These women's shoes are embroidered with a motif of a successful civil service examination taker returning home on horseback, a great success for having passed. Wearing shoes such as these was a way of a wife might express her desire for the success of her husband's career. The pressure on him to pass could be enormous.

Source: Dorothy Ko, Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet (Toronto: The Bata Shoe Museum; distributed by the University of California Press, 2001), p. 68. Original source: Bata Shoe Museum.

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