Recent discussions of the practice of footbinding in late imperial Chinese society have relied on qualitative evidence, often of a largely anecdotal nature. While qualitative sources are important to understanding what motivated Chinese actors to bind girls’ feet, they provide much less reliable evidence when it comes to estimating the extent to which the practice of footbinding varied among social groups and localities. These studies all acknowledge that footbinding was not uniformly practiced, and that wide variations existed with respect to the proportion of girls binding, the ages binding began, and the severity of deformation binding caused. Assessing such variation is fundamental to understanding the social and cultural pressures that encouraged binding in some circumstances and discouraged it in others. The early twentieth century censuses of Taiwan include comprehensive quantitative data on ethnicity, age, occupation, and region for the bound-footed population of women. This seminar will explore the census data from Taiwan for insights into the practice of footbinding in Taiwanese society. These data provide answers to many of the questions raised in the footbinding literature, as well as reveal issues and questions that should inspire new studies of Taiwanese society and Chinese social life.