Zhou Guizhen, 86, unwraps one of her bound feet
© AFP/File Mark RalstonLIUYI VILLAGE, China (AFP) - "We would listen to the music young people were dancing to and dance ourselves," said Zhou, 86, her brown eyes lighting up at the memory in front of the steps of her one-room home in China's southwestern Yunnan province.
"We would do it for fun," Zhou grinned, swaying on her five-inch (13 centimetre) feet as she displayed pictures of herself performing in a small troupe of women with bound feet in the provincial capital.
"We later performed in Kunming and I was once even invited to go to Beijing and Tokyo, although in the end I did not go for health reasons."
When Zhou and the women of Liuyi first began dancing nearly 25 years ago China was just emerging from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, taking its first tentative steps toward reconciliation, both internally and with the outside world.
Yang Yueshi(R) talks with a neighbor
© AFP/FIle Mark RalstonEconomic reforms that eventually swung China away from orthodox communism, setting in motion the kind of freedoms that today allow Chinese a modicum of control over their lives, had only just begun.
Western influences seeping into the country in the 1980s were still regarded with suspicion and those activities officially deemed bourgeois could lead to time in jail or re-education camps. Dancing was no exception.
Yang Yang, 43, a writer who grew up in Liuyi, remembers that time as one of experimentation and excitement, when "we young people, boys and girls, would get together and secretly dance disco.
"People who saw us dancing thought we were really strange and bad -- that we were becoming corrupted. We were seen as hoodlums," said Yang, who published two books, in 2001 and 2004, on the village's bound feet women.
Yang came to write about the women of Liuyi after discovering that Zhou and many of the then 300 women with bound feet in the village had secretly taken to dancing to the same music the local young people surreptitiously cavorted to.
Zhou Guizhen shows one of her bound feet
© AFP/File Mark RalstonAnd then a few years later it became acceptable for the elderly women to perform in public.
"You would have thought that these traditional women would be the most opposed but it was the exact opposite -- they were the most open to it. And they danced really well, better than us," Yang recalled.
As Zhou fondly remembered her dancing days she said she was now too old for it and only a handful of the members of her troupe from Liuyi were still alive.
"There are so few of us left," Zhou said of the women of Liuyi, which today has a population of 3,700.
Villages in China where women with bound feet survive are increasingly rare but the millennium-old practice nevertheless took almost four decades to eradicate after it was initially banned in 1911.
"We used to hide our feet in normally big shoes so officials did not think we had bound feet," said Zhou's neighbour Yang Yueshi, whose three-inch feet were once considered the ultimate in female beauty and eroticism.
In remote villages much like Liuyi the practice continued in secret until the communists took power in 1949, putting in place a system of communal labour that helped identify young girls who were still having their feet bound.
Ancient Chinese feet binding
© AFP GraphicAs Zhou rubbed her mangled toes and the sour-smelling atrophied flesh of her soles, she acknowledged her peripatetic fate was inseparable from her bound feet.
"I was once so rich that it would have taken a whole night for us to count the money. When I was young, our life was pretty good, we didn't farm, just did some knitting."
In ancient China a woman's fate was literally bound to her feet. Without them wealth and entry into the upper echelon of society were impossible.
According to popular legend the custom was first adopted among courtesans after a Tang Dynasty emperor about 1,000 years ago fell in love with a concubine who wrapped her naturally tiny feet in silk when she danced.
As the practice entrenched itself in the lower classes, held up as the paramount measure of a woman's beauty, it also became a condition of marriage and an integral part of the sexual repertoire.
To mold the so-called "lotus foot" girls of around six years old had their feet folded in two and tightly wrapped in strips of cloth, an agonising process that would break the bones.
Chinese author Yang Yang, shows one of the smallest shoes worn by women
© AFP/File Mark RalstonDeep incisions made in the arches would force the foot to bend into a shape not unlike that of a modern high-heeled shoe.
"It was so painful that when my mother turned away I would loosen the bandages immediately," Zhou said.
"But with small feet a woman could look for a handsome, rich man. My feet were wrapped tightly and were small so I was fortunate and married into a good family."
Wed at 16, Zhou's life for years centered around bringing up her children and running her household, until the victorious communists forced her to work.
For Zhou and the women of Liuyi this meant the end of their wealth and the equivalent of becoming branded women, their feet now evidence of the feudal era despised by the communists.
"After 1949 my life became tough," Zhou said.
"The landlord confiscated my house. My second husband's father and mother were beaten to death because they owed a lot of money. All the assets were distributed to my second husband's two sons. I didn't get anything."
Zhou was then forced to toil in the fields or starve.
Yet despite the suffering and poverty, Zhou said she had no regrets.
"I had two husbands. I had four children, one who went to college. Women can now drive cars. Things are much better than they were."
©AFP