A physician, who has been interested in the Chinese practice of foot binding since an early age, has put his collection of thousands of artifacts on display.
The result of David Ko’s (柯基生) endeavor over the past three decades is being exhibited through Jan. 26 at the Sansia History Museum in Sansia District (三峽), New Taipei City (新北市).
Ko said the foot-binding custom has more than 1,000 years of history in China, while it was only in the relatively modern era that Taiwan took up the practice.
Photo: Wang Kai-lin, Taipei Times
“Foot-binding was introduced to Taiwan by the occupying army of the Ming Dynasty warlord Koxinga [Cheng Chen-kung, 鄭成功] in the 17th century, but it only really spread to the common folk in the 19th century,” he said.
“In the beginning, the settlers from China were mostly poor and faced difficult living conditions in Taiwan. It was only later on when some people became prosperous, that female foot-binding became more common, especially among urban residents,” said. “At its peak, one estimate indicated that up to 70 percent of women in Taiwan had their feet bound.”
Women’s rights activists have said the custom amounts to enslaving females — giving them a life of pain and restricted movement. They have said it was the Chinese patriarchal society’s way of suppressing women — deforming their feet to satisfy a male notion of erotic desire. As such, activists have said it should not be romanticized nor promoted as some kind of fashion concept or an appealing cultural legacy.
Ko said his research showed that the Hakka, mountain Aboriginal groups and lowland Pingpu Aboriginals did not practise footbinding, but due to increased interaction with Han Chinese over the centuries, some of the groups took up the practice.
The practice resulted in what was known by the Chinese as the “three-inch golden lotus” (三寸金蓮). The Chinese inch (寸) is a little longer than 3cm so the preferred foot length was less than 10cm.
Ko said the woven and embroidered shoes used to bind feet were not as refined in Taiwan as those made in China because of the custom’s short history in the nation.
“However, there are localized differences and we do have specialty styles that are distinct from Chinese styles,” he added.
Most of the tiny shoes used to bind feet in Taiwan were various shades of red to express family bliss and vitality, Ko said.
The early migrants from the Zhangzhou and Chuanzhou regions of Fujian Province incorporated the wooden high-heel slippers from their cultures, which enclosed the bound feet and gave them a slender look, Ko said.
Ko, who has a collection of more than 6,000 pairs of the shoes, said he began to study foot-binding customs when he was about 10 and said that “it led to an interest in physiology and formed his thinking to become a medical doctor.”
Sansia District Administrator Yang Chih-hung (楊志宏) said his great-grandmother had bound feet.
“Through systematic collection, compilation and planning, the public will have a deeper understanding about this old custom,” Yang said of the exhibit.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater