Foot binding originated in the Song dynasty during the 10th century as a status symbol and the most desirable brides possessed a 10cm-long (3.9 inch) foot, known as a “golden lotus”.

Chinese netizens and cultural experts have slammed domestic online platforms selling foot-binding items, a century after the traditional practice was outlawed in the country. Several vendors on ...

In rural China, where the neon lights of the country’s big cities don’t shine, traces of the old country remain—hidden in tiny shoes. Foot binding, the cruel practice of mutilating the feet ...

Though utterly rejected in China now—the last shoe factory making lotus shoes closed in 1999—it survived for a thousand years in part because of women’s emotional investment in the practice.

One of the best known, most torturous examples of fashionable alteration is Chinese foot binding. In Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet, Barnard College history professor Dorothy Ko looks at ...

The average female foot size in the United States is an 8 or 8.5. So imagine a desire to crush your feet into a size three INCH shoe or 三寸金莲 or the Golden Lotus. That was the practice in ...

When did foot binding go out of favor? In the 19th century, toward the end of the Qing Dynasty, Western countries effectively colonized China and many Western people began to move to the country.

During the late 1950s, communist China expressed its distaste for the practice and fewer and fewer women had their feet bound. The process of binding would begin between the ages of four and nine.

Foot binding, or ‘lotus feet’, was once considered the height of female sexual attraction (Picture: Alamy) Foot binding, or ‘lotus feet’, stands as a symbol of a bygone China.

“In ancient China, men preferred women with small feet, and in a male-dominated society where the best a woman could do was marry well, the reality was that what men wanted, men got,” he says.

Though utterly rejected in China now—the last shoe factory making lotus shoes closed in 1999—it survived for a thousand years in part because of women’s emotional investment in the practice.