Flowers in the Mirror (work by Li Ruzhen)
About This Novel
"Flowers in the Mirror" is a novel written by Li Ruzhen in the Qing Dynasty. It was written during the Jiaqing and Daoguang years. The book has a total of 100 chapters. It is set in the era of Wu Zetian and tells the story of the Baihua Fairy in the sky and the flowers under her control. Because they followed the orders of the Emperor Wu Zetian and bloomed against time, they were demoted to the mortal world to experience. The first half of the novel mainly describes the story of Baihua Fairy's father, the scholar Tang Ao, who failed in the imperial examination and traveled to sea with his wife's brother Lin Zhiyang and the helmsman Duo Jiugong. During his travels, Tang Ao found the descendants of Xu Jingye, King Luo Bin and other loyal ministers who were exiled overseas because of their participation in the crusade against Wu Zetian. He also recorded his experiences in dozens of strange countries overseas. These descriptions of the country of girls, the country of gentlemen, foot binding, female imperial examinations, etc., Use bizarre customs to satirize various institutional ills of real society, showing the author's conception of an ideal society and his in-depth thinking about the real world. The brilliance of his thoughts far surpassed the era in which he lived. It is a pity that the second half of the work switches to the description of the group of talented women descended from the Fairy of Hundreds of Flowers, which is completely reduced to the author's work showing off his skills. It is almost a long display of drinking orders, lantern riddles, Shuanglu, algorithms, rhymes, etc.
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