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Sing-song girls (also known as flower girls) is an English term for the courtesans in nineteenth century China.<br/><br/> Although generally concubines or courtesans, people in Shanghai called the women who performed in sing-song houses 'xian sheng' in Wu dialect. The term was pronounced 'sing-song' in English and the young women always sang to entertain the customers; thus Westerners called them Sing-Song girls. The word xian sang in this case is a polite term used to refer to an entertainer.
Studio portrait typifying a contemporaneous Occidental view of China, including opium smoking and young 'singsong' girls with bound feet. Dated to the end of the Qing era, probably c. 1900.
Studio portrait typifying a contemporaneous Occidental view of China, including opium smoking and young 'singsong' girls with bound feet. Dated to the end of the Qing era, probably c. 1900.
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/> Some men preferred never to see a woman's bound feet, so they were always concealed within tiny 'lotus shoes' and wrappings. Feng Xun is recorded as stating, 'If you remove the shoes and bindings, the aesthetic feeling will be destroyed forever' - an indication that men understood that the symbolic erotic fantasy of bound feet did not correspond to its unpleasant physical reality, which was therefore to be kept hidden. For men, the primary erotic effect was a function of the lotus gait, the tiny steps and swaying walk of a woman whose feet had been bound.
Coloured drawing of Old Shanghai, vintage cartoon by Friedrich Schiff, an Austrian Jew who lived in Shanghai during the 1930s and 40s. In 1930 Schiff visited Shanghai and ended up living there until 1947 when he moved to Buenos Aires.