介绍:
After five months of intense construction, the "Three Inch Lotus" Museum was reopened to the public with richer and more informed exhibitions. There's also the addition of new technology to make the museum more interactive with its visitors.
Located in Anren township, about an hour from Sichuan's capital Chengdu, the museum is a part of the Jianchuan Museum Cluster founded by Fan Jianchuan, who is often referred to as a pioneer and entrepreneur of Privately-owned museums in China.
Inside the museum, there are approximately 5000 items related to the history of foot-binding from all over China including Shandong, Shanxi, Hunan, Zhejiang and so on. They're embroidered with images of peony flowers, fish, insects, birds, dragons, and phoenixes. The earliest is from the Ming Dynasty.
Most of the footwear are between 10 to 13 centimetres. The smallest is only 9 centimetres long.
Xu Jianhua is a tour guide at the museum.
"The shoes from the south are small and delicate. The ones from the north are bigger and looser. It's painful all the same. With the exception of the big toe, which can grow naturally, all the others were broken and bent into the souls of their feet."
The name of the museum, "Three-inch Lotus", refers the size of women's feet and the practice of foot-binding that was prevalent throughout Chinese history. It first appeared around the year 960, during the Five Dynasties period. Back then, having small feet was considered a sign of beauty.
When girls of the Han ethnic group reached the age of 5 or 6, their feet would be tightly bound by bandages, breaking nearly every bone. This cruel practice prevailed until the beginning of the 20th century.
Gu Chuhua is 86-years-old. Although her feet are normal size today, for a year in her life, they were wrapped in bandages and she had to wear the shoes that were no bigger than those of a three-year-old. This is her description of the experience.
"When they put the shoes on me, I couldn't stand up. I was in a lot of pain so I cried out."
Gu was one of the lucky ones whose parents let their daughter ran free after seeing the pain she was in.
On a wall inside the museum, there hangs an old picture of nine lovely and beautiful ladies during the Republic of China era. Behind each of their smiling faces is a sad and heartbreaking story. Some of them are young teenagers. Some of them married. But they all had to go through the painful process of feet binding and most of them never had the chance to walk normally again.
According to the museum's founder Fan Jianchuan, back then, for women, the size of your feet dictated your path in life.
"It's all about your feet. If they're the right size, then you could marry into a good family. If they're not, your life would be disastrous. It's a perverse culture, a perverse standard of beauty."
In addition to shoes, there are painted porcelains made by women with bound feet, sedan chairs, foot binding chairs and women's clothing from the Ming and Qing Dynasty. The floor of the museum is made uneven so that visitors can literally walk a mile in these women's shoes.
According to Fan Jianchuan, the objective is to make the visitors experience the hardship and the frustration that these women experienced everyday while at the same time it also shows the cruelty of this practice. Fan says in no way does he want to glorify feet binding.
"Most importantly, I want the museum to reflect the liberation of women, the advancement of society. In the end, the display shows a promising future."
Although the "three-inch lotus" is no longer a sign of beauty, Fan hopes that visitors would learn about the barbaric length that people would go to in order to achieve the standard of beauty and this kind of cruelty would never be repeated.
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