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 19th 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.
