A thousand years ago in China, the curious custom of breaking and binding the feet into the shape of a pointed lotus bud began. Since then, generations of women and girls have tottered through life on three- to four-inch "lotus" feet encased in exquisitely embroidered, excruciatingly tiny "lotus" shoes.

It is believed that the origin of the term "golden lotus" emerged in the Southern Tang dynasty around 920 AD, where the emperor Li Yu ordered his favorite concubine, Fragrant Girl, to bind her feet with silk bands and dance on a golden lotus platform encrusted with pearls and gems. Thereafter, women inside and outside the court began taking up strips of cloth and binding their feet, thinking them beautiful and distinguished, dainty and elegant. It gradually became the prevailing style and "golden lotus" became a synonym for bound feet.

Chinese shoemakers crafted the soles and basic forms of boots made for bound feet, but the beautiful embroidery was done by the women themselves.

For well over a thousand years, Chinese men and women pursued the ideal known as san zun jin lian ,the three-inch golden lily, or golden lotus, as it is also called. The driving force behind this desire was complex: it had to do with marriage; it had to do with sex; it had to do with status; it had to do with beauty; it had to do with duty. Whatever the rationale, the fact is that by the time the practice was abandoned, millions of Chinese women had endured the unimaginable pain of the footbinding process, and in doing so, had sacrificed their ability to move about freely and normally forever...

Contrary to popular belief, footbinding did not commence in infancy. A girl's foot had to be quite well developed before it could be worked with properly to achieve the desired shape and size. The more fully developed the arch of the foot was, the better it could be broken to achieve the desired cleft in the foot between the front part of the foot and the heel. This cleft was the third requirement for a perfectly bound foot. At the age of 3 to 8 years, after a pedicure, the toes would be bent back over the arch and a bandage would be bound around the foot to keep the shape in place.

As time went on the foot became so compressed that women usually hobbled about with difficulty, or had to lean on a wall or another person for support. This became especially severe among upper-class women, who became more or less confined to their boudoirs. They were physically prevented from moving about freely and unchaperoned, and were thus rendered incapable from succumbing to infidelity. A young girl from a wealthy family would often receive a body servant at the time of her initial binding, to look after her personal needs during wakeful nights of pain and carry her into the garden when her feet were too painful to walk on.

One of the primary allures of footbinding lay in its concealment. To be acceptable a pair of small feet had to be covered by binder, socks and shoes, doused in perfurne and scented powder, and then hidden under layers of leggings and skirts. Women also attended to their feet in the strictest privacy, often washing their feet separately from the rest of their body to shield themselves and others from contamination.

However at the beginning of the 20th century due to increasing pressure from the anti-footbinding reformers, foot binding was formally outlawed in 1911. Educated Chinese people realised that it made them appear barbaric to foreigners and social Darwinists argued that it weakened the nation (for enfeebled women inevitably produced weak sons), and feminists attacked it because it caused women to suffer.

The three steps of the campaign primarily involved modern education, which explained that the rest of the world did not bind women's feet and that China was losing face in the world, making it subject to international ridicule. Secondly, they explained the advantages of natural feet and the disadvantages of bound feet. Thirdly, they formed natural-foot societies, whose members pledged not to bind their daughter's feet nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet. These three tactics effectively succeeded in bringing footbinding to a quick end, eradicating in a single generation a practice which had survived for a thousand years. Young girls were thereafter spared the tortures of footbinding, although older women with bound feet may still be seen in China and Taiwan.

Extracts taken from:

Marie Vento: One Thousand Years of Chinese Footbinding: Its Origins, Popularity and Demise

Splendid Slippers by Beverley Jackson : A Thousand Years of an Erotic Tradition