A physiotherapist who was part of a team working on toe-to-hand transplants gave a talk about the "dreadful" practice of foot binding.
Carole Crosby, a member of the Denbigh and District Probus Club, spoke at the club's March meeting after a meal at Tweedmill in St Asaph.
Ms Crosby, who was born and raised in Ruthin, trained as a physiotherapist in Manchester before emigrating to Canada to complete her intensive care training in Toronto.
After six years in Canada, she moved to Hong Kong, where she was the only intensive care therapist in the colony.
Ms Crosby spent most of her 13 years in Hong Kong specialising in "below elbow trauma" and was part of one of the first worldwide teams working on toe-to-hand transplants, replacing severed thumbs with second toes.
She also worked with victims of Triad gang battles whose arms and hands had been slashed.
Ms Crosby retired as acting colony superintendent in 1990 and returned to Wales.
In her talk, she spoke about the "dreadful practice of foot binding", a Chinese custom of folding, dislocating, breaking, and tightly binding the feet of young girls.
The changed their shape and size to achieve the shape of a 'golden lotus' - a woman's foot no bigger than four inches long from heel to toe and no wider than 1½ inches wide.
During her orthopaedic work in Hong Kong, she came across evidence of the practice in elderly ladies she was treating, whose feet were very deformed because of foot binding.
They usually had hip fractures due to the inability to walk with stability because of the foot binding in their early youth.
Ms Crosby said: "Ladies with their feet bound had no calf muscles as they could not move their ankles."
She said it was difficult to identify when the practice started or why, but it was thought it stemmed from ladies of the court wanting to be in favour and catch the emperor’s eye.
The mutilation of girls' feet started at about three to five years of age.
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The practice finished in 1901 to 1911 but continued for quite a few years in remote areas.
Members were shocked to hear there had been such a tradition and, following the talk, looked carefully at the exhibition of the footwear from China that Ms Crosby had collected, as well as casts of the feet of a lady whose feet had been bound as a child.
The next Denbigh and District Probus Club meeting will be on Monday, April 7, at Tweedmill in St Asaph, when Tony Griffiths will show a film titled Abergele Train Disaster.
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