This kind of little shoes was 1000 years ago invented by Li Yu, the queen of Southern Tang Dynasty. He ingeniously ordered the ladies-in-waiting to tie their feet with a long white cloth, wrapped them into a small, pointed and curved "crescent moon" and stood on the golden lotus platform with lotus flowers to entertain themselves, so this kind of feet is also called "three-inch golden lotus". Later, women's foot binding swept the country. Foot-binding feet are small, of course, you can only wear small shoes.
Since then, during the feudal period of 1000, Han women have maintained this bad habit of foot-binding.
In the old society, men and women could not decide their own marriage, but their parents arranged it according to the words of the matchmaker. The matchmaker always asks for the appearance of the woman's shoes, in order to provide the man with proof of the woman's foot binding!
If the man agrees to this marriage, he will make a pair of embroidered shoes according to the size of the shoes provided by the woman and send them to her home together with the engagement gift. When they got married, the bride came to her husband's house in these little shoes. Such embroidered shoes naturally suit the bride's feet.
If these embroidered shoes are deliberately made small and make the bride uncomfortable to wear, isn't this a deliberate punishment for her? This is the origin of "hard work", which comes from a story in the Song Dynasty:
Legend has it that in the Northern Song Dynasty, there was a girl named Qiao Yu. Her stepmother wanted to betroth her to an ugly and stupid rich man, but Qiao Yu refused. Stepmother had no choice but to secretly find a way to punish her.
It happened that a matchmaker told Qiao Yu to a scholar. Qiao Yu liked it very much, but her stepmother cut a pair of little shoes behind her back and asked the matchmaker to bring them to the man.
Qiao Yu can't wear these shoes on her wedding day, so she can't get on the sedan chair. Ashamed, annoyed and anxious, she hanged herself in a rage. People are very sorry.
Later, people called this embarrassing practice of secretly retaliating or using power "hard shoes."