There are different opinions about the origin of foot binding.
Some say it began in the Sui Dynasty, some say it began in the Tang Dynasty, and some say it began in the Five Dynasties.
Some people even say that Yu’s wife and Daji during the Xia and Shang dynasties had little feet.
However, this statement is superstitious and not very credible.
Foot binding began in the Sui Dynasty and also originated from folklore. It is said that when Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty traveled east to Jiangdu, he selected hundreds of beauties to stretch their hair. A woman named Wu Yueniang was selected. She hated Emperor Yang's tyranny, so she asked her father, a blacksmith, to make a lotus petal knife three inches long and one inch wide, and wrapped the knife under her feet with a long cloth, while also wrapping her feet as small as possible. Then a lotus was engraved on the sole, and a beautiful lotus was printed every step of the way. Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty was very happy to see Houlong and called her close to him, wanting to play with her little feet. Wu Yueniang slowly untied the foot binding, suddenly pulled out the lotus petal knife and stabbed Emperor Sui Yang. Emperor Sui Yang quickly dodged away, but his arm had been stabbed. When Wu Yueniang saw that the assassination failed, she threw herself into the river and committed suicide. Afterwards, Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty decreed that in future beauty pageants, no matter how beautiful the woman is, "no women with bound feet will be selected." But in order to commemorate Yueniang, folk women bound their feet one after another. At this point, the practice of binding women's feet became increasingly popular.
It is said that footbinding began in the Five Dynasties. It originated from Empress Li’s concubine in the Southern Tang Dynasty. She was beautiful and talented, good at singing and dancing. Empress Li specially made a six-foot-tall golden lotus and decorated it with jewelry. Decorated with silk ribbons and tassels, the mother was ordered to bind her feet with silk to bend her feet into a crescent shape, and then put on plain stockings to dance on the lotus platform, thus making the dance more graceful.
Some scholars have pointed out through research that foot binding among ancient Chinese women began in the Northern Song Dynasty. Before the Five Dynasties, Chinese women did not bind their feet. Su Dongpo, a poet of the Song Dynasty, once wrote a poem called "Bodhisattva Barbarian" to praise footbinding. "Painted with incense, don't cherish the lotus. Walking, the long sorrow is gone in the stockings; I can only see the dance returning to the wind, and there is no where to go. A secretly erecting palace is as stable as standing side by side and falling into trouble; the delicate saying is to deal with difficulties, it must be seen from the palm of your hand. "This can also be called the first poem dedicated to footbinding in the history of Chinese poetry.
It should be noted that the writing of foot-binding poems is dependent on the emergence of the custom of foot-binding, which shows that the custom of foot-binding did appear in the Song Dynasty. By the Southern Song Dynasty, it was more common for women to have their feet bound. Even in the late Southern Song Dynasty, "little feet" had become a general term for women. However, in the Southern Song Dynasty, foot-binding was not yet popular among women. Foot-binding practitioners were mainly limited to the upper class, and foot-binding had not yet reached the point where it was accepted by everyone in terms of social concepts. At the same time, the custom of foot binding was spread from the north to the south, probably when the Song Dynasty moved south.