The notorious practice of footbinding—deforming little girls’ feet by wrapping them tightly in gauze, twisting and breaking their toes in the interest of daintiness—probably began around 1100, thirty years before Zhu was born. A couple of poems seem to refer to it around then, and soon after 1148 a scholar observed that “women’s footbinding began in recent times; it was not mentioned in any books from previous eras.”
