In the twenty-seventh year of Daoguang's reign, southwest Henan suffered a severe drought. The water level of the Danjiang River dropped sharply, and all the crops withered. Li Wenyi, a scholar from Li Guanqiao, led his tribe to dig canals to divert water, and exposed in public the scam of fake Taoist priests who used praying for rain to amass money. Faced with the turmoil of hungry people snatching food, he cleverly used strategies to quell the fight. However, he later reflected on the family motto of the Li family and deeply reflected on his use of power.
During the years of trouble, he and Tian Cuilian, an orphan girl who fled from Baihe, got to know each other and broke through the family barriers and got married. More than ten years later, banditry broke out in the Central Plains. At the same time that the government issued a reclamation order, the two of them took their whole family to Baihe, southern Shaanxi, and settled in the Qinba Mountains to reclaim wasteland.
