The Country Where Men Bound Their Feet / 女儿国：一个清代男人被强行缠足的国度

A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — Episode 3

From Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘), Chapters 32–37 · 第三十二至三十七回 · 女儿国

By Li Ruzhen (李汝珍, c. 1763–1830) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

A coastal kingdom somewhere east of the Eastern Sea, in the reign of the Empress Wu Zetian, late seventh century. The merchant ship has reached a country where the genders are inverted — women in boots ride out to govern; men in skirts stay home and powder their faces. The travelers' merchant brother-in-law, Lin Zhiyang, goes ashore alone with a chest of cosmetics he hopes to sell at the palace. He does not return to the ship that night. He does not return the next night, or the night after. By the time his companions find out what has become of him, the female king has already decided he is a beautiful man — and the palace staff have already begun, on royal command, to pierce his ears and break his feet to make him fit for the harem.

Arrival: The Country Where the Women Wear Boots

The ship reached the Country of Women (Nǚ'ér Guó, 女儿国)^{[1]Nǚ'ér Guó (女儿国): "The Country of Daughters" or "The Country of Women." Like Junzi Guo, this is a real toponym in the Shan Hai Jing (山海经, c. 4th c. BCE), referring to a legendary all-female nation in the Eastern Sea where conception was achieved by bathing in a sacred river. The Tang Buddhist pilgrim narrative Xī Yóu Jì (西游记, Journey to the West) and its predecessors borrowed and elaborated this version. Li Ruzhen, in deliberate contrast, writes a different Country of Women — one that has men, marriage, and reproduction in the ordinary way, with the genders' social roles inverted rather than the genders themselves erased. This distinction matters: Li Ruzhen is not writing a separatist fantasy. He is writing a thought experiment about what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of the role assigned to women in his own society.} on the morning of the company's seventy-first day at sea.

Tang Ao,^{[2]Tang Ao (唐敖): The protagonist of Flowers in the Mirror. See the annotation in our Junzi Guo translation for full background. By the time the ship reaches Nü'er Guo in Chapter 32, Tang Ao has spent thirty-one chapters traveling, has learned a great deal about himself, and is showing the early signs of the Daoist disillusionment that will, eight chapters later, cause him to leave the company on Lesser Penglai and never return to the Tang capital.} the disgraced tànhuā scholar — third laureate of the imperial examinations under the Empress Wu Zetian until his friend Xu Jingye's failed rebellion in 684 stripped him of rank — looked at the harbor through the cabin window and announced that he would not be going ashore. He had read his Tang dynasty Buddhist literature. He knew what a Country of Women did to visiting men. The monk Xuanzang, on his pilgrimage to India a generation earlier, had passed through a country of this name and had nearly been kept there permanently as the female king's husband; only a clever ruse by his disciples had freed him. Tang Ao did not propose to repeat the experiment.

Duo Jiugong,^{[3]Duo Jiugong (多九公): "Duo the Ninth," the eighty-year-old retired sea captain who serves as the expedition's pilot and intercultural consultant. See the Junzi Guo translation for fuller annotation. Duo is the only one of the three travelers who has been to the Country of Women before, and his earlier visits were all conducted from offshore — he is not, in fact, an authority on what happens to a Tang man who walks into the capital alone.} the eighty-year-old retired sea captain who served as the expedition's guide and had visited some forty foreign countries before, laughed at him.

"This is not that Nǚ'ér Guó, brother Tang. The country Xuanzang found was the country with no men in it at all — those women conceived their daughters by bathing in the sacred river and cutting their own reflections with stones. This country has men. There are husbands here, there are sons, there are fathers. The only difference is that the men and the women have swapped places. Here the men wear skirts and stay indoors and run the household; the women wear boots and go out and govern. You will not be in any danger from the king, Tang brother. The king is a woman. You she has no use for. It is your brother-in-law she will be interested in, if she is interested in anyone at all."

Tang Ao, partially reassured, asked the obvious question. "And the men here — the ones playing the wifely role — do they paint their faces? Do they bind their feet?"

Lin Zhiyang,^{[4]Lin Zhiyang (林之洋): Tang Ao's wife's brother. A merchant from the Lingnan coast (modern Guangdong) who owns the ship and finances the entire expedition. In the early chapters of Flowers in the Mirror he is almost purely a comic-relief figure — the mercenary, the bargainer, the man whose only interest in any foreign country is whether he can sell something there. The Country of Women chapter is the moment in the novel where Li Ruzhen elevates him to something more. After his ordeal, Lin Zhiyang continues to provide comic relief in subsequent chapters, but the comic register is now shadowed; the narrator's affection for him deepens, and he becomes one of the moral centers of the novel without ever explicitly taking on a moralizing role.} the merchant brother-in-law who owned the ship and whose entire livelihood was overseas trade, answered before Duo Jiugong could.

"They do both. The men here paint their faces white and red, and they bind their feet from boyhood. The smaller the foot, the better the marriage prospects. Big feet on a man are considered grotesque." He laughed, then reached into his sleeve and pulled out the cargo manifest he had been studying for three days. "And they will pay anything for cosmetics. I checked our manifest twice. We are carrying eighty trunks of rouge, white lead powder, perfumed hair-oil, eyebrow paint, gold-thread earrings, jade hairpins, and silk slippers. Eighty trunks. I have been planning to sell the lot here for a year. This is the trip that pays for the whole expedition."

He looked up. "I am going ashore. Brother Tang, you stay with the ship if you like. Duo old man, your foot is still bad — you stay too. I will go alone with the manifest."

Duo Jiugong considered. He had been to this Country of Women twice before in his career — most recently fifteen years ago — and had always done business through intermediaries, never venturing into the capital itself. The country was, in his recollection, perfectly safe for ordinary commerce. Lin Zhiyang spoke fluent Tang-court Chinese, which the ruling class here spoke as a courtesy language. The risk seemed small. "Go," he said. "Take two of the deck hands as porters. Be back by sundown. If you sell the lot, we are paid for the year."

Lin Zhiyang went. He did not come back by sundown. He did not come back at all that night, or the next, or the next.

The Sale, the Inspection, and the Royal Eye

What had happened to him, the others did not learn for nearly a week.

Lin Zhiyang had walked straight to the marketplace, opened his manifest, and found within twenty minutes that the goods sold themselves. Several local households bought partial trunks at decent prices. A wealthy townhouse bought three full trunks. By midday a chamberlain from the palace of the king's brother — the guójiù, "the country's uncle" — had heard about the foreign cosmetics and sent a runner asking the merchant to come to the brother-in-law's residence with his full inventory.

Lin Zhiyang went. The brother-in-law's residence was the size of a county yamen, walled in red brick, full of liveried servants. The chamberlain examined the manifest, declared that the brother-in-law was indeed in the market for high-quality goods of this kind, and added that there was a possibility — a very strong possibility — that the king herself might be interested. The royal court had been searching, the chamberlain said, for the right cosmetics with which to outfit the new wave of consorts being added to the royal harem.

"Leave the manifest with me," the chamberlain said. "Go upstairs and have a meal. Wait."

Lin Zhiyang, smelling a sale of unprecedented size, went upstairs and waited. He was served wine and four small dishes by a serving-man with a faint mustache, painted cheeks, and bound feet that were, by Tang dynasty standards, very small indeed. Lin Zhiyang noted with professional interest that the man's lipstick was visibly inferior to his own product line and resolved to lead his sales pitch with the cinnabar-based stick from trunk fourteen.

He did not get the chance to sell anything.

While Lin Zhiyang was eating his second dish, the manifest was being carried — at the chamberlain's order — directly into the king's private chamber. The king (whose name is never given in the original; she is only ever guówáng, "the king") read the manifest. She handed it back. Then she asked the chamberlain a question.

"This merchant. From the great Tang. You have seen him?"

"I have, your majesty."

"Describe him."

"A man perhaps thirty-five years of age. Tall. Slender of build. Fair-skinned. Clear eyes. Heavy black eyebrows. A small mustache. He carries himself well. He speaks the court Chinese as if he were born to it."

The king considered this for some time. Then she said: "I would like to look at this merchant before deciding whether to buy his goods. Bring him to the inner court. Make sure he is washed first."

The chamberlain bowed. He went upstairs to the room where Lin Zhiyang was eating his second dish, and he did not tell him.

Lin Zhiyang was conducted, instead, to a bath house, washed thoroughly by attendants who paid the kind of attention to grooming and detail that no man's bath had ever received in the city of Lin'an or any other commercial port he had visited. He was dressed in a clean robe. He was perfumed. He was led, still under the impression that he was being prepared for a sales meeting, to a small reception chamber where the king of the Country of Women was waiting with a cup of tea.

The king looked at him for a long minute. She did not speak. Then she nodded, once, to the chamberlain.

The chamberlain knelt. "Your majesty has decided?"

"Yes," she said. "He is a very beautiful man. I will take him as my royal consort. Begin the preparations."

Lin Zhiyang, still holding the cargo manifest, said: "I beg your pardon, your majesty?"

The king did not answer him. She had already left the chamber.

The Coronation Lin Zhiyang Did Not Want

What happened next, in Chapter 33 of the original, occupies one of the most famous and most uncomfortable passages in nineteenth-century Chinese fiction.

Lin Zhiyang was brought to a private apartment on an upper floor of the palace. A delegation of palace women arrived — the original calls them gōngé (宫娥), "palace maidens," but specifies that these particular ones were shēn gāo tǐ zhuàng, mǎn zuǐ húxū (身高体壮, 满嘴胡须) — tall and powerfully built, with full beards. These were the senior palace staff: women of mature years, professional in manner, holding offices that in the Tang court would have been held by senior eunuchs.

They informed Lin Zhiyang, courteously and without rancor, that he had just been formally elevated to the rank of wáng fēi — Royal Consort. There would be a wedding within the month. Before the wedding there were certain customary preparations. He was a Tang man, which was itself a great honor for the kingdom, but his appearance would need to be brought into accord with local standards of beauty before the king could present him at court.

Lin Zhiyang, holding very still, asked what specifically those preparations involved.

The answer, the original tells us, was given in the form of two sequential procedures.

A bearded palace woman with a needle and thread knelt at the foot of the bed. Bǐng niángniáng: fèng mìng chuān ěr. — Reporting to the lady consort: by royal command, ear-piercing. Four other palace women took hold of Lin Zhiyang's arms and shoulders, immobilizing him. The bearded woman with the needle gripped his right earlobe, kneaded it briefly between her fingers to numb the tissue, and pushed the needle through. Lin Zhiyang, the original reports, dà jiào yī shēng: téng shā ǎn liǎo! — cried out in a great voice: I am being killed by the pain! — and threw himself backward, only to be caught and held in place by the four palace women. The needle was pushed through his left ear. Lead-white powder was applied to both punctures to reduce inflammation. A pair of eight-jeweled gold ear-rings was inserted. The bearded woman bowed and withdrew.

A second bearded palace woman, this one with a roll of white silk, knelt in her place. Bǐng niángniáng: fèng mìng chán zú. — Reporting to the lady consort: by royal command, foot-binding.

What followed in the next half-hour is described in the original with a precision that no English summary I have ever seen does justice to. The exact words are preserved in the folded original-text section below, and what I am giving here is the substance.

That night, alone, Lin Zhiyang unwrapped the silk from his feet and tried to straighten his toes. The next morning the binding was discovered. The king was informed. The king's order was bù zūn yuē shù — fèng mìng dǎ ròu — the consort has not honored the agreement; by command, beat the flesh. Four powerful women came in, removed Lin Zhiyang's lower clothing, and beat him across the buttocks and thighs with a heavy paddle until, the original states with documentary brevity, cái dǎ wǔ bǎn, yè yǐ ròu zhàn pí kāi, xuè jiàn dāng chǎng — after only five strokes the flesh was split and the blood was on the floor. The binding was reapplied. He did not unwrap the silk again.

Within fifteen days, the original tells us, Lin Zhiyang's feet had been bound and re-bound, day after day, while being steamed with medicinal water to soften the bone (yòng yào shuǐ xūn xǐ), and the metatarsal bones had been broken in two and folded back on themselves (jiǎo miàn wān qū zhé zuò liǎng duàn). The toes had begun to suppurate. Each morning the bandages were soaked through with fresh blood. The palace women, watching him in shifts so that he could not unwrap the bindings even at night, no longer addressed him as Lin Zhiyang. They addressed him by the title of his new station: niángniáng, "lady consort."

He had been in the palace for less than a fortnight.

What Li Ruzhen Was Doing

This is the passage of Flowers in the Mirror that nineteenth-century Chinese readers, and twentieth-century Chinese feminist critics, have always recognized as the most pointed in the book. The two senior ministers of the Country of Gentlemen, in Chapter 12, had already denounced footbinding in words: "To take a healthy girl, in the name of beauty, and bind her feet until the bones break and the flesh festers — this is no different from the manufacture of instruments of perversion. How can a people who teach Confucian benevolence permit it?" That denunciation was a speech. It was abstract. It could be agreed with as a moral principle and ignored in practice, as had been the standard response of educated Chinese readers to anti-footbinding arguments for the previous five centuries.

What Li Ruzhen does in Chapters 32–37 is take the abstract argument and force the reader through it. He puts a Qing-dynasty man — a successful merchant, a confident professional, a conventional husband and father, a man with no particular feminist views and no tolerance for anything outside his own commercial interests — into the body of a young Chinese girl of the same period, and walks the reader through, day by day, what the procedure actually consists of. The pain. The blood. The infection. The systematic suppression of resistance through beating. The renaming. The way the household servants stop using the patient's personal name.

He does this without commentary. He does not pause the narrative to lecture the reader. He does not have a sympathetic Tang traveler step in to deplore the practice in the text. He simply tells the reader what is being done to Lin Zhiyang, in the same matter-of-fact tone the rest of the book uses for the satirical fantasies of the Country of Gentlemen and the Country of Two Faces.

The reader is meant to draw the conclusion unaided.

What makes the sequence even more uncomfortable, on rereading, is that the women administering the procedure are not malicious. They are professionals. They are doing a job they have been doing all their adult lives — preparing a candidate for the royal harem — to a high standard of craftsmanship. The bearded palace woman who pierces his ears applies lead-white powder afterward to reduce inflammation; she has done this hundreds of times. The bearded palace woman who breaks his feet uses alum to manage moisture and adjusts her stitching technique by feel as she works; she is, in her own terms, good at this. The whole apparatus of the binding — alum, white silk, simultaneous wrapping and stitching, medicinal steam, post-procedure ointments, the royal-grade beating administered when the patient resists — is presented as a fully professionalized institution with codified procedures and trained practitioners.

That, Li Ruzhen is saying, is the point. The atrocity is not personal cruelty. It is a competent, well-organized, well-resourced system of mutilation, run by experts who think of themselves as performing a trained skill, supported by the entire weight of court protocol, palace economy, and beauty culture. Reverse the genders of the procedure, and you have nineteenth-century China.

Tang Ao's Rescue and the Long Shadow of Mount Penglai

The remainder of Lin Zhiyang's ordeal, narrated in Chapters 34–37, runs as follows.

Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong, having tracked Lin Zhiyang to the palace through informants, drafted petition after petition to the various ministries of the Country of Women begging for his release. Every ministry refused; the marriage date had been set, the country could not be seen to interfere with the king's private affairs. The petitions were rejected for over a month. Lin Zhiyang's feet, in the meantime, had become so badly mangled that he had attempted suicide twice and been prevented by the palace staff watching him in shifts.

The breakthrough came when the country was struck by a flood. The principal river of the kingdom, swollen by spring rains in the western mountains, broke its dykes and threatened to inundate the capital. The king, who governed competently when she was not selecting consorts, issued a national appeal: any foreigner with engineering skill who could repair the dykes would be granted any single favor he asked. Tang Ao, who had studied flood-control engineering as part of his examination preparation a decade earlier, presented himself at the palace with a proposal. The proposal worked. The dykes were rebuilt. The capital was saved.

Tang Ao, asked to name his reward, asked for the release of Lin Zhiyang. The king, bound by her own edict, granted it.

Lin Zhiyang was brought down from the palace to the ship in a litter, his feet still wrapped, his hair still pinned, his face still painted. Once aboard, the binding was cut away. The damage to his feet was permanent — the metatarsal bones had set in their broken position and could not be reset — and he walked with a limp for the rest of the novel. The ear-rings were taken out; the holes never closed. The experience marked him in a way that nothing else in the voyage marked him; the original notes that he never spoke of the Country of Women again, in any of the next twenty-six countries the ship visited, except once when a child in another port asked him what had happened to his feet and he answered only: I was a queen for a month.

The voyage continued. The expedition visited some thirty more countries. Eventually, in Chapter 40, Tang Ao parted from his companions on the holy mountain of Lesser Penglai (小蓬莱, Xiǎo Pénglái, a Daoist immortal-paradise located, in Li Ruzhen's geography, somewhere in the South China Sea) and remained there to take Daoist orders, having decided that he would not return to the disgraced court life of the Tang capital. The remaining sixty chapters of the novel are narrated by his daughter, Tang Xiaoshan (唐小山), who eventually retrieves him from Lesser Penglai, returns to the capital, and presides over the imperial-examination cycle — held by special edict of the Empress Wu Zetian — in which the hundred reincarnated Flower Spirits of Heaven take and pass the civil-service examination as women.

But that is a story for many tales from now.

Translator's Notebook

Of all the chapters of Flowers in the Mirror I have translated so far, this is the one I dreaded most.

I dreaded it because the source material is so explicit. Li Ruzhen, in 1818, did not write about footbinding the way the careful male novelists of the eighteenth century wrote about footbinding. He did not avert his eyes. He did not gesture at the small foot in passing. He sat the reader down and told them, with documentary precision, what the procedure consisted of, how long it took, how the resistance was suppressed, what the bandages looked like by the second week. I have read perhaps a hundred Qing-era novels at this point and I cannot think of another one that approaches this passage in directness. Hong Lou Meng does not approach it. The Sanyan stories do not approach it. Liaozhai does not approach it. Even the late-Qing reformist tracts that attacked footbinding directly — Liang Qichao's, for instance — tend to make the case in abstract terms, as a question of national strength or female productivity, rather than walking through the procedure step by step.

Li Ruzhen was a failed examination candidate from a coastal county in Jiangsu, with no political platform and no powerful patron, and he made a different choice. He chose to make the reader experience footbinding through the body of a man — a male reader's surrogate — and he chose to make the man someone the reader would naturally identify with: the merchant brother-in-law, the comic-relief character, the practical money-making businessman who has been the audience's favorite figure for the previous thirty chapters. Lin Zhiyang is not the protagonist. He is the regular guy. He is who the male Qing dynasty reader would most naturally project himself onto. And Li Ruzhen knew exactly what he was doing when he picked Lin Zhiyang to be the body on the bed.

The other thing I want to flag, because it is easy to miss when you read this in modern Chinese textbooks, is that the female king of the Country of Women is not the villain. She is portrayed throughout the chapter as a competent ruler — she handles the flood crisis with intelligence, she keeps her word about the reward, she releases Lin Zhiyang once Tang Ao asks. Her interest in Lin Zhiyang is an exact mirror of the interest a Qing dynasty male monarch would have in a beautiful woman from a foreign country: a property transaction, decided by appearance, conducted through the household staff, with the candidate's own consent treated as a formality. She is not a monster. She is a normal head of state, behaving as a normal head of state of her culture would normally behave. The horror of the chapter is precisely that the procedure she sets in motion — the routine procedure for preparing a new consort for the royal harem — is a procedure that fifty thousand ordinary Chinese families set in motion every year for their own daughters, with the same competence and the same matter-of-factness.

Li Ruzhen is not asking the reader to be angry at the female king. He is asking the reader to be angry at the procedure. He is asking the reader to notice that the procedure does not become more horrifying when administered by a king than when administered by a mother. It was always this horrifying. The reader, for most of his reading life, simply had not been put in a position to notice.

I found I could not write this chapter in one sitting. I had to put it down twice. I do not say this as a literary affectation; I say it because I think the original is meant to do exactly that to the reader, and any English translation that does not at some point require the translator to walk away from the desk for an hour has missed the point.

Lin Zhiyang's feet are real feet. They were the feet of half the women in the empire when Li Ruzhen was writing this chapter. They were the feet of the translator's own great-great-grandmothers. They were the feet of perhaps a hundred million Chinese women between the late twelfth century and the early twentieth.

I am glad we are not done translating these chapters yet, and I am glad the next port the ship visits is the Country of Black Teeth, where the women are scholars and the men do laundry, and Lin Zhiyang gets to be in a country that thinks his bound feet are merely strange, rather than in a country that thinks his unbound feet are an outrage.

He needs the rest. So, I think, do I.

Next port: The Country of Black Teeth (Hēi Chǐ Guó, 黑齿国) — where every citizen blackens her teeth from birth as a sign of refinement, every woman of station is a published scholar, and Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong are publicly humiliated in a literary debate by two fifteen-year-old schoolgirls who quote the Book of Songs better than they do. → [Coming soon]