Footbinding as Fashion

Ethnicity, Labor, and Status in Traditional China

John Robert Shepherd

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780295744421
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Previous studies of the practice of footbinding in imperial China have theorized that it expressed ethnic identity or that it served an economic function. By analyzing the popularity of footbinding in different places and times, Footbinding as Fashion investigates the claim that early Qing (1644–1911) attempts by Manchu rulers to ban footbinding made it a symbol of anti-Manchu sentiment and Han identity and led to the spread of the practice throughout all levels of society. Detailed case studies of Taiwan, Hebei, and Liaoning provinces exploit rich bodies of previously neglected ethnographic reports, economic surveys, and rare censuses of footbinding to challenge the significance of sedentary female labor and ethnic rivalries as factors leading to the hegemony of the footbinding fashion. The study concludes that, independently of identity politics and economic factors, variations in local status hierarchies and elite culture coupled with status competition and fear of ridicule for not binding girls’ feet best explain how a culturally arbitrary fashion such as footbinding could attain hegemonic status.

CHAPTER 1

The Qing Conquest and Footbinding

IN the early decades of the seventeenth century a new center of power emerged in China’s northeast, led by a non-Han Manchu dynasty. In 1644, China was wracked by internal rebellion, rebels seized the capital at Beijing, and the Ming emperor committed suicide. Seizing the opportunity created by the collapse of the Ming court, Manchu armies entered Beijing and proclaimed a new Qing dynasty. In the ensuing years, Qing forces succeeded in defeating remnant Ming supporters and asserting dominion over the empire.

Did the triumph of a non-Han conquest dynasty spur a proto-nationalist reaction among Chinese that led to the spread of footbinding?¹ Students of Qing history regularly learn that although at the beginning of the dynasty the Manchu conquerors prohibited footbinding throughout the empire, they were forced to rescind the prohibition when women resisted.² Qing attempts to ban footbinding made binding into a politically charged ethnic marker that embodied for Han anti-Qing sentiments and caused the bans to backfire and footbinding to spread further.³ Evaluating these claims requires a close scrutiny of the sources documenting Qing policies toward footbinding and the subsequent distortions of that record perpetuated by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians.

THE PRE-CONQUEST BANS OF 1636 AND 1638

Hair and dress regulations were an early feature of the rising Manchu state’s policies governing its multiethnic population. When in the early 1620s Manchu forces wrested Liaodong from Ming control, the regime faced the challenge of incorporating large numbers of Chinese into the subject population. As a mark of submission and test of loyalty, surrendering males were required to shave their heads and adopt the Manchu hairstyle, or queue.⁴ The Manchu rulers also discouraged sartorial distinctions, which hindered integrating the newly subjugated population into the Manchu polity on an equal and uniform basis.⁵ These policies were not always successful, and an expanding Chinese population presented continuing challenges to the maintenance of Manchu cultural dominance.

In 1636, Hong Taiji, Nurhaci’s successor as the leader of the rising Manchu state, became concerned that exposure to Han lifestyles had weakened Manchu military skills.⁶ In 1636 and 1637, he warned his followers that the adoption of Han (M: Nikan) attire, customs, and language and the decline of horse-riding and archery skills had led to the fall of the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234), from which the Manchus claimed descent. To prevent a similar fate for his newly named Qing state, Hong Taiji demanded that his followers maintain Manchu cultural traditions and attire. These decrees stress the incompatibility of the free-flowing robes and wide sleeves worn by Han men and Manchu martial skills of horse-riding and mounted archery, which required belted waists and tight-fitting sleeves.⁷ A separate 1636 decree preserved in the draft Veritable Records cautioned Manchus against the influence of degenerate Han customs (Hanren zhi louxi) and for the first time explicitly extended the dress regulations to females. This decree took the further step of ordering all Han officials and commoners, males and females (fan Hanren guanmin nannü), to adopt Manchu apparel (Manzhou shiyang) and threatened severe punishment for those who did not comply. The new regulations specify that Han men were in addition not to wear broad collars, wide sleeves, and Ming-style hats and were required to belt the waist (nanren buxu chuan daling daxiu, dai rongmao, ge yao shuyao). The 1636 regulations also make the earliest explicit mention of women’s footbinding: they forbid Han women to wear certain hairstyles and to bind feet (nüren buxu shutou, chanjiao).⁸ These decrees make clear that all Manchu subjects, including Han males and females, were expected to conform to Manchu cultural traditions in attire.

In 1638, Hong Taiji again instituted harsh punishments for “those who adopted the hats and clothing of a foreign country [i.e., Ming China] and caused women to tie up their hair and bind their feet [shufa guozu]; such persons, although subjects of our dynasty, have their hearts elsewhere.” This phrasing makes the failure by either men or women to conform to Manchu traditions of attire a sign of disloyalty.⁹ A Manchu version of the 1638 decree (but not the version in the Chinese Veritable Records) specifies that those found binding their feet should suffer death by having the feet chopped off.¹⁰ A condensed and reworded version of the 1638 decree, calling for the severe punishment of those who imitated foreign clothing, hairstyle, and bound feet, but making no reference to “causing” women to bind (and dropping the reference to “hearts elsewhere”), is given in Records from within the Eastern Gate (Donghua lu).¹¹ All later Qing commentators cite this truncated version of the 1638 decree when they trace prohibitions on footbinding to the pre-1644 era.

By this series of decrees Hong Taiji mandated Manchu attire, including both the queue and the ban on footbinding, among the banner populations (the hereditary military caste that drew members from the Manchus, Mongols, Han, and others) as well as any civilian Han population under Manchu control.¹² The decrees served multiple purposes: removing distinctions between Han and other Manchu subjects and making them all equally subject to the same state regulations; eliminating practices that undermined the martial traditions of the Manchus; and creating visible signs of loyalty. The hair and dress regulations expressed pride in Manchu traditions and preserved them against the encroachment of Han fashions. The decrees also made women’s natural feet an “ethnic” marker of Qing identity for Manchu and other bannerwomen and for all female subjects of the early Manchu state.

THE TONSURE EDICT AND ANTI-QING SENTIMENT

Prominent scholars have claimed that the early Manchu prohibitions on footbinding (1636, 1638, 1645?, 1664–68) failed among the Han majority because they were “defied” by women and that “resistance” caused the fashion to spread further.¹³ But evidence does not support the widely repeated assertion that Manchu prohibitions on footbinding were extended to the civilian Han population of China proper after the conquest, although the Qing court early in the Kangxi reign (1662–1722) did briefly consider a proposal to ban footbinding among the general population in China. Nor does Qing politicization of a cultural trait as a badge of identity (natural feet among bannerwomen) automatically convert what was already a long-standing practice of footbinding among Han into a marker either of Han opposition or of ethnic identity. An ethnic marker and boundary maintenance hypothesis has thus been invoked to explain the continued spread of footbinding in the Han population.¹⁴ But no evidence has been produced to demonstrate that resistance or identity ever motivated binding and could explain its unabated popularity in the Qing period.

Proponents of the notion that the Qing enforced bans on footbinding in the post-1644 context rely on sources that discuss prohibitions dated to 1645 and 1664–68, as well as the 1636 and 1638 bans. These sources and their interpretation by modern scholars have rarely been subjected to scrutiny.¹⁵ The 1636 and 1638 edicts, issued before the Manchus entered Beijing in 1644, applied at the time they were issued only to the multiethnic population of the Liao basin under Manchu control, where they were successful among the banners, and as the nineteenth-century ethnographic evidence suggests, more generally. In need of clarification is whether the 1636 and 1638 bans were extended to the civilian population of China proper in 1645 or in any year of the Shunzhi reign (1644–61) and whether women’s footbinding was also included in the hair and dress regulations that the Qing imposed on Chinese men.

In June 1644, Qing forces entering Beijing initially imposed but twenty-one days later suspended the requirement that civilian men (ministers and commoners, chen min) adopt the queue as a sign of loyalty.¹⁶ A year later, in July 1645, after defeating southern Ming forces and extending Qing control to Nanjing, a tonsure command (tifa ling) was promulgated, rescinding the suspension. Arguing that differences in customs would lead to divided loyalties (erxin), the decree made adopting the queue a test of loyalty to the new regime. The tonsure decree set a ten-day limit on adopting the queue, but set no time limit for officeholders to adopt Manchu-style male dress.¹⁷ In response to the sudden forced imposition of the queue, serious rebellions broke out in several Jiangnan localities, which the Manchus suppressed, brutally.¹⁸ The history of the tonsure edict makes clear that there was no automatic extension of the 1636 and 1638 dress regulations to the civilian population of China proper during the conquest, but only a selective and strategically timed enforcement.

None of the orders suspending or reimposing the queue and recorded in the Qing Veritable Records make any reference to footbinding. The earliest sources referring to a ban on footbinding in 1645 appear nearly two hundred years later, in the early nineteenth-century works of Yu Zhengxie (1775–1840) and Qian Yong (1759–1844).¹⁹ Neither Yu nor Qian cites a source for a 1645 ban, nor does any other later author. In fact, a 1668 memorial retracting a ban on footbinding proposed in an edict of 1664 explicitly contradicts any claim that there was a 1645 ban on footbinding.²⁰

THE ABORTIVE PROPOSAL OF 1664–1668

The edict of 1664, which prohibits footbinding among civilians, was published in 1951 but has never before been cited by any modern student of footbinding (nor was it cited by any Qing-period scholar). The edict, dated the third year, fourth month, and third day of the Kangxi reign (1664), does not appear in the Veritable Records, and the only published copy is of a draft preserved in the archives of the Grand Secretariat (Neige daku dang’an) in Taipei.²¹ The edict endorsed a recommendation of the Manchu-dominated Assembly of Deliberative Princes, Ministers, and Censors to ban footbinding among civilians.²² Addressed to the Board of Rites, the edict begins by declaring that within the empire, differences of custom should not be tolerated (tianxia yijia, neiwai fengsu buke youyi), yet civilian females (minjian funü) continue to bind their feet and harm their bodies (juxing guozu huishang quanti), following a vile custom passed down unchanged from the former dynasty (wangguo louxi). The edict affirmed that a compassionate monarch in a prosperous age could not tolerate practices that violate nature and destroy bodies (shang benzhi hui quanti). Moreover, Taizu (Nurhaci, r. 1616–26) and Taizong (Hong Taiji, r. 1627–43) left strict orders mandating head shaving and banning footbinding, and to stop shaving and continue footbinding would violate the precedents set by these imperial forefathers. Exempting those who had already bound their feet, the assembly recommended that footbinding should cease for all women born from the first year of the present Kangxi reign, 1662 (zi Kangxi yuannian yilai suosheng nüzi yingting qi guozu zhe).

The rationale for the prohibition on footbinding given by the edict of 1664 makes some interesting rhetorical shifts. In the 1636 and 1638 edicts, the key concerns of Hong Taiji were preservation of Manchu martial skills and the expression of loyalty in the subject population by conformity to Manchu hair and dress customs, but these themes are downplayed here. The 1664 edict stresses respect for the precedents set by the dynastic founders, the need to reform degenerate Ming practices, and the importance of creating a uniformity of custom in the new empire, which is also a prominent theme of the tonsure command. The expression of compassion for those injuring themselves by binding, whose loyalty is not questioned, introduces a new theme.²³ The edict thus adopts an approach milder than the punitive one of Hong Taiji’s decrees. Note also that the precedents cited for the prohibition refer to the imperial predecessors Taizu and Taizong and make no mention of any precedent from the more recent reign of the Shunzhi emperor, who ruled during the conquest of China proper (Shizu, r. 1644–61). The edict implies that although in Hong Taiji’s time both the tonsure and the ban on footbinding had been enforced, the latter had not been enforced in the more recent reign. Unlike the tonsure command, the draft edict does not call for its transmission to the provinces, nor does it specify sanctions for violation of the ban, an issue the 1668 memorial reports had been referred to the Board of Rites for deliberation; thus it is unlikely the proposed ban came into effect at this time.

The story of the short life of this proposed ban on footbinding is continued in the 1668 memorial preserved in Trivial Thoughts in Yin An (Yin’an suoyu) by Wang Bu, a native of Jiaxing, Zhejiang. Wang was a low-ranking scholar and minor official who served in grain transport at the end of the Ming and died some time following 1670, the date of the last event he recorded, and prior to 1684,...

Table of contents

• Footbinding as Fashion: Ethnicity, Labor, and Status in Traditional China
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chronologies
• Notes on Usage
• Introduction: Seeking Status, Avoiding Shame
• Chapter 1. The Qing Conquest and Footbinding
• Chapter 2. The Taiwan Census of 1905
• Chapter 3. The 1915 Prohibition
• Chapter 4. Footbinding for Marriage
• Chapter 5. Regional Variations among the Hoklo Fujianese
• Chapter 6. Women’s Labor in Agriculture
• Chapter 7. Women’s Labor in Handicrafts
• Chapter 8. Bannerwomen and Civilian Women in the Northeast
• Conclusion: The Tyranny of Fashion
• Chinese Character Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index