Ok, I originally posted this picture, but it’s too gross to leave up. So, click here to see the picture that is referenced in the caption below.

Zhou Guizhen, who is 86-years-old, shows one of her bound feet where the bones in the four small toes were broken and forced underneath the foot over a period of time, at her home in Liuyi village in China’s southern Yunnan Province, February 2007. Villages in China where women with bound feet survive are increasingly rare but the millennium-old practice nevertheless took almost four decades to eradicate after it was initially banned in 1911.(AFP/File/Mark Ralston)

I suppose this is helpful to know as well. This link tells a little bit more about WHY they do this.