Pictures of the latest women with feet bound: goodbye to the Chinese tradition of "getting married"

They are the last Chinese women to have accomplished a brutal tradition that has mutilated them for life: foot bandage so that they do not grow more than eight centimeters "ideally". Although this practice was abolished in the second decade of the twentieth century, the millennial custom weighed more than the law itself. And that's how many of them continued to heal their daughters so that they can get married and have a brighter future.

"I did not want it because it hurt a lot. Nobody wanted. We used a piece of cloth to bind our feet. And my mother sewed it so that she could not take it from me, "said Zhao, at the age of 92. She is now one of the last living victims of this ritual.

For his house around Beijing, his youngest great-grandson runs everywhere. Everyone can see how much the two-year-old's shoes are almost bigger than his great-grandmother's shoes.

Zhao's mother, like many women of the time, knew that she had to invest her small income in the form of bandages for her feet so that her daughter had the "lotus foot". This was a word of order for the future and, most importantly, more effective for finding him a husband.

But for this "well-being" had to pay a heinous price: the breaking of the four smaller toes of the foot, which were pressed under the plant, like an atrophy of life.

Chinese writer Jung Chang recounted in her family biography, "Wild Swans," that the "eight-centimeter golden lilies" gave the image of a tottering woman on her bandaged feet, which, in theory, He had an erotic effect on men.

For her part, Zhao knew that her mother was not the only one to check her feet. But her stepmother would notice them too and they would have a very bad relationship if she found out that they were great.

They were blindfolded for the first time when he was six years old. And with the pbadage of time and began to get used to it. "From the age of 13 or 14, I no longer felt the pain," admitted the old woman. It is only when her husband died, two decades ago, that she gave up the practice.

"Now men and women are equal"Zhao said. Accustomed to living in poverty, you can buy food or clothes today. And the government provides a sufficient monthly subsidy to cover its expenses: "I do not know how to spend the money that I have, I did not have the habit of buying. "

In a reality very different from Zhao's in her youth, modern Chinese women do not agree with this tradition and call it a "stupid" and "horrible" practice.