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!