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Foot binding (pinyin: chanzu, literally 'bound feet') was a custom practiced on young girls and women for approximately one thousand years in China, beginning in the 10th century and ending in the first half of 20th century. There is little evidence for the custom prior to the court of the Southern Tang dynasty in Nanjing, which celebrated the fame of its dancing girls, renowned for their tiny feet and beautiful bow shoes.<br/><br/> What is clear is that foot binding was first practised among the elite and only in the wealthiest parts of China, which suggests that binding the feet of well-born girls represented their freedom from manual labor and, at the same time, the ability of their husbands to afford wives who did not need to work, who existed solely to serve their men and direct household servants while performing no labor themselves. Bound feet were considered intensely erotic in traditional Chinese culture. Qing Dynasty sex manuals listed 48 different ways of playing with women's bound feet.<br/><br/> Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse (November 1784–1844) was a French painter and lithographer. Born in Corbeil, he began studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1803. His first painting, L'Arabe pleurant son coursier (The Arab Mourning his Steed), won him a first class medal at the exhibition at the Salon in 1812. Mauzaisse's specialty was painting historical subjects, especially battle scenes, but he also painted portraits. In 1822, he was commissioned to decorate several ceilings in the Louvre. He died in Paris.
Ghilzai are one of the major Pashtun tribes found in Afghanistan. They are also known historically as Ghiljies, Ghaljis, and possibly Gharzais. These Pashtun people are located mainly in southeastern Afghanistan, between Kandahar and Kabul, and extending eastwards towards the Suleiman Mountains into Pakistan. They are the second Pashtun tribal confederation after the Durrani.
Sunan Giri is one of Indonesia’s best known ‘wali sanga’ or revered saints of Islam. The name ‘Sunan Giri’ in fact means ‘honoured hill’ and his grave is a pilgrimage site to this day.<br/><br/> The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, was a chartered company granted a monopoly by the Dutch government to carry out colonial activities in Asia. It was the first multinational corporation in the world and the first company to issue stock. It was also arguably the world's first megacorporation, possessing quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, coin money and establish colonies. The VOC was set up in 1602 to gain a foothold in the East Indies (Indonesia) for the Dutch in the lucrative spice trade, which until that point was dominated by the Portuguese. Between 1602 and 1796, the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods.
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a Prussian geographer, naturalist, and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography.<br/><br/> Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in Latin America, exploring and describing it for the first time from a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in an enormous set of volumes over 21 years. He was one of the first to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular).<br/><br/> Later, his five-volume work, Kosmos (1845), attempted to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge. Humboldt supported and worked with other scientists, including Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, Justus von Liebig, Louis Agassiz, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Georg von Neumayer, and most notably, Aimé Bonpland, with whom he conducted much of his scientific exploration.