The so-called "little shoes" refer to a kind of "little shoes" embroidered with flowers worn by women with bound feet in the old days.
This kind of small shoes was a "patent" invented by Li Yu, the empress of the Southern Tang Dynasty more than 1,000 years ago. He ingeniously ordered the maids to bind their feet with a long white cloth, and then tied their feet into small, pointed and curved "crescent moons", and danced on a golden lotus platform with lotus paintings for themselves to watch and enjoy, so this kind of feet is also called "Three-inch golden lotus". Later, the custom of women's foot binding emerged throughout the country. After foot binding, my feet became smaller, so of course I could only wear small shoes.
Since then, Han women have maintained this bad habit of foot binding for 1,000 years since the feudal era.
In the old days, men and women had no control over their own marriages. They relied entirely on the words of a matchmaker and arranged by their parents. When matchmaking, matchmakers will ask for the look of the woman's shoes in order to provide the man with proof that the woman has bound her feet.
If the man agrees to the marriage, he will make a pair of embroidered shoes according to the shoe size provided by the woman, and send them to the woman's home together with the engagement gift. When getting married, the bride would wear these little shoes to her husband's house. Such embroidered shoes naturally fit the bride's feet.
If these embroidered shoes are deliberately made small to make them uncomfortable for the bride to wear, isn’t this a deliberate attempt to punish her? This is the origin of "wearing small shoes", which comes from a story in the Song Dynasty:
It is said that in the Northern Song Dynasty, there was a girl named Qiaoyu, and her stepmother wanted to betroth her to an ugly and ugly man. The dumb rich man, Qiaoyu resolutely refused to obey. The stepmother had no choice but to secretly think of ways to punish her.
It happened that a matchmaker told a scholar about the clever jade. Qiaoyu liked it very much, but her stepmother secretly cut out a pair of very small shoes and asked the matchmaker to bring them to the man.
On the day of Qiaoyu’s wedding, she couldn’t put on these shoes, which made her unable to get into the sedan chair. She was ashamed, annoyed, and anxious, so she hanged herself in a fit of anger. People are very sympathetic.
Later, people called this kind of retaliation behind the scenes or using power to embarrass others as "wearing small shoes".