These detailed, intricate shoes may look beautiful, but they have a horrific history.
In this episode of Shrine Stories, join Exhibitions Coordinator Katrina Nicolson as she uncovers the story behind a pair of Lotus shoes on display in our galleries, and their unlikely link to stories of service.
WARNING: This episode contains themes that may be distressing for some audience. Listener discretion is advised.
Transcript
LAURA THOMAS: The Shrine of Remembrance acknowledge the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which the Shrine stands, and pay our respects to their elders, past and present. As a place of remembrance and storytelling, we honour their deep connection to country and waterways shaped by generations of stories and memories.
KATRINA NICOLSON: And the product is a really beautiful pair of shoes that, if you don't know that history, you think, wow, these are gorgeous.
LAURA THOMAS: Welcome to the Shrine Stories podcast, a place where we unpack the stories behind an object on our gallery floor. My name is Laura Thomas, and in this episode of Shrine Stories, we're going to explore an item that looks beautiful but has a horrific history, and that item is a tiny pair of shoes, Lotus shoes, to be precise. Katrina Nicolson is the exhibitions coordinator at the Shrine and joins me now to explain this. Welcome, Katrina.
KATRINA NICOLSON: Thanks for having me.
LAURA THOMAS: And I'll just say a warning before we get started, because by nature, this item is pretty graphic, and we will be discussing some themes that might be uncomfortable for some audience. So if that's you, please feel free to skip this episode. Now, Katrina, as I mentioned, this item is aesthetically stunning, but historically pretty horrific. So thought it would be best if you could start by explaining what Lotus shoes are.
KATRINA NICOLSON: So lotus shoes come from China, and they're more accurately called binding shoes. Lotus shoes sounds lovely, and that's part of the horror of them, that they have this lovely sounding name because they're shaped like a lotus bud and they're beautifully made. They're very pretty. But they're actually made by binding a young woman's foot. And what happens is, and I won't go into too graphic detail, but there is no way to explore this without mentioning it. They start from a very young age, often as young as five years old, and they soak your foot in warm water, and they start to curl your toes under and they leave your big toe pointing forward to give you balance, and also to create the lotus bud shape, which is highly prized in these shoes. And they bind all your other toes under your foot, and they keep renewing the binding and renewing the binding until your feet grow in that shape, and often your toes are broken to enable them to maintain that shape.
KATRINA NICOLSON: So it's a pretty horrific thing. And the product is a really beautiful pair of shoes that, if you don't know that history, you think, 'Wow, these are gorgeous'. They have beautiful colours. They're highly decorated. , the ones that we have here in the Shrine are made on a, they have a little wooden sole, and then it's a cotton base, and then they're, they're wrapped with silk, and they have beautiful embroidery. They're very faded, but the colours appear to have been a red, and we can see the silk embroidery forms the shape of a butterfly. When you put the toes of the shoes together, you've got two sides of a butterfly. And the symbolism of the shoes is, it's very strong. So colours is very strong, wildlife and animals is very strong. And in this instance, red is a colour for joy and happiness and weddings. And butterflies are a sign of renewal and life and longevity. And so we think that these are possibly shoes for a wedding, either worn by a bride or perhaps by a wedding guest. And they really are, when you see them, the handiwork in them is beautiful., they're a really lovely little piece, but when you understand the history of them, they also give rise to a real sense of horror and abhorrence.
LAURA THOMAS: When was this practice popularised, and why was it something that was quite widespread from what I understand?
KATRINA NICOLSON: Yeah, it's a very ancient practice, and it's believed that having small feet was a bit of a thing in China and in many other countries around the world. We've only got to look at the story of Cinderella and the small shoes. But during the Song Dynasty, which is about 960, to 1279AD, court dancers began to bind their feet into a bit of a half moon shape, so that when they were dancingthey had a particular gait. And then it sort of moved from court dancers into upper class women. And then it sort of gradually seeped its way through society, because the tiny feet imparted a sway and a gait to the body, and that gait became seen to be as sexually desirable, and the idea of the small feet became sexually desirable. And then what also began to happen is, as elite women took up that practice is the production of the shoes began to be seen as something that was, it was something for women to demonstrate their handicraft on, their prowess at embroidery. And so they might make a little pair of shoes and send them to a prospective. bridegrooms family, so that they could see that this is a woman who had great talent and was appropriate for a wife she had the attributes that you're looking for in a wife. So that's how it became sort of more widely spread through that sort of social desire. And then, interestingly enough, successive dynasties had tried to wipe it out with little success.
LAURA THOMAS: When did it eventually become a practice that wasn't done anymore?
KATRINA NICOLSON: Well, finally, in about 1949 with the Communist takeover of China, it was finally banned. But the Qing Dynasty, we might but know them better as the Manchu dynasty, who were in power through the 17th and 18th and 19th century, they had actually tried to ban the practice, and Manchu women did not bind their feet as a normal sort of thing. Women from other sections of society did, and like many things, something that had started at court and amongst elite women and then had filtered down through to common people and people who are working in farming and things like that, it becomes harder, the elite people stop doing it, but the people in the rural regions hold on to those practices for longer. But with the advent of the Communist Party, they said, 'That's it. There will be no more of this'.
KATRINA NICOLSON: Now, this is problematic, because we may see that as being a really positive thing, that, , women would no longer have their feet bound in this horrific manner. , it gave rise tonasty infections and disease, and it meant that women were unable to do certain types of work in many instances. So, we would see that as a positive but it's a bit of an insult to injury, because many women were forcibly had their bindings removed, and so lost something that had been a high status symbol for them. They had that ripped away. So it was problematic to be moving forward into a modern China but at the same time, women were being disempowered in a different way. But they also had to take into account that they had women who had these deformed feet through this practice, and they needed footwear and the last factory making binding shoes, except they were then no longer these beautiful artifacts. They became just a really utilitarian, plain, black leather supportive shoe. The last factory didn't actually close in 1999 but it closed production of those sorts of shoes. It moved into ordinary shoes. So that's the last time that you could buy a pair of shoes for a woman who had, , had had those foot deformities created.
LAURA THOMAS: That's very recent, much more recent than I thought it would have been.
KATRINA NICOLSON: It is really recent, and it's interesting, given that they've been trying to wipe it out for over 300 years, that it's only just the last generation of people are just on their last, , the last moments.
LAURA THOMAS: Now let's talk about the pair that we have on display. You mentioned they're very likely a pair that was used around marriage. But what are the origins of it, and how did it come to the Shrine?
KATRINA NICOLSON: Yeah, so it's a bit of an interesting story, and one that many Australians perhaps don't realise that Australia, well, it wasn't Australia, Victoria sent forces to the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900
LAURA THOMAS: And that's because we weren't a federation
KATRINA NICOLSON: That's right, we were still the colony of Victoria, the colony of New South Wales, the colony of South Australia at that point. And the three colonies all sent forces. So Victoria sent a naval brigade, and one of the members was Able Seaman Frederick Gries, and he joined with that force. And as I say, New South Wales and South Australia, so they went to China in support, primarily of the British force there. But the British were part of an eight force set of foreign powers who were engaged in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion.
KATRINA NICOLSON: And the Boxer Rebellion, it started as a peasant uprising, and it was created by the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, who were known as the Boxers because they were initially a secret society, and they practiced a form of physical combat which to western eyes appeared to be very like boxing. And so that's how the name boxers came about. And they had, , some particular complaints about what was happening in their world. So they believed the economic hardship that they were experiencing was due to the Western influence that had come into China through the 19th century. They were anti imperialist. They wanted to remove those Western traders. They wanted to get rid of foreign concessions and treaty ports, which was an area where trade could happen freely. And they were motivated also by religious fundamentalism, because they were very strongly felt that only Chinese indigenous religions or Asian religions were acceptable, and they wanted to get rid of Christianity, and particularly remove Christian missionaries from China. And all of that is compounded because they firmly believed that the Manchu dynasty had lost its mandate from heaven, which is where a Chinese emperor gets his mandate of the divine right, because they'd had a series of natural disasters, and like one of the biggest ones was the flood of the Yellow River in 1887 so this is a slow build, , to a rebellion. But of course, the Western powers were not going to accept that. China was a huge source of trade, so we went as part of the British forces, but there were also forces from Austria, Hungary, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States. So this is perhaps a very early United Nations. It's certainly the first time that that particular set of countries had all come together. So yeah.
KATRINA NICOLSON: So the Victorian brigade, they actually, by the time they arrived, the worst of the fighting was over. The Victorians were tasked with they were going to besiege a Boxer fortress. But by the time they arrived, the siege had been broken already, so they did a bit of marching backwards and forwards. And they also conducted, , they policed things, they made sure the roads were safe, that kind of thing. It was a pretty ugly war, and there were atrocities performed on both sides. To the best of our understanding, Australian forces were not directly involved in those but they certainly witnessed some of the happenings around them. And so he was in Tianjin, and we believe, from the style of the shoes, that they were made in that region. And he's purchased, we can only assume, purchased them and brought them home as a souvenir.
LAURA THOMAS: So we don't know if they belonged to anyone before he purchased them?
KATRINA NICOLSON: It's uncertain, because there was certainly a souvenir trade, as often happens in a war zone, things that are part of a local economy, a local culture become, something that people want to collect and buy and take home as a remembrance of the culture they've been interacting with. So they may have belonged to somebody, and they may have sold them, because times were tough and needed the money, or they may have been made specifically as a souvenir. We can't really say. Possibly from the, , the fact that they are the red that they do appear to be like a wedding shoe, that lends us more towards perhaps they were worn by somebody, but we can't be 100% sure.
LAURA THOMAS: And tell me more about the shoes, specifically the size. How big are the ones that we have here on display?
KATRINA NICOLSON: Well, and turn off if you are a little bit squeamish at this point, because they're very, very small. A what they used to call a golden lotus was a foot about seven centimetres in length. A silver Lotus was a foot of seven to nine centimetres in length. And sometimes, if a foot was poorly bound, or if it was oversized, it would be given the insulting name of an iron Lotus. But our shoes are about 13 centimetres in length, which will fit on the palm of my hand. So they're not very large. The feet would have been smaller to fit inside them, because they're padded around. And to put that into perspective, the average Australian woman's shoe is a size eight, and that's 25 centimetres long. So we're talking about half the size of a normal woman's foot. It's pretty horrific.
LAURA THOMAS: It truly is horrific, but it's an incredibly poignant item within the galleries. And I'm curious to know why, Katrina, you think that this is such an important part of our collection?
KATRINA NICOLSON: I think it's important on two levels. One is that it does shine a light into a history that most of us are unaware of. The Boxer Rebellion is not something that really comes to our attention through our schooling. And even, , there are older listeners may remember the film 55 days to Peking, and that's probably the main pop culture reference that we have to the Boxer rebellion. And it's about the relief of the foreign legation in Beijing, and it's the story of the relief force that comes to rescue those besieged delegates.
KATRINA NICOLSON: But that film was a number of years ago, so most people are really unaware of this aspect of history, and very unaware that we participated in it. So I think that connection is very important. And to show particularly as a Victorian colony, the colony was making its way in the world and expecting to play its part on a world stage, and that is a precursor to the way the newly federated Commonwealth of Australia, which is what happened those people came back from the Boxer rebellion, and they left as Victorian colonials and came back as Australians, because Federation happened in 1901 before they arrived home. And it's a bit of a precursor to the events of, in some ways, the Boer War was happening at the same time, but also to the events of the First World War, where we go overseas and fight to support the British Empire.
KATRINA NICOLSON: So I think it makes a really strong and powerful link to the reason the Shrine was built, to remember the people who have fought in those foreign wars and fought overseas for Australia. Just a powerful, very symbolic way of showing that and showing that connection that people don't expect. And the other reason that they're important is they're quite rare in Australian collections, so it's not something that people will see every day when they go to a museum, and it does highlight some of the aspects of what women's lives have been like around the world. And if we stop and think about that for a minute, it's not an exclusively Chinese phenomenon to be thinking about small shoes. If we go back to that idea about Cinderella in the original Grimm stories that we're mostly familiar with in the West, the stepsisters cut their toes off to try and fit into those little, tiny glass slippers. And if we take it even further into our modern life, we look at the sort of shoes that we wear, and stilettos are the ones that come straight to mind as being something that is incredibly painful for women over time. So these things are not isolated to one culture or one time.
LAURA THOMAS: Thank you so much, Katrina, it's been a difficult story to discuss, but an important one nonetheless.
KATRINA NICOLSON: You're very welcome.
LAURA THOMAS: Thanks for listening to this episode of Shrine Stories. For more, make sure you subscribe to our channel wherever you listen.
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