Men in premodern China believed that small feet on a woman were beautiful, and during the Sung dynasty years they developed a means to ensure that women's feet would remain small. In childhood, a Chinese girl would have her feet bound with strips of cloth, which constricted their growth. By the time she became a woman, she would have abnormally small feet, so much so that walking became difficult.
Of course foot-binding only applied to women of the upper classes; peasant girls had to work in the fields, and tiny feet would only slow them down. Nor did the practice attract many admirers outside of China: though Chinese men swooned at the sight of tiny feet, Westerners thought them grotesque. In the modern era, foot-binding became a symbol of the hard-line conservatism that prevailed during imperial times, and the end of the monarchy in 1912 also saw the end of foot-binding.
Dominated by bandits and competing warlords. Thus Marco Polo was able to make his celebrated journey to Kublai's court, from which he would bring back to Europe all sorts of innovations: gunpowder, paper money, the compass, kites, even playing cards.
The Yuan were the first foreign ruling house in China's three-thousand-year history, and the Chi-
Nese resented them deeply. This had an unintended result. Rather than serve the "barbarians," many talented Chinese opted to become artists and educators rather than civil servants, and this led to a flowering in the arts.
Yet the Yuan depended on the Chinese to run the country for them and did not return their neighbors' contempt toward them. Whereas the Chinese were accustomed to looking down on outsiders, the Mongols were some of the most open-minded people of the Middle Ages. Precisely because they lacked a sophisticated culture, they admired those of the peoples they ruled, and they admired no culture as much as that of China. Thus they were eager to absorb the refined ways of the Chinese, and this produced yet another unintended effect: in becoming more sophisticated, the Mongols lost the brutal toughness that had aided them in their conquests and so become vulnerable to overthrow.
A series of failed invasions, both against Japan and Java, hastened the decline of Mongol power. Furthermore, the Mongols lacked the sheer numbers to truly dominate China: not only were the Chinese older and wiser, in terms of their civilization, they were also more numerous. As with their distant cousins the Huns before them, the Mongols soon faded into the larger population.
The last years of Mongol rule were marked by famines and other natural disasters, which the Chinese took as a sign that their rulers had lost what they called the "Mandate of Heaven"— in other words, the favor of the gods. This is a consistent theme in Chinese history, and such calamities often attended the change of dynasties.
World History
