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if you thought that the English male was the first person to put foot to an inflated ball, you are hundreds of years out of date.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