\n
![\"manchu](\"http:\/\/www.chss.iup.edu\/baumler\/ManchuFeet.jpg\" "\\"\\"\/")
\nThis illustration is from 1911 and is one of a series on Manchu women adopting Han dress. (Rhoades Manchus & Han<\/i>)On the woman\u2019s left foot she is wearing a typical Manchu \u201chorse-hoof\u201d shoe that makes it appear the wearer has tiny feet. The other foot is, maybe, being bound, even though she is far too old for it at this point. Although some Manchu women may have tried to sinify themselves in the last years of the dynasty, for 200 years before that they were quite willing to keep their natural feet<\/p>\n
The question I have is: Why footbinding? Why was this custom chosen as alone of the \u201cevil habits of the Han\u201d (Elliot p.470) as the one that would be unambiguously rejected by the Qing state? More importantly, why did the Manchus accept this imperial order? They were more than willing to smoke tobacco and later opium, to quit learning Manchu and do all sorts of other things that the Emperors did not want them to do. Perhaps most interestingly, how can this be connected to the current scholarship on footbinding?<\/p>\n
I think we can safely dismiss Hong Taiji\u2019s apparent assumption that footbinding was something done to women on the orders of men. Dorothy Ko suggests looking at footbinding as \u201ca device inscribing the Confucian ideal of a centripetal woman and as a central event in the development of a women\u2019s culture in the boudoir [and] as a means women employed to cater to the erotic fantasies of men\u201d (Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers p.263) Footbinding was, among other things, a way for Han women to demonstrate (mostly to other women) their self-cultivation and self-discipline. It was the feet of Chinese women that separated the Han from the non-Han.2<\/sup><\/p>\n \tPamela Crossley suggests that natural feet symbolized the active economic and political lives of Manchu women, and thus a rejection of women\u2019s passive role in Chinese society. (The Manchus<\/a> p. 27) There is probably a great deal of truth to this, but at the same time Manchu women seem to have embraced their own foot customs as coeval to and superior to those of the Chinese. Zhou Hong presents this Liaoning folksong as an example of Manchu women\u2019s attitudes towards feet. (\u6ee1\u65cf\u5987\u5973\u751f\u6d3b\u4e0e\u6c11\u4fd7\u6587\u5316\u7814\u7a76p. 96, My apologies for the translation)<\/p>\n \u627e\u4e2a\u6728\u5320\u951b\u978b\u5e95 Get a carpenter\u2019s adze to make the shoe-bottoms This poem shows, I think, how Manchu women tried to appropriate the meaning of footbinding despite their big feet. Right from the beginning the comparison to Chinese customs is implicit but never stated. Manchu shoes involve violent re-shaping, but it is of wood rather than the body. The girl stretches her foot to meet the shoe, rather than shrinking the foot to meet it. The process of making the shoes is said to take three years, which seems a little long no matter how elaborate the embroidery is, but it matches the time and dedication that go into binding feet. The girl, once mounted on the shoes, moves just as awkwardly as a Chinese women, and like them her feet become the center of her potency. Being a Manchu she crushes tigers and wolves rather than attracting poets, but the idea seems the same.<\/p>\n I suppose, then, that part of the reason Manchu women did not bind their feet was in part because it they were ordered not to by the Emperor and other men, who saw their feet as a marker (the<\/i> marker) of ethnic difference. They were also able to gain all the benefits of footbinding, a visible symbol of their refinement and culture, without having to bind their feet.<\/p>\n 1<\/sup> \u201c\u82e5\u6709\u4eff\u6548\u4ed6\u56fd\u8863\u5e3d\u53ca\u4ee4\u5987\u5973\u675f\u53d1\u88f9\u8db3\u8005\uff0c\u7b49\u4e8e\u8eab\u5728\u672c\u671d\uff0c\u5fc3\u5728\u4ed6\u56fd.\u201d I\u2019m not sure how valid this quote is. \u5468\u8679 \u201c\u6ee1\u65cf\u5987\u5973\u751f\u6d3b\u4e0e\u6c11\u4fd7\u6587\u5316\u7814\u7a76\u201d \u5317\u4eac\uff1a\u4e2d\u56fd\u793e\u4f1a\u79d1\u5b66\u51fa\u7248\u793e\uff0c 2005\uff0cp. 95, takes the quote from the \u5149\u7eea\u671d\u4e1c\u83ef\u9304. On the other hand, Elliot The Manchu Way<\/a> p.470n61 says that he has been unable to locate the original edict, which makes me think their may be something wrong.<\/p>\n 2<\/sup> Dorothy Ko\u2019s new book<\/a> on footbinding is probably the best of the new scholarship, although I have not seen it yet. Wang Ping synthesizes some of the new scholarship in Aching for Beauty<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is well-known that even after the conquest of China Manchu women did not bind their feet. The Qing emperors took clothing and hair very seriously as ways of defining groups under the empire. Thus after 1644 all Han men were expected to wear the Manchu hairstyle of shaving their foreheads and growing a queue…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,125,126,153],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-gender","category-general","category-qing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-T","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5115,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/5115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u627e\u4e2a\u6728\u5320\u505a\u978b\u5e2e
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\n\u978b\u5c0f\u811a\u5927\u7b8d\u5f97\u614c
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\n\u53f3\u811a\u8e29\u6b7b\u4e5d\u53ea\u72fc<\/p>\n
\nGet a carpenter to make the outside of the shoes
\nUse a card of yarn
\nEight lengths of fine cloth
\nAltogether it will take three years
\nTo make a pair of embroidered shoes
\nCall a girl to try the shoes
\nWhether short or long
\nThe girl stretches her foot
\n\t to fit the embroidered shoes
\nThe shoe small the foot large
\n\t Constrained and uncomfortable
\nAwkwardly and crookedly to the back wall
\nThe left foot crushing eight tigers
\nThe right foot crushing nine wolves<\/p>\n