my nerves are bad to-night

Soccer is an English invention, but if you thought that the English male was the first person to put foot to an inflated ball, you are hundreds of years out of date. Chinese palace ladies were already practising their passing inside the bamboo fence. The ball was lined with an animal bladder and inflated from outside. What about the problem of bound-up feet? Foot-binding was widely imposed on classy women in the Ming period. These 15th-century footballers are moving freely, probably because the painting, as so often, is evoking a much earlier era.   look

PHOTOGRAPH: Katrin Koenning

Tagged: beijing, child with his pets in a flower garden, chinese football, chinese golf, chuiwan, court ladies in the inner palace, cuju, david tang, du jin, foot binding, garden of an unsuccessful politician, garden of the inept administrator, grooms and horses, hongxing zhang, masterpieces of chinese painting, paulownia flowers, paulownia trees, paulownias, robin lane fox, souzhou, tang yin, victoria and albert museum, wen zhengming

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (required) (Address never made public)

Name (required)

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Notify me of new comments via email.

Notify me of new posts via email.

Δ