Content area
Full Text
Wearing lotus shoes was a unique footwear style in ancient China worn by Han women. They were named lotus shoes as women's tiny feet were likened to the golden lotus flower. These distorted feet were highly valued in ancient China and were thought to be linked to beauty, virtuousness, preciousness and auspiciousness. Foot-binding was a custom that encouraged wrapping up women's feet with cloth for the purpose of shaping them to be unnaturally small and sharp. It originated in the late Northern Song Dynasty, and grew in popularity during the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, before ultimately became generally accepted as the female fashion and aesthetic standard for the whole of society in the Qing Dynasty. It was also the golden age of Chinese ceramic development during which craft and art reached the highest level. Concurrently, porcelain was being used extensively and it became popular to replicate various daily rituals and traditions in porcelain, with a high level of realism. Porcelain-made lotus shoes began being made by imitating the embroidered shoes for the appreciation of male scholars. The shoes not only revealed the multiple ceramic techniques that were popular in the Qing Dynasty, but also exposed the spiritual and aesthetic appeal men had for the shoes (and the feet they produced) disassociating themselves from the plight of women who were objectified and oppressed in the patriarchal society.
The History of Porcelain-made Lotus Shoes
As derivatives of the foot-binding culture, the inspiration of porcelain-made lotus shoes came from wine serving games in which male scholars used embroidered lotus shoes as wine cups while carousing and playing in brothels. A note in the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, records a story of a scholar in the late Yuan Dynasty, named Yang Tieya, who drank wine from the lotus shoes - and his behavior was imitated.1 It is inferred that the performance of using prostitutes' shoes for wine drinking began in the late Yuan Dynasty when the custom of foot-binding was gradually becoming popular in society. However, the lotus shoes got wet with wine cups in them, hence the craftsmen of Jindezhen in Jiangxi Province began to make and fire golden lotus wine cups in the shape of embroidered lotus shoes.
The invention of golden lotus wine cups led...