Counted among the 857 residents of Tuanshan village are six elderly women with bound feet, among the last surviving examples in China of a 1,000-year-old practice.

Officially, the custom of twisting, binding, squeezing and cramping the toes of little Chinese girls to create triangular, pointed, four-inch “golden lotus” feet was outlawed in 1912 after the fall of the empire.

In fact it took two to three decades to end a custom so ingrained, particularly in remote corners of the land.

In the far southwestern province of Yunnan, dozens of women - more than anywhere else in China - still hobble through the villages. Most are in their late seventies and eighties and are now rapidly disappearing.

Pu Huimin minces along the street with tiny steps. Her feet, encased in cloth shoes embroidered with flowers and birds, are barely five inches long. They are so small that each swaying pace is reduced to half the length of those who stride past her. Now 80, she is unembarrassed by the attention that her feet attract.

“I was about 5 when my mother started to bind my feet. I cried a lot because it hurt so much.” Now she smiles ruefully at the memory and insists that her family did not voluntarily subject her to this mutilation that would make her a much more valuable bride. “But we had to do this because the government officials here ordered it.”

She says that she does not know why officials issued such a directive. “We had to do this or there would be a punishment. It was some sort of fine. But it's a long time ago and I don't remember much about it now.” At home she has an elder sister with similar tiny feet. Her younger sister was born later and escaped the practice.

More than a dozen women with bound feet survive in her village. More than 300 lived here a decade ago.

There was a time in China when the number of women with golden lotus feet numbered in the millions. Legend has it that the custom was first adopted in the late Tang dynasty after an emperor fell in love with a concubine who wrapped her naturally tiny feet in silk when she danced.

The practice became entrenched throughout most tiers of society, held up as the paramount measure of beauty. Tiny feet came to be regarded as the body's most erogenous zone. Ancient sex manuals described the many ways to fondle the foot to ensure the man obtained the maximum pleasure.

Inside the doorway to her earthen-floored courtyard home, Pu Jifen sits on a stool swatting flies from a basket of tiny fish drying in the sun. Now 82, she displays little rancour at the decision by her grandmother to bind her feet when she was 5. “Of course it was terribly painful. But my grandmother told me that if I wanted to find a husband then I had to put up with it.”

She gestures with her hand to show how strips of cloth were bandaged tightly under her foot, pressing her toes under the ball of her foot and pushing up the arch to create the tiny feet regarded by Chinese men as the height of eroticism. She smiles knowingly. “As soon as the neighbours knew that I had bound feet they all came calling. All the men wanted to marry me.” Her parents found her a farmer to marry when she was 12.

Her tiny feet did not exempt her from farm work. “I had to work in the fields just like everyone else. I helped my husband to plough the fields and it was my job to take the vegetables into town to sell at the market. And I had to walk. Can you imagine?” She unwrapped her feet in 1956 and tried for two years to open out her toes. The experiment proved too painful for bones already broken and twisted for two decades. In 1958 she bound them up again and has kept them bandaged ever since. She unwraps and washes her feet three times a week. Each year she wears out three pairs of the hand-embroidered, cloth-soled shoes that she sews herself at home.

“At first I thought it would be really inconvenient for my whole life. But actually I have managed. I had to.”

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