The chapter that I read (in translation) particularly involved the heroes coming to a land ruled by women where all of the men wear women's clothing. They are told that they must be women since they have beards. The hottest of the heroes is then kidnapped and taken away to a harem where he is put into perfume and make-up, his ears are pierced for jewellery, and his feet are bound against his will. The violence, coercion and indignity of certain gender roles seems to be very strongly argued.
I was surprised by how modern the approach to gender seemed and how much it seemed to be constructing the idea that gender was a social construct.
Did the novel make a big impact at the time and did it reflect a larger social movement? Was gender equality as we now understand it a contemporary debate in China? Or was this novel a one off oddity that was only really noticed later on for its critique of gender?
"Flowers in the Mirror" was one of the many novels that reflected the anti-Confucian sentiment that grew throughout the Qing dynasty. Gender is definitely one of the central themes of the book, women are a large part of the cast and it's set in the Tang dynasty during the reign of Wu Zetian, the only woman to take the title of Emperor of China. It would probably be an anachronism to call it feminist, but highlighting the mistreatment of women was part of the larger anti-Confucian perspective which fought against the idea of marriage as a strict hierarchy, with the husband as superior and the wife as inferior.
There is also a deeper metaphor at work. It was in the Qing dynasty that the Chinese imperial examinations, a series of exams which granted titles and a shot at the bureaucracy to successful exam-takers, became deeply unpopular from a combination of factors:
The population of China had grown rapidly between the 1750s and the early 1800s, with only a negligible rise in demand for bureaucratic positions. This meant that earning even a minor title was brutally competitive.
The exams were absurdly difficult. This comment gives a pretty good idea of how strict and arbitrary the questions could be.
The exams promoted a very orthodox ideology -- there was a right philosophy and a wrong philosophy, and the 'right philosophy' was the 12th century philosopher Zhu Xi's commentaries on the Four Books: the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Great Learning. In other words, it's a little like if becoming a mayor involved writing a dissertation on Plato's Republic, in ancient Greek.
The end result was a scholarly culture that was seen as hyperfocused on Confucian tradition and propriety, while not caring that much about actually running the bureaucracy. In this context, when Tang Ao says "these big feet of mine, how can they bear restriction?" it could also be seen as a metaphor for Confucian orthodoxy constricting and binding everyone who lived under the Qing dynasty.