"First exhibited in 2010 at the Shanghai World Expo, one attraction still draws over 7,000 visitors a day." "This is a giant, animated version of China's greatest painting, its Mona Lisa." "The Qingming Scroll, which depicts the city of Kaifeng at the height of the Song Dynasty, one of the great economic high points in Chinese history and in which today the Chinese see a mirror of their own times." "Originally commissioned in the 11th century, the scroll is a fantasy image of the world the emperor wanted his China to be." "Harmonious, well-governed, secure and almost exclusively male." "What's astonishing is, of the 814 people in the scroll, there are only 20 women." "There's a couple of concubines in a tavern, there's some women shopping, there's some mothers with their children, there's a couple of veiled widows, a woman in her sedan chair eating noodles and some servants." "But, of course, this isn't meant to be a picture of the real world in the 12th century, this is an idealised view of the Confucian world, where everybody knew their place and the men belonged to the public realm, leading busy and active lives," "and women were in the private realm, behind closed doors, where they were chaste, obedient and utterly beholden to their husbands." "These ideals have become one of the defining marks of Chinese civilisation, part of Yin and Yang." "And their influence has waxed and waned over women's lives not just in China, but across Asia." "Empowered by other faiths, women found ways to defy the limits placed on their sex." "In Vietnam, warrior princesses led the first revolution against Chinese rule." "In Japan, women became the creators of national culture." "And in China, many court women became the power behind the throne." "Yet, confining women to the home, these limitations also give rise to ideals of beauty that advocated chastity and immobility, which culminated in one of the most unsettling cliches in Asian history, the ritual of foot binding, whose legacy" "would live on to the 20th century." "TRANSLATION:" "Today, Vietnam is known for its strong women, home to the largest women's union in the world, 15 million members and counting." "Women are a vital part of its economy, a tradition that goes back 2,000 years to when Vietnam was born." "And it's a story that reveals much about Vietnam's complicated relationship with its most powerful neighbour, China." "In the 1st century BC, northern Vietnam was home to a tribal Red River culture in which women had equal power and equal rights with men." "They could become clan rulers and queens, operate businesses and inherit property." "Even have multiple husbands." "But all this changed dramatically when Vietnam was conquered by the Han Dynasty of Imperial China in 111 BC." "The Chinese not only imposed their own taxes and laws on this country, but they also replaced the ancient" "Vietnamese tradition of giving women a greater role in society." "They replaced it with the Chinese concept of political authority, and this was entirely male and based around the concept of the patriarchal family system." "What this meant for women was that their role and status in society was drastically reduced." "Not surprisingly, the Vietnamese bitterly resented this interference in their way of life and they soon began to rebel." "The most important uprising began in Me Linh in 41 AD, led by two women," "Trung Trac and her sister, Trung Nhi." "These two remarkable women were the first to fully mobilise Vietnam and to lead it to rise up against Chinese rule and to fight for independence." "In defiance of Chinese ideas of gender, the Trung sisters, the daughters of a local military chief, raised an army of 80,000, led by both male and female generals." "And after a series of victories, crowned themselves kings." "But the Trung sisters' success was not to last." "Two years later in 43 AD, the Chinese emperor sent his most celebrated general, Ma Yuan - a man so feared in his own country that he was known as "the tamer of waters"." "Cornering the sisters in the paddy fields outside Me Linh, he engaged them in a final desperate battle, where they mounted their elephants in what was, in effect, a suicide mission." "As expected, General Ma routed the army, slaughtering thousands and then, with the sisters out of the way, he easily went on to pacify the rest of the country." "The defeat of the Trung sisters was a double catastrophe for Vietnam." "It became a Chinese colony for the next 900 years." "And under Chinese rule," "Vietnamese women were turned into second-class citizens." "TRADITIONAL VIETNAMESE MUSIC PLAYS" "But it was the Trungs who had the last word." "National festivals like this one in downtown Hanoi have been celebrating the sisters since the year 939, when Vietnam finally won back its independence from China." "MUSIC CONTINUES" "And despite their defeat, the legend of the Trung sisters has become central to Vietnamese national identity." "Not just against the Chinese, but against later invaders, even inspiring many women to join the Vietcong in the Vietnam War." "VIETNAMESE POP MUSIC PLAYS" "The veneration of the Trung sisters, their status as living gods to whom thousands come to pray for security and safety, is a clear example of how the identity of nations is so often defined by the roles women play within them." "It's absolutely telling, in fact, that there are two national versions of their story." "In the first version, the Vietnamese version, the sisters chose to drown themselves rather than be taken alive." "The Chinese version, General Ma executed them and then he sent their heads back to China as a trophy." "The Chinese really regarded the sisters as this kind of grotesque social aberration." "If the sisters left behind any legacy at all in China, it was simply in that enduring battle of the sexes, there was only ever going to be one outcome." "At the time of the Trung sisters' rebellion, the Chinese imperial court was located in Luoyang, a sprawling city on the ancient Yellow River, the cradle of Chinese civilisation that went back 3,000 years." "Lasting for over four centuries, the Han Dynasty was a golden age in Chinese history." "Its achievements included the establishment of the Silk Road, the completion of the Great Wall and a flowering of culture and innovation that was unrivalled anywhere in the world, except Rome." "This was when the China we know today was born, and at the heart of its identity was a revolutionary philosophy of Confucianism." "A unique system of ethics, which stressed the primacy of social harmony, legitimised Han rule and which brought order to a growing empire." "What was so attractive about Confucianism to the Emperors was that it promoted a deeply hierarchical and patriarchal social order." "One in which every citizen had a rank and place." "At the top and centre of it all was the Emperor, and he received his mandate to rule from heaven above." "Below him was the apparatus of the state and this was peopled all by Confucian scholars, and they're all male, of course." "And below them was the citizenry." "This was divided into four categories." "At the very top was the shi, the scholar gentry." "Next came the nong, the peasant farmers." "After them came the gong, the artisans and craftsmen, and below them, because they didn't produce anything, came the shang, the merchants and traders." "There was also the family, and this, too, had its own set of hierarchical relationships." "The most important was father to son, then elder to younger, husband to wife, mother to daughter, all the way down until you get to the daughters-in-law, and they had to answer to everyone." "I'm afraid to say that there's no getting away from the fact that in the Confucian social order, women were at the very, very bottom of the pile." "An essential, if not THE essential, building block of these Confucian ideas was a canon of literature." "Edited, compiled and carved in stone by male scholars during the Han Dynasty, they were called the Confucian Classics - originally a set of five books from antiquity," "China's equivalent of the Bible, the Koran or the Torah." "In terms of social roles, the key book was called the Liji, the Book of Rites, and it governed all aspects of both state and individual behaviour, from court ceremonies and banquets to rules of conduct for men and women inside and outside the home." "TRANSLATION:" "At its heart is the message that for women, the Dao, meaning the proper way, can only be expressed through their roles as wives and mothers, and all the rituals governing their behaviour are there to uphold the feminine virtue of obedience." "This is later clarified to be the three obediences - obedience to father, husband and then to grown-up son." "And women didn't only have a proper role to play, they also had a proper place, and this was inside the home." "The private realm, known as the nei." "By contrast, men belonged to the outer realm, the world of business, of culture, of government and education." "This was the public sphere known as the wai, and women were completely excluded from it." "Of course, in real life, some women did play a part in the wai, but according to the book, they had no moral right to do so." "But the Confucian Classics were also tied to a set of ancient beliefs that went back to the origins of Chinese civilisation." "Carved around 175 AD, this is a precious fragment of the oldest book in the classics, the I Ching." "A deeply mystical divination manual dating back to the second millennium BC." "It taught the ancient cosmological belief that the harmony of the human social world was aligned with the harmony of the heavens." "When each member of society observed the proper rites and kept their place, the cosmos remained stable." "But if these rites and roles were transgressed, then heaven wreaked havoc, in the form of famine, plagues and political collapse." "Strongly linked to this idea was the concept of Yin and Yang." "Originating as patterns of light and shadow on the land," "Yin and Yang evolved into a philosophy of complementary energies that balanced the world." "Light and dark, heaven and earth, sun and moon." "And to them, scholars added the genders, making Yin feminine and Yang male." "But whereas at the beginning Yin and Yang were perfectly balanced, the Han scholar Dong Zhongshu reinterpreted the idea to make Yin inferior to Yang." "Giving Yang a male essence that took precedence over Yin, the female essence, became part of the Confucian canon." "The inferiority of women was now the natural order of things and patriarchy wasn't man-made, it was divinely ordained." "It's the age-old story of men giving themselves the benefit of God on their side." "These ideas, so central to Chinese identity, have left a long shadow over gender relations in China." "They are still debated in lecture halls across the country." "TRANSLATION:" "Why Han scholars were so obsessed with gender has everything to do with the context in which they formulated their ideas, for they were reacting directly to the power of women in the Han court, in particular concubines and empresses who, in their eyes," "constituted the greatest threat to Imperial stability." "In the first place, the concept of the inner and outer realms favoured the concubines." "They lived in the inner quarters, they had the greatest access to the Emperor and they could funnel vast amounts of patronage to their families, who often led palace coups in a bid to have even greater power." "And, second, it was the contradictions within Confucianism itself, specifically the concept of filial piety, which demanded absolute obedience towards parents and grandparents." "This gave the 16 Empress Dowagers of the Han Dynasty incredible status and power." "Filial piety meant then, as it does now in contemporary China, that the authority of gender was always trumped by the authority of age." "One of the ways Han scholars tried to resolve these contradictions was by writing a collection of Confucian Classics for women, essentially manuals for female behaviour that ran parallel to the carved Classics studied by men." "The first was called the Lienu Zhuan, a collection of 125 Biographies Of Exemplary Women from the past, compiled by the male scholar, Liu Xiang." "Divided into eight chapters, from maternal models to the chaste and compliant, such as widows who cut off their own noses to protect their virtue," "Liu Xiang embedded two key messages in his book." "The first, in the chapter Depraved Favourites, was a warning that women who overstepped their roles brought disharmony to the state." "And the second, in the chapter Accomplished Rhetoricians, was that women were obliged to dispense Confucian wisdom to their rulers and husbands." "Over time, the characters of the Biographies Of Exemplary Women became instantly recognisable archetypes, standards of behaviour against which women were genuinely judged right up to the 20th century." "But arguably it was another book whose influence was more profound because it was written by a woman." "This was the Nujie, Disciplines For Women, written by Ban Zhao, who was born into a family of eminent Han scholars." "Written for her daughters, in the Nujie, Ban Zhao made obedience to in-laws and husbands the be-all and end-all of female behaviour, reaffirming not just the three obediences, but also the four feminine virtues - morality, propriety in speech, modest appearance and diligent work." "Ban Zhao was the foremost Confucian scholar of her age and she was known to have ruled her own family with a rod of iron, so, why did she write a book that advocated the exact opposite for other women?" "But whatever her motivations, the Nujie went on to become the core of the Confucian Classics for women, and the heavily restrictive ideas that it contained about feminine virtue ultimately became the only model that could be followed." "These gender ideals became one of the defining hallmarks of Chinese civilisation, which it exported to conquered countries like Vietnam." "But by expanding and exporting, China also made its borders porous to new ideas heading the other way, one of which, Buddhism, would provide Confucianism with its first major challenge." "Arriving down the Silk Road in the 2nd century during the Han, by the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century, it had effectively become the state religion." "And by this time, it had developed a distinctly universalist message, for not only did it extend salvation to everyone, regardless of race or gender, but with its numerous female deities and ideas on reincarnation, it suggested that gender," "like all polarities, was ultimately meaningless." "And, as such, it offered women an alternative way." "Perhaps the best place to see the impact Buddhism had on Tang Dynasty women is at the Longmen Grottoes, on the outskirts of Luoyang, where thousands of Buddhist shrines are carved into the rock face, most commissioned by the Tang elite." "At its centre is the great Vairocana Buddha, paid for by Empress Wu Zetian, the wife of the third Tang Emperor Gaozong." "Said to have been modelled in the Empress's own image, it's a bold statement of power, showing how Tang women used" "Buddhist imagery to give themselves a public face." "Empress Wu defied the Confucian model of womanhood." "She came from a very humble family, a second daughter of lumber merchants, and because of her pretty face, they dispatched her to be a concubine to the Emperor's Palace." "Although she was only fifth rank, she was able to claw her way to the top, going from being concubine to the old Emperor, to the wife of the new Emperor Gaozong." "To be intimate with both father and son was considered incest by the Confucian scholars and a shocking crime in itself." "They accused her of hundreds of crimes, but topping them all was deposing her two sons and ruling not just as Empress, but Emperor for 15 years and founding her own dynasty." "Empress Wu literally shattered the cosmic order of Yin and Yang." "To this day, Empress Wu is the only woman in Chinese history to have ruled China in her own right, and ever since she has been caricatured as the ultimate evil woman, but in reality it was her skill in promoting Buddhism" "as a challenge to the Confucian order that secured her power." "In 690, Empress Wu found two obscure prophesies that foretold the emergence of a female ruler, who would be the reincarnation of one of Buddha's most revered bodhisattvas, the Messiah figure, Maitreya." "Empress Wu used these two prophesies as a pretext to build her own caves in the Longmen Grottoes, and to drive home the point, she had Maitreya placed front and centre and, once again, she had her features carved onto" "the face, while she had the Buddha shunted all the way to the side." "As far as we know, this is the only instance of this happening throughout all of Buddhist art, of Maitreya taking such precedence over the Buddha." "This professor is a specialist in the era of the Tang and is one of the rising stars of Chinese history." "I wanted to ask her about the context of Empress Wu's rule." "Do you think Empress Wu could have seized power any time or actually it was a case of her being in the right place at the right time?" "One of the ways Empress Wu drew on this alternative ideology was by giving herself a new name, a deeply transgressive act not just because this was the patriarchal privilege of fathers, but also because she created a new" "character that was inspired by the I Ching, China's most sacred book." "It was the symbol for the sun on the left and the moon on the right, illuminating the sky or the world below." "Empress Wu owed her extraordinary rise to the city into which she was born." "By the 7th century, the Tang capital was Chang'an, today's Xi'an." "Home to near two million people, it was the great metropolitan wonder of the East, rivalled only by Baghdad and Constantinople." "Linking the ports of the South China Sea with Central Asia, at the end of the Silk Road, Chang'an stood at the centre of a Chinese Empire at its greatest ever breadth." "The Silk Road began here, attracting merchants from as far afield as Arabia and Japan, and they brought with them their own languages, customs and religions." "Buoyed by the Silk Road's flow of riches and ideas, this was a stable, vibrant economy that looked outwards, in which women were able to escape the more restrictive confines of Confucianism." "And that freedom can be seen on display in the city's museums, for alongside the camels and the foreign traders of the 7th-century Silk Road, women are everywhere in their art." "The Tang were part descended from Steppe nomads with their more egalitarian attitudes to gender, so, in contrast to Han ideals of segregation, Tang women are sensuous and unveiled." "They often appear on horseback playing polo, another import from the Steppes." "And it's the objects of women's finery, not their chastity, that fill the displays." "From silver mirrors, and bronze feather hairpins..." "..to elaborate powder boxes... ..and multicoloured silk robes with exotic headdresses." "It's no surprise that their favourite flower was the luscious and deeply un-Confucian peony." "TRANSLATION:" "Is the basement of the Shaanxi History Museum in Xi'an, restorers are working on a series of Tang frescoes from the tomb of Empress Wu's niece, Wu Huifei." "Incredibly well preserved after 14 centuries below ground, the women being gradually revealed aren't the two-dimensional archetypes of the Biographies Of Exemplary Women, but flesh and blood individuals with strong expressions, gestures and clothing styles from revealing gowns to jodhpurs and caps." "But it would be a mistake to think that the Tang was only about luxury and fashion." "Empress Wu was determined to give women real agency and power too." "Empress Wu was a woman of tremendous energy and she wasn't afraid to implement radical changes." "She created the first professional civil service, she completely reformed the tax code and she increased China's trade and diplomacy." "But, to my mind, what's really impressive was what she did for women." "She wasn't afraid to challenge Confucian norms." "For example, she promoted both men and women equally, and solely on the basis of merit, so that included both her niece," "Empress Wei, her daughter, Princess Taiping, and Shangguan Wan'er, the first female Prime Minister who was a Palace slave who rose all the way to the top job" "1,400 years before her modern counterparts." "There will always be unanswered questions about Empress Wu, but one thing is for certain, she was a true visionary." "The story of Empress Wu has long been a source of intense fascination, particularly for modern Chinese women, but her extraordinary life has been reduced to a cliched narrative about female lust, murder and corruption." "In storylines made much of in drama ever since, she allegedly smothered her own daughter, poisoned vast numbers of relatives, and in her 80s, enjoyed a personal harem of male lovers." "There is no doubt that, like many Emperors," "Wu killed anyone who got in her way, but the most lurid stories were written centuries after her death by historians keen to reassert the Confucian order." "TRANSLATION:" "Empress Wu's story is much more than one woman's rise to power." "It was her life's ambition to establish her own dynasty, but, after her death, her daughter, niece and Prime Minister were all murdered." "And when the Tang dynasty collapsed in the 10th century, inevitably," "Tang women were blamed for invoking the displeasure of heaven." "Do you think historians have unfairly blamed women for the fall of the Tang Dynasty?" "Perhaps the best example of how divided China has been about Empress Wu, and more widely about women in power, is her tomb on the outskirts of Xi'an." "Designed by the Empress herself, it is crowned not with phoenixes, the usual symbol for royal women, but with dragons, the symbol of a male emperor." "But, in comparison to the 8,000-word eulogy she inscribed on the tomb of her ineffectual husband, hers is hauntingly empty." "It is a great irony that Empress Wu achieved so much in her lifetime and yet, after her death, her successors did everything they could to obliterate her memory." "Exhibit A is her memorial, her stele." "The fact that it was intentionally left blank was the ultimate mark of disrespect, of dishonour." "Just as bad are the twisted stories that historians wrote about her and presented as fact, yet the allegations that she murdered her own child, that she was some kind of sex-crazed lunatic who believed in black magic," "these are just the old hoary cliches that were trotted out against every woman in power in every culture." "To my mind, the missing words on Empress Wu's stele are part of a wider missing dialogue in Chinese history about women's lives and how they really were, as opposed to just how they were meant to be." "It's very telling that it would be 1,200 years before another female leader would emerge in China," "Empress Cixi in the 19th century." "And even today, in modern China, when motherhood is just one of many options open to women, the fact remains that in government and politics, it's still a male preserve." "At its peak, the cultural and economic clout of Tang China was so enormous that its influence spread across Asia, rippling eastwards to Korea and even to Japan, which, unlike Vietnam, embraced Chinese culture voluntarily." "In the 7th and 8th centuries, in order to put an end to clan warfare, Japan imported the Chinese" "Imperial model to create a centralised state with a capital, a court and an Imperial family headed by an emperor." "And alongside Confucianism, Japanese ambassadors returned from China with everything from laws and literature, fashion and art, even technology and town planning." "When it was built in 794, Kyoto, called Heian-kyo, was a mini copy of the Tang capital." "The language of court politics was Chinese and every male was expected to learn the Confucian Classics by rote." "GONG SOUNDS" "And they imported Buddhism too." "As in China, by the 8th century, it had become the state religion." "But what differed about Japanese Buddhism is that it merged with the local religion, Shinto, whose ideology was very different." "Of all the differences between the two religions, what really shocked the Chinese about Shinto was the central role played by women, and not just on a practical level as shamans, but fundamentally at the heart of the religion." "Shinto's chief deity was female, Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun, while her brother, Tsukiyomi, was the god of the moon, the exact inverse of Yin and Yang." "The upshot of this tolerance for women in positions of power was that the Chinese referred to Japan as Queen Country, and I'm not sure they meant this as a compliment." "By the 11th century, now known as the Heian era, power was returning to more Japanese lines." "The Emperor was nothing more than a symbolic head beholden to the clans, in particular to one family, the Fujiwaras, whose strategy of marrying their daughters off to the Imperial family was central to their dominance." "This system of marriage broking was adopted by all noble families, and it led to strange tensions in the status of women, where Confucianism was used to bolster the clan family and not Imperial rule." "Unlike in China, wives lived separately from their husbands, amorous affairs were tolerated, and women could own and inherit property so as to keep it within their father's control." "But confined to the inner world of the home," "Heian women lived in separate compounds, were only allowed to converse with men from behind kicho screens and their only recourse to the outside world being court festivals and pilgrimages to Buddhist temples." "And so, within their gilded cage, Heian women developed a distinctly" "Japanese aesthetic that moved away from the fashions of Tang China." "Long hair, pearl white faces and black teeth, gardens that brought the outside world in and miniaturised it." "And junihitoe kimonos, of up to 40 layers, which completely obscured the female body." "TRANSLATION:" "With its emphasis on ritual and artifice, it was a beauty ethic that revealed not just the extreme immobility, but also the extreme asceticism of Japanese court life." "This was a world in which female goodness was judged not by exemplary conduct as it was in China, but by the beauty of one's calligraphy or by the choice of colours on a kimono sleeve that women seductively reveal from behind a screen." "Significantly, as Japanese identity began to express itself through its sense of aesthetics, it also began to develop its own language and literature." "Kept apart from official Chinese of the outer world, in the inner world, women communicated in native Japanese called kana," ""the woman's hand"." "As a result, a unique phenomenon in world history was born for, unlike in China, where the world of letters was dominated by men, the first flowering of Japanese literature was dominated by women, the most important of whom, in my opinion, was Murasaki Shikibu." "Born into a minor branch of the Fujiwara family," "Lady Murasaki was educated clandestinely in the Confucian Classics by her father." "Married at 20 to an older man, after his death, she is said to have entered the court and started writing her finest work, The Tale Of Genji." "Considered the world's first novel, it tells the story of the Shining Prince, named Genji, whose bloodline is insufficiently royal to inherit the throne." "Trapped in social limbo, he engages in a futile search for love and happiness with the women of the Heian court." "Lady Murasaki's contemporaries adored The Tale Of Genji with its stories of illicit love affairs and court intrigues, which so obviously mirrored their own lives." "But the book has endured because Murasaki was a pioneer - she wrote the world's first psychological novel with characters that have emotions and motives that ring true." "The book is highly evocative of that mix of melancholy and frivolity that marked the Heian era, but it is also a profound meditation on the meaning of life." "It is filled with sadness for the fleeting seasons, the ephemeral beauty of nature and the fragility of love." "Murasaki's characters struggle to find the meaning of life and understand why there is so much suffering." "Eventually, they find their solace in Buddhism, just as Murasaki did in her own life." "CHANTING" "In comparison to China, Japanese women found solace in Buddhism because their isolation chimed with the Buddhist idea that all life is suffering." "The temple where Murasaki Shikibu is said to have found inspiration for The Tale Of Genji is now a site of pilgrimage." "It is home to numerous national treasures, including her oldest portrait, painted some two centuries after her death." "And the stunning 13th-century Ishiyamadera Scroll, which shows her gazing at the moon from one of its rooms." "These treasures are all the more precious because, like so many women in history, we know so little about the real Murasaki." "Her dates of birth and death were not recorded." "We don't even know her real name." "Murasaki, meaning "violet", was the name of one of her heroines and Shikibu refers to her father's position at court." "All we have left of her are fragments and, to me, the most moving, given I'm a writer myself, is her personal inkwell, the very one she is said to have used to write the world's first novel." "For me, this is just one of the most moving experiences of my life." "To see this beautiful inkwell, it is aesthetically beautiful and it's so delicate and then to know that this could be the very inkwell that Lady Murasaki Shikibu actually used, it's like being taken back 1,000 years." "And to get in touch one of the most important artefacts of women's history and also in the history of writing." "And here it is - the very, very thing." "This is such a rare and incredible experience to have and I feel so profoundly grateful to have it." "What's even more poignant is that the world from which these objects came soon disappeared." "By the end of the 11th century," "Japan was taken over by the samurai and, in a culture now based on male codes of honour, women lost the little agency they once had and, astonishingly, female inheritance laws wouldn't return until the 1930s." "But, crucially, the world of Heian women lived on through the book and, to better understand its legacy," "I've come to meet Japan's greatest living female novelist, the Buddhist nun Jakucho Setouchi, for whom reading The Tale Of Genji at 13 changed her life." "Known for novels that confront the taboos of patriarchal Japanese society, she sees within The Tale Of Genji a subtle feminist message whose promise is finally being fulfilled." "I've read that it took 1,000 years for the relative independence of the Heian women to come back to Japan." "Why do you think that is?" "Despite centuries of male dominance," "The Tale Of Genji has become central to Japanese cultural identity and today, beneath the neon masculinity of the modern city, everywhere you look, there are echoes of Murasaki's world." "You can see it in the Japanese love of ceremony and ritual, in their sensitivity to nature and the seasons and, most of all, in the status of Heian women writers - national heroines who have become the torchbearers" "for the potential of women in dark times." "What it all boils down to is something extraordinary because Japan is the only country I know whose cultural DNA was forged and made by women and one woman in particular." "But this isn't the end of the story." "As Japan fell into the grip of the samurai," "China was going through another resurgence - this time under a new dynasty, the Song of the Qingming Scroll - and once again, the roles of women would become central to its story." "It was a period of great innovations - printing, clocks, paper money and a booming free market economy that propelled China's population to 200 million for the first time." "In this wealthy, cosmopolitan society, women were highly visible outside the home, running businesses and administering their own property." "But it was also a time of great insecurity." "In 1125, the Jurchen nomads invaded from the north, pushing the Song Dynasty into the south." "In the next century, the Mongols captured the entire country, moving the capital to Beijing." "The Chinese reacted to these disasters with a new movement called Neo-Confucianism and, within it, a group of male scholars reasserted the traditional ideas of harmony, social order and gender, first advocated in the Confucian Classics." "Eventually, when the Ming Dynasty drove the Mongols out of China in the 14th century, these scholars' ideas once again became a core part of national identity." "Neo-Confucianism has often been labelled fundamentalist because of its rigid adherence to the written text, but actually it was quite revolutionary." "Its founder, Zhu Xi, overturned the old social order and made the family, not the emperor, the role model that state and society was to follow." "But the group that really bore the brunt of Neo-Confucianism was women and ironically, as the home and family became more important, their status within it was diminished." "Practically, this meant that daughters no longer had the right to inherit property, wives no longer had the right to keep their dowries and widows no longer had the right to remarry." "Neo-Confucianism was a watershed moment for women." "It was a point when their lives really became restrained, both metaphorically and physically." "As in Heian Japan, this radical reassertion of women's place in the home became synonymous with a beauty ritual that was so extreme, it has divided China ever since - foot binding." "Today, the world's largest collection of lotus shoes is housed in an anonymous apartment block in downtown Shanghai." "The collection of Yang Shaorong, whose own mother had bound feet, contains over 1,500 pairs, from the earliest shoes of the Song Dynasty to the much smaller ones of the Ming and beyond, by which time bound feet were a mark of Han Chinese identity" "and a social requirement for marriage." "'The process itself was excruciating." "'Starting as young as five, 'mothers cracked the bones of their daughters' feet almost in half, 'folded forcibly their toes under 'and swaddled them in a set of bandages 'which were ever more tightly bound over a process of years.'" "And why the calligraphy brushes?" "Embroidered by the women who wore them, these shoes are symbols of the domestic economy to which women were confined." "But they also reveal an ugly truth about beauty and fashion, which for some women can be a tool of liberation, but for others, an instrument of male oppression." "Some people may disagree with me, but I say that this shoe represents the end of an era for women - a closing of doors." "And to those who argue that foot binding is the ultimate form of female self-expression, I would say that it's the ultimate form of female self-control and one that's imposed by a harsh ideology." "Practised by women on women, to many, foot binding has become the ultimate symbol of the victory of Confucian ideology over women's lives." "Much like the veil, over time, it became a route to social advancement, increasingly adopted by the poor." "Officially banned in 1902 by Empress Cixi, astonishingly, footbound women are still alive today in rural China, the last of a 1,000-year legacy." "Spending her early life sewing and weaving at home, during Communist times," "Mrs Wang was required to work in the fields like every other member of society, earning points for her family's welfare." "Now 84, Mrs Wang has been married to her husband since the age of 14 and, 70 years later, four generations of her family live under the same roof." "Meeting her has been a privilege because it has reminded me that the story of women in Asia isn't just one of blind ideology, however patriarchal and however painful." "The truth is that, in Asia, entire nations have defined their identities by the roles they accord their women." "But what these women stand for, both now and in the past, isn't simply victimhood or endless obedience, but energy, creativity and irrepressibility." "Ideology and reality are rarely the same and, even at the height of foot binding, women not only contributed to the family but also to the economies and cultures in which they lived." "And to not tell that story too is to tell an untruth." "What's been missing from history is exactly what modern Asian women are finally getting today, and that is recognition." "Interested in finding out more about world-changing women?" "The Open University has produced a collection of free postcards." "To order, call..." "Or go to the website below and follow the links to the Open University."