Footbinding defies easy characterization for two reasons: its scant appearance in the conventional historical sources makes the bulk of its history—from its beginnings in the Song to the mid-Qing—murky, and there existed enormous local variations in the cultural and economic motivations for binding (or not). In his meticulously researched and elegantly argued book Footbinding as Fashion, John Shepherd has made a major contribution by introducing a new body of evidence, the 1905 and 1915 censuses conducted by the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan. The former surveys the state of footbinding in twenty prefectures whereas the latter reaches the level of townships (284 in total). Arthur Wolf and Huang Chieh-shan's classic study drawn from the surveys has reported a near universality of footbinding among the Hokkien-speaking women from Fujian (Hoklo) and a virtual absence among the Hakkas, but the full import of these records has now been revealed only with...

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