8 /10 High-Class Discomfort
The dance was allegedly so popular that it spread among the court’s noble ladies and social elites. The practice of foot binding became more concrete and was written about in poems shared across the dynasty.
These survived even further until they were confirmed by scholar Zhang Bangji in 1148, who stated the practice itself seemed to start around then, and that the previous era had no mention of it in books.
7 /10 Early Adopters
In practice, the earliest physical records found from tombs of foot binding came from two young ladies, aged approximately 17 and the other older, whose feet were still wrapped in 6 feet of special gauze.
Their skeletons were well preserved enough to determine their age and gender, but their feet were mangled and crushed, broken in multiple places to form a steep curve that fit into their tiny, pointed slippers that were only just wider than what their ankles would have been.