Twice now I've seen people discuss the origins of the Cinderella story yet ignore the existence of Ye Xian!
Joseph Jacobs (the author of the best-known versions of Jack and the Beanstalk and The Three Little Pigs) wrote in the footnotes to his version, The Cinder Maid, that while ancient proto-versions like Rhodopis do exist, the archetype of Cinderella most likely originated in Germany, because it's a German wedding tradition for the groom to place a shoe on the bride's foot. (More specifically, for the guests to jokingly "steal" and "auction off" one of the bride's shoes, only for the groom to make the "winning bid" and then return the shoe to her.)
More recently, the late Roberto De Simone (who wrote and directed the musical La Gatta Cenerentola and later directed a famous production of the opera La Cenerentola starring Cecilia Bartoli) said that he believed the archetype of Donkeyskin was the original Cinderella story: where the heroine's father tries to marry her, so she runs away and becomes a scullery maid in or near another kingdom's royal palace. He thought it was bowdlerization over time that replaced the incestuous father with a wicked stepmother as the villain.
But what about Ye Xian? It's much older than any known Cinderella from Germany! It's also much older any recorded Donkeyskin tale, yet it features a stepmother! And it obviously points to the Chinese standard of tiny feet as essential to female beauty, not to the German custom of "stealing" the bride's shoe, as the origin of the slipper-fitting search.
I'm not quite sure how those men could do their research yet overlook Ye Xian this way!
