It is a popular error in England to suppose that binding the feet is a mark of rank in China. In the west of China women sit by the roadside begging with their feet bound. In the far north, where women do field-labour, they do it, poor things! kneeling on the heavy clay soil, because they cannot stand upon their poor mutilated feet. Another popular error in England is that the custom was introduced in order to prevent women from gadding about. Never in all the many conversations I have had with Chinese upon this subject have I heard this reason alleged or even hinted at, nor is it ever alluded to in any of the Chinese literature upon the subject. The popular idea in China is that P`an-fei, a favourite of the Emperor Ho-ti, of the Chi Dynasty, whose capital was Nanking, was so beautiful that golden lilies sprang out of the ground wherever she stepped; hence the name of "golden lilies" for the hideous goatlike feet Chinamen so strangely admire. Ho-ti is said to have so loved P`an-fei as to have had golden lotus flowers strewn on her path for her to walk on. But there is another tradition that T`an-ki, the wife of the last Emperor of the Shang Dynasty, who in despair burned himself in his palace with all his treasures in 1120 B.C.—that T`an-ki was the introducer of these strange feet. She seems to have been a semi-mythical character—a changeling, with "hinds' feet" covered with hair. So she wound bandages round them, and wore lovely little fairy shoes, and every one else tried to follow suit. But to come to later and somewhat more historic times, a King of the Sung Dynasty, A.D. 970, had a favourite wife Niao-niang, whom he used to like to see posing or dancing upon golden lotus flowers. And to make her feet look more lovely she used to tie strips of coloured satin round them, till they resembled a crescent moon or a bent bow; and thus the fashion began, some say.

It is obvious, however, that a nation that has not stockings naturally takes to bandaging its feet, and that so doing, quite without intending it, it is very easy to alter the shape of the feet by binding them ever a little tighter, as many a European lady has done with her waist. Chinese civilisation being very ancient and conservative, abuses there go on increasing, and become exceptionally exaggerated. The Chinese are also as a nation curiously callous to suffering either in themselves or others, not taking pleasure in the infliction of it, as is the case with some more highly strung natures, but strangely indifferent to it. In all probability at first women simply bandaged their feet somewhat tightly. And just as a man in Europe used a little while ago to attach especial importance to a woman's being well shod and to the turn of her ankle, so did a Chinese man, till in the course of a thousand years we have arrived at the present abortions with a two-and-a-half-inch measurement, as also at all these stories of long dead and gone empresses and lotus flowers.

The method of binding and the period of beginning naturally differ somewhat over the whole extent of this vast empire. In the west binding seems generally to begin at six years old. In the east it is generally from five to seven, or at the latest at eight, years of age. Tsai, the good-natured Governor of Shanghai, when I met him there at a dinner party at our Chief Justice's, looked across the table at me, and said in his somewhat humorous, jerky voice, "I know what you want to talk to me about. You want to talk to me about footbinding. It is very hard, is it not? The poor little things have but two years to run." So that it would seem as if in his part of the country or in his own family binding began earlier. In the east of China the bandage is said to be of strong white cotton-cloth, two yards long and about three inches wide; and I have generally seen a two yards long bandage. The cloth is drawn as tightly as the child can bear, leaving the great toe free, but binding all the other toes under the sole of the foot, so as to reduce the width as much as possible, and eventually to make the toes of the left foot peep out at the right side and the toes of the right foot at the left side of the foot, in both cases coming from underneath the sole. Each succeeding day the bandage is tightened both morning and night; and if the bones are refractory, and spring back into their places on the removal of the bandage, sometimes a blow is given with the heavy wooden mallet used in beating clothes; and possibly it is, on the whole, kinder thus to hasten operations. Directly after binding, the little girl is made to walk up and down on her poor aching feet, for fear mortification should at once set in. But all this is only during the first year. It is the next two years that are the terrible time for the little girls of China; for then the foot is no longer being narrowed, but shortened, by so winding the bandages as to draw the fleshy part of the foot and the heel close together, till it is possible to hide a half-crown piece between them. It is, indeed, not till this can be done that a foot is considered bound. During these three years the girlhood of China presents a most melancholy spectacle. Instead of a hop, skip, and a jump, with rosy cheeks like the little girls of England, the poor little things are leaning heavily on a stick somewhat taller than themselves, or carried on a man's back, or sitting sadly crying. They have great black lines under their eyes, and a special curious paleness that I have never seen except in connection with footbinding. Their mothers mostly sleep with a big stick by the bedside, with which to get up and beat the little girl should she disturb the household by her wails; but not uncommonly she is put to sleep in an outhouse. The only relief she gets is either from opium, or from hanging her feet over the edge of her wooden bedstead, so as to stop the circulation.

The Chinese saying is, "For each pair of bound feet there has been a whole kang, or big bath, full of tears"; and they say that one girl out of ten dies of footbinding or its after-effects. When I quoted this to the Italian Mother Superior at Hankow, who has for years been head of the great Girls' School and Foundling Establishment there, she said, with tears in her eyes, "Oh no, no! that may be true of the coast towns." I thought she was going to say it would be a gross exaggeration in Central China; but to my horror she went on, "But more here—more—more." Few people could be in a better position to judge than herself; for until this year the little girls under her charge have regularly had their feet bound. As I have understood, there the bandages were only tightened once a week. The children were, of course, exempted from all lessons on those days; and the Italian Sister who had to be present suffered so much from witnessing the little girls' sufferings that she had to be continually changed, no Italian woman being able to endure the pain of it week after week. Of course, the only reason they bound the children's feet was from anxiety about finding husbands for them in after-life, and from fear of parents not confiding their children to them unless they so far conformed to Chinese custom. But this year the good Mother has at last decided that public opinion has been sufficiently developed to make it possible for her to dispense with these hateful bandages. "Do you suppose I like them?" she said, the last time I saw her. "Always this question of new shoes of different sizes, according as the feet are made smaller; always more cotton-cloth being torn into bandages: the trouble it all entails is endless—simply endless." This was a point of view I had never considered. But it is a comfort to think the good Mother is delivered from it; for she wrote to me in the spring of 1898 that she knew I should be glad to hear fifty little girls had just been unbound, and no more girls were to have their feet bound under her care.

Dr. Reifsnyder, the lady at the head of the Margaret Williamson Hospital at Shanghai, says toes often drop off under binding, and not uncommonly half the foot does likewise. She tells of a poor girl's grief on undoing her bandage—"Why, there is half my foot gone!" and how she herself had said to her that, with half her foot, and that half in good condition, she would be much better off than those around her. And so it has turned out. This girl walks better than most others. Her feet had been bound by a cruel mother-in-law; and, according to Dr. Reifsnyder, of all cruel people a Chinese mother-in-law is the cruelest to the daughter-in-law under her keeping. The foot of another daughter-in-law, she knew, dropped off entirely under the process of binding. Another error, Dr. Reifnysder points out, is that people often think that, after the first, binding does not hurt. She had in her employ a woman fifty years old; and she knew that, after standing more than usual, this woman's feet would still bleed, as is not unnatural, when it is considered this woman, weighing one hundred and forty pounds, stood up in shoes two and a half inches long.

Dr. Macklin of Nanking, on my asking him what sort of cases he had come across, he having the reputation of thinking many things more pressing than unbinding the feet of the women of China, at once told me of a little child of a poor family brought to his hospital with an ulcer that had begun at the heel, caused by the bandages. When he first saw the child, the ulcer extended half-way up to the knee; and the child would have died of blood-poisoning in a few days, if she had not been brought to him. Another of his cases ended more sadly. The poor little girl was the granddaughter of an official, her father a teacher. When only between six and seven, she was brought to the hospital, both her feet already black masses of corruption. Her relations would not allow her feet to be amputated; so in a few months they dropped off. The stumps were a long time in healing, as the skin was drawn back from the bone. The child was taken home, gradually became weaker and weaker, and after a year and a half of suffering died.

Dr. McCartney of Chungking mentions one case in which he was called in to a little girl. When he removed the binding, he found both feet hanging by the tendons only, with gangrene extending above the ankles. Immediate amputation was at once necessary; but the unfortunate child will have to go through life without feet. The mother of the child was a confirmed opium-smoker, and her indifference had led to the result indicated. The two greatest curses in China are, in his opinion, opium-smoking and footbinding. Another case was an unmarried woman who had paralysis in both legs. She was treated by removing the bandages on her feet, by massage, and electric current. In less than a month she was able to walk. Her trouble was caused by nothing more or less than footbinding. He says the Chinese know nothing of the physiology and anatomy of the human body; and this ignorance causes untold suffering to the women and children of China. Footbinding has nothing to recommend it but the dictates of a senseless fashion. Women with small feet are unable to stand still, but are continually swaying and taking short steps, like a person on tiptoe. He defies any Chinaman to tell him there is not great pain and discomfort in footbinding. Chinese women were disinclined to confess pain. To do so would be pu hao i-su—indelicate. There is in a bound foot a space like that between the closed fingers and the ball of the thumb. This space does not touch the shoe, and is consequently soft and tender. Perspiration gathers there, and, unless kept extremely clean, eczema results, and finally ulceration and mortification. He had had several cases of double amputation. From the time the feet were bound until death, they caused pain and were liable to disease. Not only did these serious local troubles exist, but others occurred in the internal organs, and in many cases affected the offspring.

It would require a medical work to describe the various maladies more or less directly traceable to binding. Let it suffice here to point out that when a Chinese woman walks it is on her heel entirely, and to suggest that the consequent jar to the spine and the whole body is very likely the cause of the internal maladies of women, so general, if not universal, in those regions where binding is generally practised. Lady doctors have already observed that in certain parts of China where binding is universal, whatever disease a woman may come to the hospital for, she is always afflicted with some severe internal trouble; whereas in those parts where only a few bind, it is rare to find these same maladies.