This past week (4/28/2011), I welcomed Ruixing Lu, Founding Curator of the Wuxi Chinese Blue Calico Museum, along with his wife Xiaoxuan Ji.  His daughter Lu Qi, who is studying financial mathematics, arranged our meeting at the University of Connecticut.  Curator Lu has contributed many of the shoes and sandals from Japan and China.  He found skilled weavers to make some of the China sandals specifically for the collection.  This is very special because it is clear proof that the skills of straw weaving of sandals still exist in China.

Here Ruixing and I are studying a woven shoe for bound feet (item C16) with Lu Qi acting as our translator.  I was particularly interested in his thoughts about this shoe since I was very surprised to find straw shoes made for bound feet in China.  In my mind I associated foot binding with the wealthy and privileged classes and with their access to the finest cloth and embroidery materials.  I think of straw shoes and sandals as footwear of the common people.  Ruixing carefully turned a shoe in his hands and felt its surfaces.  First he announced that these shoes are well over 100 years old, which confirms the seller’s information.  Then, he said that these shoes are worn and tell a story about their owner, who was a member of a wealthy family.  He  reached this conclusion based on the variety of materials that were used to create multiple layers and from the very fine weaving of the surface layer, which took many hours to complete.  I asked for his thoughts on why these shoes were much larger than the shoes for the golden lotus foot at roughly half the length of these.  He suggested that C16 possibly was made for a young girl in an early stage of binding and that this size shoe could accommodate a heavily bound foot in this transitional stage.  Finally, he looked directly into my eyes and said that if I were to divide my collection into three levels of quality and significance, this shoe would be in the top level.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of collecting is that it leads one in unexpected directions.  At least to this collector, straw shoe C16 represents a surprising link between the handicraft of straw weaving and the institution of foot binding, which existed in some form for roughly a thousand years in China, ending during the first half of the twentieth century.  This cries out for deeper study!

There is a new  gallery in the About>Present section of the website.  It is composed of images taken by Philip and Elizabeth Hooper during a visit in 2010 to the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St. Petersberg.  It shows Russian peasants in traditional dress wearing straw sandals made from the inner bark of  birch trees.  The collection contains examples of these kinds of woven shoes from Russia (items R1 and R2) and Finland (items F1 and F2).  The skills to obtain the raw materials and to craft these shoes have migrated to the United States along with immigrants from Scandinavian countries, a more recent example of human migrations spreading handicrafts.  Elizabeth also created three galleries of contemporary  Russians wearing their shoes and boots.  It is interesting to see how footwear continues to evolve while at the same time preserving ancient accents and patterns.  I have included these URLs below.  Enjoy the slides accompanied by Russian music and lighthearted commentary:

http://russiatrek2010.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/shoespart-i/

http://russiatrek2010.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/shoes-part-2-2/

http://russiatrek2010.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/shoes-final-2/

The latest addition (J11) to the Japan Gallery is not a straw sandal but rather a wooden mold for making straw slippers.  At least, that is how this mold was used originally in the late 1800s as a household tool.  Now it hangs on the wall of my study, having arrived with a hand rubbed coating, possibly oil and varnish, and a leather tie for attaching the mold to a wall hanger.  It is now a Mingei folk art object.  Mingei, literally folk art, refers to a movement founded by Yanagi Soetsu in the 1920s.  There are two museums that include Mingei art, the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum and the Mingei International Museum, located in Tokyo and San Diego CA, respectively.  Intially I thought that it would be relatively simple to describe  this piece, but then I discovered that there is a Mingei Theory or philosophy that became entwined in Japanese imperialism and colonialism.  There are numerous interpretations both historical and political about the movement that go far beyond the simple crafting of straw slippers.  These will take a while to research and sort out.   Meanwhile, as wall art the mold, although wonderful on its own, now provides a perfect shelf for another recent addition to the collection.  See the news story  “The Kokeshi Travelers”.

A woven sandal from a cave in Missouri has been dated to 8300 years old. It was made from the leaves of a yucca-like plant with the common name rattlesnake master.  The sandal is surprisingly similar in design to modern Huarachi shoes from Mexico.  The story was featured in the New Scientist in the link below:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15921422.300-secondhand-shoes.html

The accelerator mass spectrometer dating was done by Michael J. O’Brien and colleagues and appeared in a 1998 report in Science titled “7500 Years of Prehistoric Footwear from Arnold Research Cave, Missouri“.