Foot binding, or ‘lotus feet’, was once considered the height of female sexual attraction (Picture: Alamy) Foot binding, or ‘lotus feet’, stands as a symbol of a bygone China. Alongside seedy opium ...

Zhou Guizhen who is 86 years old, shows one of her bound feet where the bones in the four small toes were broken and forced underneath the foot over a period of time, at her home in Liuyi village in ...

For several hundred years, millions of Chinese girls had their bodies painfully misshapen to conform to a prevailing social expectation. Intact feet, girls were told, would damage their marriage ...

Foot binding was a feature in Han Chinese society for a large swathe of its history and, in certain regions, was nearly ubiquitous for generations. But because foot binding was not universal in China, ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Billy Joel may love you "just the way you are," but many Americans have doubts about their appearances. More than 1.5 million people had cosmetic procedures in 2012 and nearly 15 million more had ...

We should all be thankful the process of foot binding is finally over. But what is foot binding, exactly? Well, imagine bending (and occasionally, breaking) your feet to grotesque angles from the age ...

Foot binding, the practice of crushing young women’s feet into tiny “lotus” feet, was widespread in China for nearly a thousand years. Long seen as a crucial way for women to elevate their status and ...

Striking images of the last surviving Chinese women with bound feet are going on display in Hong Kong this month. The photographs were taken over eight years by Hong Kong photographer Jo Farrell and ...

Foot-binding was practiced for about 1,000 years in China. The memory of this practice is preserved in historical documents, shoes found in graves of the elite and the testimonies of a dwindling ...