_FOOTBINDING._
Not a Mark of Rank.--Golden Lilies.--Hinds'
Feet.--Bandages drawn tighter.--Breaking the Bones.--A
Cleft in which to hide Half a Crown.--Mothers sleep with
Sticks beside them.--How many die.--How many have all
their Toes.--Feet drop off.--Pain till Death.--Typical
Cases.--Eczema, Ulceration, Mortification.--General
Health affected.
It is a popular error in England to suppose that binding the feet is a
mark of rank in China. In the west of China women sit by the roadside
begging with their feet bound. In the far north, where women do
field-labour, they do it, poor things! kneeling on the heavy clay
soil, because they cannot stand upon their poor mutilated feet.
Another popular error in England is that the custom was introduced in
order to prevent women from gadding about. Never in all the many
conversations I have had with Chinese upon this subject have I heard
this reason alleged or even hinted at, nor is it ever alluded to in
any of the Chinese literature upon the subject. The popular idea in
China is that Pʽan-fei, a favourite of the Emperor Ho-ti, of the Chi
Dynasty, whose capital was Nanking, was so beautiful that golden
lilies sprang out of the ground wherever she stepped; hence the name
of "golden lilies" for the hideous goatlike feet Chinamen so strangely
admire. Ho-ti is said to have so loved Pʽan-fei as to have had golden
lotus flowers strewn on her path for her to walk on. But there is
another tradition that Tʽan-ki, the wife of the last Emperor of the
Shang Dynasty, who in despair burned himself in his palace with all
his treasures in 1120 B.C.--that Tʽan-ki was the introducer of these
strange feet. She seems to have been a semi-mythical character--a
changeling, with "hinds' feet" covered with hair. So she wound
bandages round them, and wore lovely little fairy shoes, and every one
else tried to follow suit. But to come to later and somewhat more
historic times, a King of the Sung Dynasty, A.D. 970, had a favourite
wife Niao-niang, whom he used to like to see posing or dancing upon
golden lotus flowers. And to make her feet look more lovely she used
to tie strips of coloured satin round them, till they resembled a
crescent moon or a bent bow; and thus the fashion began, some say.
[Illustration: CHINESE ROMAN CATHOLICS OF MANY GENERATIONS.
_By Mrs. Archibald Little._]
It is obvious, however, that a nation that has not stockings naturally
takes to bandaging its feet, and that so doing, quite without
intending it, it is very easy to alter the shape of the feet by
binding them ever a little tighter, as many a European lady has done
with her waist. Chinese civilisation being very ancient and
conservative, abuses there go on increasing, and become exceptionally
exaggerated. The Chinese are also as a nation curiously callous to
suffering either in themselves or others, not taking pleasure in the
infliction of it, as is the case with some more highly strung natures,
but strangely indifferent to it. In all probability at first women
simply bandaged their feet somewhat tightly. And just as a man in
Europe used a little while ago to attach especial importance to a
woman's being well shod and to the turn of her ankle, so did a Chinese
man, till in the course of a thousand years we have arrived at the
present abortions with a two-and-a-half-inch measurement, as also at
all these stories of long dead and gone empresses and lotus flowers.
The method of binding and the period of beginning naturally differ
somewhat over the whole extent of this vast empire. In the west
binding seems generally to begin at six years old. In the east it is
generally from five to seven, or at the latest at eight, years of age.
Tsai, the good-natured Governor of Shanghai, when I met him there at a
dinner party at our Chief Justice's, looked across the table at me,
and said in his somewhat humorous, jerky voice, "I know what you want
to talk to me about. You want to talk to me about footbinding. It is
very hard, is it not? The poor little things have but two years to
run." So that it would seem as if in his part of the country or in his
own family binding began earlier. In the east of China the bandage is
said to be of strong white cotton-cloth, two yards long and about
three inches wide; and I have generally seen a two yards long bandage.
The cloth is drawn as tightly as the child can bear, leaving the great
toe free, but binding all the other toes under the sole of the foot,
so as to reduce the width as much as possible, and eventually to make
the toes of the left foot peep out at the right side and the toes of
the right foot at the left side of the foot, in both cases coming from
underneath the sole. Each succeeding day the bandage is tightened both
morning and night; and if the bones are refractory, and spring back
into their places on the removal of the bandage, sometimes a blow is
given with the heavy wooden mallet used in beating clothes; and
possibly it is, on the whole, kinder thus to hasten operations.
Directly after binding, the little girl is made to walk up and down on
her poor aching feet, for fear mortification should at once set in.
But all this is only during the first year. It is the next two years
that are the terrible time for the little girls of China; for then the
foot is no longer being narrowed, but shortened, by so winding the
bandages as to draw the fleshy part of the foot and the heel close
together, till it is possible to hide a half-crown piece between them.
It is, indeed, not till this can be done that a foot is considered
bound. During these three years the girlhood of China presents a most
melancholy spectacle. Instead of a hop, skip, and a jump, with rosy
cheeks like the little girls of England, the poor little things are
leaning heavily on a stick somewhat taller than themselves, or carried
on a man's back, or sitting sadly crying. They have great black lines
under their eyes, and a special curious paleness that I have never
seen except in connection with footbinding. Their mothers mostly sleep
with a big stick by the bedside, with which to get up and beat the
little girl should she disturb the household by her wails; but not
uncommonly she is put to sleep in an outhouse. The only relief she
gets is either from opium, or from hanging her feet over the edge of
her wooden bedstead, so as to stop the circulation.
[Illustration: WOMAN'S NATURAL FOOT, AND ANOTHER WOMAN'S FEET BOUND TO
6 INCHES.
_By Dr. E. Garner._]
[Illustration: WOMAN'S NATURAL FOOT, AND ANOTHER WOMAN'S FEET BOUND TO
4½ INCHES.
_By Dr. E. Garner._]
The Chinese saying is, "For each pair of bound feet there has been a
whole _kang_, or big bath, full of tears"; and they say that one girl
out of ten dies of footbinding or its after-effects. When I quoted
this to the Italian Mother Superior at Hankow, who has for years been
head of the great Girls' School and Foundling Establishment there, she
said, with tears in her eyes, "Oh no, no! that may be true of the
coast towns." I thought she was going to say it would be a gross
exaggeration in Central China; but to my horror she went on, "But more
here--more--more." Few people could be in a better position to judge
than herself; for until this year the little girls under her charge
have regularly had their feet bound. As I have understood, there the
bandages were only tightened once a week. The children were, of
course, exempted from all lessons on those days; and the Italian
Sister who had to be present suffered so much from witnessing the
little girls' sufferings that she had to be continually changed, no
Italian woman being able to endure the pain of it week after week. Of
course, the only reason they bound the children's feet was from
anxiety about finding husbands for them in after-life, and from fear
of parents not confiding their children to them unless they so far
conformed to Chinese custom. But this year the good Mother has at last
decided that public opinion has been sufficiently developed to make it
possible for her to dispense with these hateful bandages. "Do you
suppose I like them?" she said, the last time I saw her. "Always this
question of new shoes of different sizes, according as the feet are
made smaller; always more cotton-cloth being torn into bandages: the
trouble it all entails is endless--simply endless." This was a point
of view I had never considered. But it is a comfort to think the good
Mother is delivered from it; for she wrote to me in the spring of 1898
that she knew I should be glad to hear fifty little girls had just
been unbound, and no more girls were to have their feet bound under
her care.
Dr. Reifsnyder, the lady at the head of the Margaret Williamson
Hospital at Shanghai, says toes often drop off under binding, and not
uncommonly half the foot does likewise. She tells of a poor girl's
grief on undoing her bandage--"Why, there is half my foot gone!" and
how she herself had said to her that, with half her foot, and that
half in good condition, she would be much better off than those around
her. And so it has turned out. This girl walks better than most
others. Her feet had been bound by a cruel mother-in-law; and,
according to Dr. Reifsnyder, of all cruel people a Chinese
mother-in-law is the cruelest to the daughter-in-law under her
keeping. The foot of another daughter-in-law, she knew, dropped off
entirely under the process of binding. Another error, Dr. Reifnysder
points out, is that people often think that, after the first, binding
does not hurt. She had in her employ a woman fifty years old; and she
knew that, after standing more than usual, this woman's feet would
still bleed, as is not unnatural, when it is considered this woman,
weighing one hundred and forty pounds, stood up in shoes two and a
half inches long.
Dr. Macklin of Nanking, on my asking him what sort of cases he had
come across, he having the reputation of thinking many things more
pressing than unbinding the feet of the women of China, at once told
me of a little child of a poor family brought to his hospital with an
ulcer that had begun at the heel, caused by the bandages. When he
first saw the child, the ulcer extended half-way up to the knee; and
the child would have died of blood-poisoning in a few days, if she had
not been brought to him. Another of his cases ended more sadly. The
poor little girl was the granddaughter of an official, her father a
teacher. When only between six and seven, she was brought to the
hospital, both her feet already black masses of corruption. Her
relations would not allow her feet to be amputated; so in a few months
they dropped off. The stumps were a long time in healing, as the skin
was drawn back from the bone. The child was taken home, gradually
became weaker and weaker, and after a year and a half of suffering
died.
Dr. McCartney of Chungking mentions one case in which he was called in
to a little girl. When he removed the binding, he found both feet
hanging by the tendons only, with gangrene extending above the ankles.
Immediate amputation was at once necessary; but the unfortunate child
will have to go through life without feet. The mother of the child was
a confirmed opium-smoker, and her indifference had led to the result
indicated. The two greatest curses in China are, in his opinion,
opium-smoking and footbinding. Another case was an unmarried woman who
had paralysis in both legs. She was treated by removing the bandages
on her feet, by massage, and electric current. In less than a month
she was able to walk. Her trouble was caused by nothing more or less
than footbinding. He says the Chinese know nothing of the physiology
and anatomy of the human body; and this ignorance causes untold
suffering to the women and children of China. Footbinding has nothing
to recommend it but the dictates of a senseless fashion. Women with
small feet are unable to stand still, but are continually swaying and
taking short steps, like a person on tiptoe. He defies any Chinaman to
tell him there is not great pain and discomfort in footbinding.
Chinese women were disinclined to confess pain. To do so would be _pu
hao i-su_--indelicate. There is in a bound foot a space like that
between the closed fingers and the ball of the thumb. This space does
not touch the shoe, and is consequently soft and tender. Perspiration
gathers there, and, unless kept extremely clean, eczema results, and
finally ulceration and mortification. He had had several cases of
double amputation. From the time the feet were bound until death,
they caused pain and were liable to disease. Not only did these
serious local troubles exist, but others occurred in the internal
organs, and in many cases affected the offspring.
It would require a medical work to describe the various maladies more
or less directly traceable to binding. Let it suffice here to point
out that when a Chinese woman walks it is on her heel entirely, and to
suggest that the consequent jar to the spine and the whole body is
very likely the cause of the internal maladies of women, so general,
if not universal, in those regions where binding is generally
practised. Lady doctors have already observed that in certain parts of
China where binding is universal, whatever disease a woman may come to
the hospital for, she is always afflicted with some severe internal
trouble; whereas in those parts where only a few bind, it is rare to
find these same maladies.