When I started collecting straw sandals, it did not dawn on me that I would become involved in Chinese shoes for bound feet. After all, straw sandals were the shoes of the farmers, peasants and a few monks living alone in the mountains.  Shoes for bound feet were for the elite families who could afford to bind their daughters’ feet, i.e. the wealthy folks along with courtesans and concubines, or so I thought.  Then I found a pair of straw shoes on-line that were very clearly shaped like shoes for bound feet.  These shoes were probably not from poor farm families or rural peasants.  Several different types of materials were used, which would have been costly, and these shoes exhibited multiple layers of high quality weaving.  I set them aside because I simply did not understand where they fit into the footwear from China.  I did start reading about foot binding in Chinese culture and history.  It was after reading several books by Dorothy Ko, a history professor at Columbia University, that I began to understand more about these shoes, C16 in the collection, shown below.  Professor Ko has specialized in the history of women in Chinese culture and foot binding in particular.  The key lesson provided me by Dr. Ko is that during the roughly 1,000 years of foot binding in China, it changed over time in terms of who practiced it, how and where it was done, and the reasons why.  By the 19^th century people in rural areas including farm families were binding their daughters’ feet.  My seller estimated that the C16 shoes were made between 1850-1899.  Let me share with you a couple of additional insights from colleagues who have visited the collection.  My friend and fellow curator Ruixing Lu, about whom I have written on several occasions, told me that these shoes indeed belonged to a woman from a well-to-do family.  The quality of the weaving and materials used were not in reach of poor rural women.  He suggested that perhaps they had once belonged to the wife of a wealthy landowner.  Then recently, my colleague Ping Zhang visited, saw these shoes, and exclaimed “These are like my grandmother wore”.   He told me that she had lived in the south of China and that her family owned a number of fish ponds that made them wealthy.  And yes, she had bound feet, also confirming Ruixing’s conclusions.

As I mentioned in an earlier news post, I searched for woven sandals  and shoes from the Ladakh Region of Northern India for about five years without luck.  Then a chance conversation with my colleague Pierre Goloubinoff resulted in the first pair contributed to the SSP collection (Item I-4).  Wait until I tell you this next story involving Pierre.  The story begins on Sunday, July 28, 2013, when I received an email message from another friend, colleague and fellow world traveler, Phil Hooper.  His longtime friend Cynthia Hunt, founder of The Help Fund and HEALTH Inc, had sent him some pictures from Ladakh and Phil had forwarded them to me.  Phil recalled my interest in shoes from that region and Cynthia had lived and worked there for thirty years.  Among the images were hand crafted shoes made from straw and woven yak wool locally dyed.  Here are a few of the images (click on images to enlarge):

I immediately wrote back to Phil to say that I would love to have a pair of these shoes for the collection.  Yes, he would ask Cynthia about this possibility.  Here is where Pierre enters the story.  I knew that Pierre and his daughter were in Ladakh again that summer in and around the city of Leh, and he was keeping a watchful eye for woven shoes and sandals.  On Wednesday, July 31, Pierre sent me a brief message:  “Dear Larry,  I just found an hour ago in the market of Leh a couple of hand made straw shoes (bottom made of straw and the rest of yak wool) from a village in the Nubra valley, which is on the southernmost branch of the Silk Road….”   Could it possibly be?  I immediately sent Pierre the shoe image from Cynthia that Phil had sent me.  I noted in the message that “It seems to be a magical time for me linking to this part of the world!”  On Thursday morning, I opened my email page and there was Pierre’s reply:  “This is it exactly! I will bring them to Sheffield.  Hold your breath!”  Here are images of the shoes that Pierre found for me in one of the most remote regions of our planet:

To give you an idea of the size of the shoes, here are some dimensions:  For the sole, width across the heel is 7.3 cm, widest part, at the part where sole starts to turn up is 9.0 cm and the length is 37 cm.  The inside width at the heel is 6.0 cm and the useable length inside the shoe is 20 cm.

Here is a little information about the Nubra Valley, where these shoes were made.  Nubra is a  high altitude desert, essentially Tibetan Plateau, with an average altitude of 10,000 ft (about 3,000 meters).  Its capital of Diskit is about 150 km north of Leh, the capital of the Ladakh District, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, India. Most inhabitants of the valley speak the Nubra dialect or Nubra Skat and they are mostly Buddhists.  The land along the river beds is fertile and irrigated, producing a variety of grains, fruits and nuts.  Other parts of the valley present a forbidding landscape.  Interestingly, nomads and camaliers wore shoes turned up at the toes to ease walking in sand.  Perhaps this functionality is a source for the design of these remarkable shoes.

Another coincidence emerged as I prepared this news post, again involving Pierre.  During his visit along with his two daughters to Leh during the summer of 2013, he happened to walk into a Nepali cafe in the city, only to find a colleague from the cell stress and chaperones research field.  It was Wilbert Boelens from the Netherlands.  Wilbert visited the Nubra Valley during his touring in the Ladakh region and he took some remarkable photos.  I am very happy to present some of these images below with Wilbert’s permission:

Sand dunes on the floor of the Nubra Valley

Bactrian camels resting

Diskit Monastery

Statue of a giant Buddha on the valley floor