White china shoes in the Qing Dynasty. This pair of china shoes is beautifully colored and exquisitely shaped.

Straw Shoes and Wooden Sandals

While China’s northern and northwestern people were sewing hide boots with bone needles and hide thread, people in the east were making straw shoes using bamboo needles and flax thread. Archaeological finds show that as early as 7,000 years ago, ancient Chinese had learned to make articles of daily use from plant fibers. Certain researchers believe that bamboo needles and flax thread date back even further than bone needles and hide threads.

A Chinese legend tells how straw shoes came into being: An impoverished old man eked out a living by chopping up and selling firewood. When fetching wood from the mountains, he often injured his feet on thorns and pointed stones, and so would wrap his wounded feet in wild grass. However, as the grass would inevitably come loose and fall away, he devised a way of twisting it into ropes, which he then tied around his feet. Still later he wove this rope into a sole and instep to facilitate the wearing and taking on and off of this footwear.

Many kinds of grass can be used to make shoes. In ancient times, therefore, almost all people across China wore straw shoes, excepting only nomadic tribes. The main difference in mode of this footwear was that people in the frigid north wore thick straw boots, while those in the hot, humid south wore straw sandals. Straw footwear was worn by all, whether they were nobles, men of letters or farmers. Along the eastern coast of Shandong Province, farmers would wear “straw nests” — boots woven tightly with the stems and leaves of cattail or corn leaves — in the depths of winter. These materials were most effective in keeping the feet warm and, even today, local farmers still weave this kind of boots for export.

In Shandong Province, straw boots were attached to wooden soles, making them a combination of straw shoes and wooden sandals, the latter originating from the Warring States Period (475–221 BC). They came in two styles, with either flat or ridged soles. In later years, poet Xie Lingyun (385–433), a keen mountaineer, invented removable ridges. When going uphill, he removed the ridges from the front of the sole, and when going downhill, from the heels.