Perhaps it was because of his melancholy experiences in T'an-ch'eng that in the brief essays with which he introduced several of the economic sections in the "Local History" Feng wrote so frankly about the miseries of the area, the poverty of its people, and the general inability of the local gentry to help alleviate that misery.
P. 3, Chapter 1, The Observers

As Huang Liu-hung found when he came to T'an-ch'eng to serve as magistrate in 1670, the people's problem was one of basic survival- physical and moral- in a world that seemed to be disintegrating before their eyes.
P. 9, Chapter 1, The Observers

The people of T'an-ch'eng claimed to know the exact spot where Confucius had sought the advice of their viscount twenty-two hundred years before- just inside the north gate of the magistrate's current office compound- and the place was honored with a temple, while a more public plaque in...