Tinted lantern slide featuring a wooden barrow and a Chinese family. The exterior walls of houses can be seen in the background. The father stands and rests his foot on the barrow and is the only figure to face the camera. A daughter and mother sit on either side of the barrow whilst a grandmother sits at the front. It is possible that they are pictured as ready to move out of their home as the fighting at the end of the Qing Dynasty spread in 1911. Note that the feet of both daughter and grandmother do not appear to have been bound. Whilst footbinding was a widespread practice up to and beyond its official prohibition in the new Republic of China in 1912, not all women had their feet bound. At the end of the nineteenth century both Protestant missionaries and Chinese political reformers opposed footbinding and formed anti footbinding societies - political reformer Kang Youwei formed the first anti-footbinding society in 1894, and missionary Mrs Archibald Little founded a national anti footbinding organisation in Shanghai. However, neither Manchu nor Hakka women had ever bound their feet, and peasant and poor girls destined to work in factories or the fields were left with their feet unbound to ease their movement. The slide was developed by the Photo Department, Tientsin Hui Wen Academy, Tientsin, China. This slide comes from a collection held by the Church of Scotland and generated by the medical missionary Charles Somerville, who worked for the London Missionary Society in Hankou from 1904 to 1914.
Format
lantern slides 8.2 x 8.2cm lantern slides photographs
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