"The story's opening narrative lays out the grand right [moral].
A well known exemplar foreshadows the entire text."

• Wang Mian

1. The story of this chapter takes place in Zhejiang in the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368).
2. Wang Mian's father dies when he is seven, after which he is only able to continue school for 3 years.
3. Then his mother is no longer able to support him, so he goes to work as a buffalo heard boy.
• He first uses his spare money to buy books.
• But after hearing a conversation between scholars that reveals to him the empty vanity of officialdom, Wang Mian gives up buying books and takes up the study of painting instead.
4. He ends up becoming a famous painter of flowers.
• He is also known for his erudition and mastery of the classics.
• He eventually is able to make a living through his painting.
5. But Wang Mian is an eccentric, uninterested in official position.
• Bailiff Chai commissions a set of 24 of Wang Mian's paintings for the county Magistrate Shi.
• Wang Mian only agrees at the urging of his friend Old Jin, the peasant.
• A Magistrate Wei, a superior official to whom Magistrate Shi had presented the 24 paintings, wishes to meet Want Mian.
• Wang Mian refuses to go.
• He also makes himself unavailable when Magistrate Shi condescends to try and visit him.  He explains to Old Jin, "This magistrate relies on Mr. Wei's authority to tyrannize the common people here, and do many other bad things.  Why should I have anything to do with a man like that."
6. Fearing Magistrate Wei's anger over his action, Wang Mian moves to Jinan, Shandong, in the North, leaving his mother in Zhejiang.
• He makes a good living there for 6 months.
• A flood of the Yellow River, and a consequent flood of refugees, provides Wang Mian a reason to return home.
7. Six years after he returns home, Wang Mian's mother dies.
8. On her death bed she has her son promise to never become an official.
9. A year after his three-year mourning period, Wang Mian is visited by Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-1398), the future founder of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).
• Wang Mian advises him to "use goodness and justice to win the people."
• Wang Mian reveals to no one who visited him.
10. The Ming dynasty is established.
• Old Jin shows Wang Mian a bulletin announcing that Magistrate Wei was exiled for arrogance toward the new emperor.
• The bulletin also notes that future civil service exams will only test ability to write "eight-legged essays," which Wang Mian remarks promises ill for the future of scholarship and civil service.
11. Later Wang Mian, alarmed by word that he will be offered an official appointment, slips away to live as an anonymous recluse in the mountains.

• Opening poem hints at the moral point of the novel:
  
  
"People face many crossroads in the directions their lives may take:
Military officers, government ministers, gods, and immortals, all begin as ordinary people.
A hundred dynasties rise and fall; dawn returns to dusk;
Wild river winds can blow down the trees of a previous reign.
Accomplishment, fame, wealth, and position are all without foundation;
One can expend all one's heart and passion [in their pursuit], and yet all  is wasted in the flash of time.
So have a few glasses of turbid wine and go for drunken reverie;
For who knows where the water flows, or whence the blossoms wither."


• Prose passages descriptive of scenery are innovative and well done.

Guidelines for the construction of your outlines:

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