Museum deciphers China's shoe-making history

The China Shoe Culture Museum, the first of its kind in China, based in Wenzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, displays the country's shoe-making history.

Covering 1,500 square meters, the museum consists of two parts respectively dedicated to traditional shoes and modern brand name shoes. The museum was built at a cost of 10 million yuan (about 1.2 million US dollars) by the Hongqingting (Red Dragonfly) Group, a private business of the province.

More than 1,200 shoes, together with pictures and narrations housed in the museum, tell vividly of China's several thousand years' history of shoe-making.

Shoes on show include fossilized "foot-binding cloth" of the New Stone Age, jade shoes of the Shang (1600 B.C.-1100 B.C.) and Zhou(1100 B.C.-221 B.C.) dynasties, leather shoes of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), shoes for three-cun lily feet (referring to women's bound feet) of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), and shoes of China's ethnic groups, such as the bamboo shoes of the Dai ethnic group.

Also put on show are a pair of 2.8-meter-long embroidered shoes and artistic shoes of 25 countries.

Dubbed "China's shoe capital", Wenzhou is crowded with more than 6,000 shoe-making businesses, employing over 800,000 workers and involving more than one million people in marketing.

Source: Xinhua