At the time when Li Ruzhen wrote his Flowers in the Mirror, Europe was gradually recovering from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The first decades of the nineteenth century were marked by a period of cultural crisis, with the utopian imagination trying to find a solution for the urgent social problems which the French Revolution had brought to the surface but had failed to solve. European intellectuals and politicians were torn between rationalism and romanticism, agnosticism and religion, reactionary forces and imminent revolution. They were challenged to choose between, on the one hand, the rationalist legacy of Condorcet and the technological utopianism of Saint-Simon, and, on the other, the tradition of celebrating nature in the wake of Rousseau and a free play of the emotions in the utopianism of Fourier, a precursor of Freud according to Ricoeur (1986). In the political and intellectual turmoil of the first half of the nineteenth century small-scale experiments were launched, designed to implement various shades of socialism. North America offered a hospitable environment for such experiments with communal ways of life. Ever since the Declaration of Independence of 1776 America had played an increasingly important role in the Enlightenment debate and the subsequent discussion on democracy. Even the old Goethe incorporated the theme of emigration to North America in his partly utopian novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre(1829, Wilhelm Meister’s Travels).

It was a period of boiling activity, both intellectually and in industry. The steam engine inflamed the imagination. Technological progress as evidenced in the railway system and new means of communication raised the expectation that social problems could also be solved. The industrial and political fervor in Europe differs strikingly from the ironic complacency with which Li Ruzhen looked at the Chinese cultural tradition. As we shall see in chapter 12, it was little over a decade later, notably during the AngloChinese War of 1839-1842 – the so-called “Opium War” – that China was confronted with a technologically and militarily superior European power, as a result of which it was forced to give up its splendid cultural isolation that had protected a stale Confucianism and an escapist Daoism.