A poor peasant woman in Tancheng abandons her husband to run off with another man, is deserted by her lover, and returns home, where her husband takes her back, then strangles her one winter night and attempts to frame a neighbor by dumping her body on his land. The magistrate's forensic examination of the frozen corpse exposes the husband's lie, and the case survives in the record only because it intersected the duties of an official and a local scholar.
The inner lives of illiterate poor people who left no writings can be partially reconstructed by cross-reading sources created for other purposes — a magistrate's handbook, a local gazetteer, and a nearby writer's fiction. The method yields texture and plausibility rather than certainty, and the imagined dream given to Woman Wang is openly borrowed from Pu Songling's stories because no record of her own thoughts exists.
In a county where imperial authority was understaffed and underfunded, the written legal code and the single magistrate were the main points where the distant state touched ordinary lives. Reading a place through its legal cases, land-tax disputes, and punishments reveals how a strained administration actually governed through improvisation, fines, and personal judgment rather than smooth institutional machinery.