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White china shoes in the Qing Dynasty. This pair of china shoes is beautifully colored and exquisitely shaped. |
Straw Shoes and Wooden Sandals
While China’s northern andnorthwestern people were sewing hide boots with bone needles and hidethread, people in the east were making straw shoes using bamboo needlesand flax thread. Archaeological finds show that as early as 7,000 yearsago, ancient Chinese had learned to make articles of daily use fromplant fibers. Certain researchers believe that bamboo needles and flaxthread date back even further than bone needles and hide threads.
A Chinese legend tells how straw shoescame into being: An impoverished old man eked out a living by choppingup and selling firewood. When fetching wood from the mountains, heoften injured his feet on thorns and pointed stones, and so would wraphis wounded feet in wild grass. However, as the grass would inevitablycome loose and fall away, he devised a way of twisting it into ropes,which he then tied around his feet. Still later he wove this rope intoa sole and instep to facilitate the wearing and taking on and off ofthis footwear.
Many kinds of grass can be used tomake shoes. In ancient times, therefore, almost all people across Chinawore straw shoes, excepting only nomadic tribes. The main difference inmode of this footwear was that people in the frigid north wore thickstraw boots, while those in the hot, humid south wore straw sandals.Straw footwear was worn by all, whether they were nobles, men ofletters or farmers. Along the eastern coast of Shandong Province,farmers would wear “straw nests” — boots woven tightly with the stemsand leaves of cattail or corn leaves — in the depths of winter. Thesematerials were most effective in keeping the feet warm and, even today,local farmers still weave this kind of boots for export.
In Shandong Province, straw boots wereattached to wooden soles, making them a combination of straw shoes andwooden sandals, the latter originating from the Warring States Period(475–221 BC). They came in two styles, with either flat or ridgedsoles. In later years, poet Xie Lingyun (385–433), a keen mountaineer,invented removable ridges. When going uphill, he removed the ridgesfrom the front of the sole, and when going downhill, from the heels.
