Chinese 'Art' of Footbinding

This Chinese cultural practice which began in the tenth century gained popularity after the Mongols invaded China in 1279.
Advertising Footbinding became one of the ways to express Han identity; a source of Chinese pride, signaling an ethnic superiority.
However, the deliberate breaking and folding of a girl’s feet between the age of four and six — sometimes as young as three, to as old as twelve — carry much darker origins.
As with many female beauty practices (think Victorian corsetry), the practice of molding a woman’s foot into a slender tiny triangle was shaped by both the desire to retain power and male erotic appeal.
Why? The way a woman whose feet had been bound walked was thought to produce a tighter hip, thigh and vaginal area.
This aesthetically-based rite of passage, endorsed and carried out by generations of women, was banned in China in 1912 but did not really end until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Her little red shoe is so tiny, its literally like she's wearing baby booties.