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China shoe culture museum opens in Tianjin
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-05-19 01:05
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TIANJIN -- A private shoe museum exhibiting China's 5,000 years of shoe culture opened in northern China's Tianjin Municipality Tuesday, the 34th International Museum Day.
The museum displays more than 1,000 pairs of shoes, a wide collection of shoe designs, and traditional shoe-making techniques, said Zhong Mantian, head of "Huaxia Shoe Culture Museum."
"We collected shoes from ordinary people all over China. Some items have a history of hundreds of years," said Zhong, also a private shoe collector for more than 40 years.
The history of Chinese show-making industry could be traced back 5,000 years, as the image of shoes had been found on ancient painted pottery at that time, Zhong said.
Nowadays, China remains one of the leading shoe producers in the world. It exported 8.17 billion pairs of shoes last year, according to the General Administration of Customs of China.
As an item of daily necessities, shoes can also reflect the evolution of the nation's culture and conventions, said Feng Jicai, president of the China Society For the Study of Folk Literature and Art.
Among the exhibited shoes were all kinds of bound-feet shoes designed for Chinese women who were forced to have their feet bound to become "three-inch golden lotuses" in feudal times.
Other museums in China celebrated International Museum Day, too.
May 18 was designated as International Museum Day in 1977 by the International Committee of Museums.
