Recently, I received a message from Ruixing  Lu that he found some baby straw shoes at  The Straw Articles store near Chenghuang Temple in Yuyuan Garden, Shanghai.  The shoes were made in a Shanghai suburb and are contemporary. Thanks to Luki, my translator, we know that Ruixing wrote “囡囡小草鞋” as the topic.  “囡” is in the Wu dialect. It is a nickname for little kids.  Ruixing created a link for us to get a preview of the new items.  The Wu dialect is spoken in an around Shanghai.  It has properties of a separate language but is considered in China to be a dialect of Chinese.  If you would like a brief introduction of this ancient dialect, Luki provided a link here.  The shoes are now in the Collection and are labeled C17 and C18.

In addition, Ruixing sent two pairs of womens’ sandals found in a suburb of Wuxi.  They date back to the 1920s.  We know this because these sandals were found in a closet with old letters, wedding invitations and other items in the attic of an old Wuxi building during the demolition of the Zhengxing Road in March of 2010.  They are now in the Collection as items C19 and C20.

Discovered by Luther S. Cressman in 1938, this approximately 9,000 years old sandal from Fort Rock Cave is an important piece of the prehistory of Oregon Indians.  Cressman (1897-1994) was a pioneering field archaeologist at the University of Oregon.  He recovered about 75 sandals made from sagebrush bark cords from Fort Rock Cave along with other artefacts that suggest human occupation 12,000-10,000 years ago. Additional Fort Rock-style sandals have been recovered from Cougar Mountain and Catlow caves and these have been directly dated to 10,500-9300 years old.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~connolly/FRsandals.htm

A nice companion to the website above is Luther Cressman’s little book “The Sandal and the Cave”, ISBN 0-87071-059-1, Oregon State University Press.

The subtitle of this new book by Jeffrey Kaye is “How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration”.  The term coyote capitalism encapsulates the practice of some businesses and governments that treats humans like a natural resource, to be moved about internationally  like shipping containers to meet labor demands.  In the context of the Straw Sandals Project, we have here great contemporary stories that emphasize the continuing saga of human migration.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010, ISBN: 978-0-470-42334-9.

In this NPR story, writer Anthony Kuhn tells the story of Endo Mitsunago, a 34-year-old Japanese monk, who walked, mediated and prayed over a period of seven years.  During this time in he made 1,000 walks in straw sandals around Mount Hiei.

The story title “A Monk’s Enlightenment Begins with a Marathon Walk” is at the link below:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125223168

The book for which the video below is a companion, Unbound by Dean King, tells about the women who were part of the Long March of Mao’s army through Western China. This book will be many things to many readers, depending on perspective. For me, it is an extraordinary story of a relatively recent human migration and an example of the role of straw sandals in history and culture from tens of thousands of years ago to the present.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/mE5T6NB9PJBP6