The Importance Of Foot Binding In China

The Chinese Empire started declining throughout the whole nineteenth century while the West began rising since the Industrial Revolution and expanding its imperial world at the same time. With colonial expansion, Europeans were actively looking for trade privileges with the world biggest world’s market, China. However, the latter’s reluctance to be involved in direct trade with the West generated the discontent of Europeans and contributed to negative ideas of China. Also the victory of Great Britain over China during the Opium War strengthened the bad perceptions of the West. Thus, westerns travelers who journeyed in China began to regard Chinese people and their culture differently and derogatively. Their pleasurable contemplation for Foot binding gradually altered and raised western concerns.
He Qi agrees that, “the positive image of China in previous centuries was partly owing to Westerners’ difficulty in accessing to China and fully grasp their cultural practices.” When western missionaries were sanctioned to go to China, they found that their understanding of foot binding was contradictory with what previous western travelers have been described in previous