In the 21st year of Guangxu (1895), after the defeat of the Sino-Japanese War of 1895-1895, Chen Jiu, a boy from the countryside of Zhili, suffered a military disaster and his parents died. He lived in Tianjin with half a piece of coarse cloth sewn by his mother as a beggar's gang token. In the slums outside the South Gate, he was beaten up by young beggars from the "Clean Clothes Hall" of the beggar gang for snatching half of the wotou, but was saved by Zhao Laogen, an old beggar from the "Dirty Clothes Hall".
