What makes a woman beautiful varies from culture to culture; from tooth blackening in ancient Japan to the wearing of corsets and 
girdles in the West. There are many speculations about how some of these beauty practices came about and whose opinion and personal preference was the deciding factor. The ancient Chinese ritual of foot binding is such a practice, seemingly macabre to modern day beautification rights but well preserved in its time. Foot binding has been reported to have started in (960-1279 A.D.) by Prince Li Yu who so loved the feet of his concubine that he insisted she bind them to keep them in the shape of a “golden lily” and toe dance for him. Another more feasible story is the legend of the Shang Dynasty Empress who was born with a club foot. In order to not appear different and to stay “fabulous” she ordered that all young girls have their feet bound so that she would not be the only one in her kingdom hobbling around in pain. Whatever version you believe there is one irrefutable fact...the ritual of foot binding was practiced well over a millennium. The binding of a young girl’s feet (before she got too old and her bones became too hard) was a task performed by her mother. The girl’s feet would be soaked in an herbal tonic and rubbed with an ointment to remove all dead and calloused skin. Kinda sounds like an ancient pedicure...but wait, after the soaking and rubbing, the four smallest toes of the girl would be broken and wrapped in cloths soaked with water, herbs and animal blood wound tightly up to the heel. The cloth would be changed and the feet rewound tighter every two days until the foot begins to grow in on itself (the four broken toes are now located under the ball of the foot and the arch of the foot begins to truncate and grow inward) eventually the foot would measure approximately 3-4 inches. To keep this size, this practice would be done for about a decade. The pain was unbelievable, the stench of the bloody bandages mind blowing and in some circumstances, if the foot was unbound, toes would drop off due to little or no circulation of blood in the area. Death was not an uncommon result.
Foot binding was outlawed in (1644-1911 A.D.) but a practice once only performed by the rich ladies of society who didn’t have to toil had passed over to the “common man.” It didn’t die that easily. Though the poor were binding their feet (How else was a girl to get a husband when the size of your feet was attributed to the size of you vagina...’nough said), they still had to work, though the work they were able to perform was limited being they could barely walk. Mothers, knowing they were breaking the law, would bind their daughters’ feet (still) and then make them wear big shoes to hide the fact. You can still find elder woman in China today with bound feet, some with broken hips and the inability to stand from a sitting position without aid. Pain for fashion.
bellaonline.com/articles/art29600.asp
Images:
Shoes: http://newyorktoimes.blogspot.com/2008/06/japanese-fashion-high-heels-chase-foot.html
x-ray of feet: http://www.thefullwiki.org/Bound_feet
foot: http://www.lovelovechina.com/fashion/plastic-surgery-in-china/
