On this day, two young women were married in Yangzhou. One was Du Bingyan (played by Li Lin), the daughter of a wealthy local merchant. The other was Li Yuhu (played by Huang Yi), the daughter of a local martial arts instructor. To outsiders, both seemed destined for happy marriages, but only they knew the bitterness beneath the surface. Bingyan was to marry Qi Tianlei (played by Nie Yuan), the third son of the wealthy Qi family of Liuzhou, while Yuhu was to marry Yuan Buqu (played by Shi Xiaohong), a high-ranking court official and great general. Qi Tianlei was frail and sickly, and the wedding was being rushed to bring him good fortune. Yuan Buqu had suffered contempt from the Li family before making his name, and had decided to marry Yuhu as an act of revenge. Just as the two brides secretly wept in their bridal sedan chairs, a torrential rain suddenly began. Both wedding processions took shelter from the storm in the same temple, but when the rain cleared, the bearers had carried the wrong sedan chairs! And so began two strange and convoluted marriages.
