tour 12 of 13
Badges: symbols of identity
Heavenly Feet Society (Anti-Footbinding League) badge
This is the badge of the Heavenly Feet Society,
set up in opposition to the Chinese custom of binding the feet of
young girls. Footbinding probably originated towards the end of the
Tang dynasty (618-906), as a fashion among palace dancers. By the
twelfth century it had become accepted throughout the imperial
palace, and from then on the practice became increasingly common
amongst the upper classes as a sign of gentility. The earliest
recorded opponent to footbinding was a writer from the Song dynasty
(960-1279) called Ch'e Jo-shui, and the Manchus who
conquered China in the seventeenth century tried without success to
abolish the practice. However, it was during the late nineteenth
century that opposition became more widespread, and the abolition
of footbinding became closely associated with the emancipation of
women.
The first Unbound
Foot Association was started by K'ang Yu-wei in Canton in
1894, later moving to Shanghai. This group had 10,000 followers.
Other natural foot groups sprang up all over China, holding mass
meetings and publishing songs and tracts. All members would vow not
to bind their daughters' feet or let their sons marry girls
with bound feet. Christian missionaries made natural feet a
condition for entering church or boarding school. The Empress
Dowager Tz'u-hsi issued an Anti-Footbinding Edict in 1902,
and footbinding was officially prohibited in Taiwan in 1915. The
revolutionaries who overthrew the Manchu government were equally
determined to eliminate the practice and issued several decrees.
Footbinding persisted for some years, mainly in rural areas, but
eventually died out before the Second World
War.