banned, but ultimately could not beat the traditional habits, spinning ban spinning relaxation, and even the Qing Dynasty women have been sinicized, wearing a thin gold lotus square. This situation shows that traditional women's foot-binding is not a directive of the ruler, much less a norm of Confucian etiquette.

"Zhouyi Dazhuan" Qian Gua "Xiangzhuan": "Tian Xingjian, the gentleman to self-improvement." This means that the heavens, with their sun, moon and stars, run day after day, year after year, never stopping, displaying immense energy and unrivaled strength. Generally used to refer to the positioning of the social image of men. Zhouyi Dazhuan" Kun Gua "Xiangzhuan" "the earth is Kun, the gentleman to the virtue of carrying things." It means that the "earth" loads all things with its boundless bosom, and nourishes all living beings with all its resources. It is generally used to refer to the social image of women. "Heaven and earth are two of the largest objects in nature, and the "Systematic Rhetoric" says, "The great virtue of heaven and earth is birth." According to this theory of the complementarity of yin and yang, a woman's body is crippled, which also affects the health of her children and the quality of the nation's population.

For example, the Southern Song Dynasty rationalist Henan Cheng Yi, when he was alive, did not allow women in his family to wrap their feet; after his death, the family honored their ancestral teachings, and also has not allowed women to wrap their feet. Historically, the Ming and Qing governments ordered many times that women should not have their feet wrapped, and the emperors married women who did not have their feet wrapped as consorts, especially Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang's Empress Ma, who was the most famous of the Ming Dynasty. Empress Ma herself did not wrap the feet, once personally authorized the imperial "internal training", as the textbook of women's studies to regulate women's behavior, Zhu Yuanzhang even issued an edict expressly prohibiting foot binding. However, many orders did not solve the problem, and later the Qing government had to prohibit Manchu women from wrapping their feet, fearing that Manchu women would be influenced by Han Chinese women to wrap their feet, which would harm their health. Therefore, the phenomenon of traditional women's foot-binding still needs to be analyzed in depth. Whether it is due to the mutilation of women by ritualism or the poisoning of women by the secular beauty standards concocted by popular culture is worth analyzing.

Why was the ban on foot-binding reiterated so many times during the Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang periods, and why was the heyday of foot-binding in China's history during the Qing Dynasty? It is not enough to explain this phenomenon by cosmetic surgery alone. "Women's behavior, not out of the door," it should be said that the Qing Dynasty Han people on the style of foot-binding "carry forward", is a resistance to the Manchurian Qing Dynasty to maintain the Han nationality "temperament" and personality of the efforts. In the early years of the Qing Dynasty, who want to respond to the new dynasty "benevolent policy", for women to put feet, there may be "traitor" suspicion, these history books are recorded.

Additionally, when it comes to foot-binding, the beauty of small feet is probably similar to the popular beauty pageants, and modern women wear high heels, and fashionable beauties like breast augmentation and slimming and other self-sabotaging behaviors seem to be more similar. For example, the novel "Dream of the Red Chamber" depicts a typical upper-class feudal family, which depicts a large number of women, but there is almost no depiction of how to wrap small feet. There is almost no depiction of women's foot-binding in any of the classical Chinese texts. From this, it is not difficult to conclude that the phenomenon of small-footed women in Chinese history originated from the influence of popular culture, and was a product of folk aesthetic standards, which can also be said to be a kind of folk custom. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, with the appeal of more and more educated people, with the deepening of the women's liberation movement, the ugly custom of foot-binding began to be rejected during the Republic of China.