An edition of Every Step a Lotus (2001)

Every Step a Lotus

Shoes for Bound Feet

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Last edited by MARC Bot
November 14, 2023 | History
An edition of Every Step a Lotus (2001)

Every Step a Lotus

Shoes for Bound Feet

  • 0 Ratings
  • 1 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

"In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its origins, purpose, and spread before the nineteenth century. She uses women's own voices to reconstruct the inner chambers of a Chinese house where women with bound feet lived and worked.

Focusing on the material aspects of footbinding and shoemaking - the tools needed, the procedures, the wealth of symbolism in the shoes, and the amazing regional variations in style - she contends that footbinding was a reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity, motherhood, and handiwork.

Her absorbing, superbly detailed, and beautifully written book demonstrates that in the women's eyes, footbinding had less to do with the exotic or the sublime than with the mundane business of having to live in a woman's body in a man's world.".

"Footbinding was likely to have started in the tenth century among palace dancers. Ironically, it was meant not to cripple but to enhance the grace. Its meaning shifted dramatically as it became domesticated in the subsequent centuries, though the original hint of sensuality did not entirely disappear.

This contradictory image of footbinding as at once degenerate and virtuous, grotesque and refined, is embodied in the key symbol for the practice - the lotus blossom, being both a Buddhist sign of piety and a poetic allusion to sensory pleasures.".

"Every Step a Lotus includes almost one hundred illustrations of shoes from different regions of China, material paraphernalia associated with the customs and rituals of footbinding, and historical images that contextualize the narrative. Most of the shoes, from the collection of The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, have not been exhibited before.

Readers will come away from the book with a richer understanding of why footbinding carries such force as a symbol and why, long after its demise, it continues to exercise a powerful grip on our imagination."--BOOK JACKET.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
200

Buy this book

Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Every Step a Lotus
Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet
December 11, 2001, University of California Press
Hardcover in English
Cover of: Every Step a Lotus
Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet
November 5, 2001, University of California Press
Paperback in English

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Book Details


First Sentence

"In 1975 A TEAM of Chinese archaeologists discovered a treasure trove when they unearthed the tomb of Huang Sheng, wife of a distant imperial clansman, in the southern city of Fuzhou, Fujian province."

Classifications

Library of Congress
2001027876, GT498.F66 K6 2001

The Physical Object

Format
Paperback
Number of pages
200
Dimensions
9.3 x 8.2 x 0.6 inches
Weight
1.4 pounds

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL7711384M
Internet Archive
everysteplotussh0000kodo
ISBN 10
0520232844
ISBN 13
9780520232846
LCCN
2001027876
OCLC/WorldCat
46937491
Library Thing
606053
Goodreads
815831

Excerpts

In 1975 A TEAM of Chinese archaeologists discovered a treasure trove when they unearthed the tomb of Huang Sheng, wife of a distant imperial clansman, in the southern city of Fuzhou, Fujian province.
added anonymously.

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
November 14, 2023 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
August 23, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
December 3, 2020 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
October 8, 2020 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
April 29, 2008 Created by an anonymous user Imported from amazon.com record