According to the pref., the book was composed (seemingly around 1117) in Guangling 廣陵 (modern Yangzhou) while Li Yuanbi was waiting for his next appointment. He collected about 130 remarks on administrative matters from the local elite (j. 1-4), and added more than 100 entries of his own (j. 5-10). The resulting text, which Li seems to have composed for his own use, has been called by Denis Twitchett “the fullest of the surviving Song handbooks” for local administrative practice. The emphasis is on legal procedures and technical terms rather than moral advice. J. 1 has three sections, on rectifying oneself (正己), regulating one’s family (治家), and performing official duties (處事), respectively. J. 2-4 carry on with official duties, elaborating (in some disorder) on every kind of topic, including buildings, personnel, procedures, justice, prisons, punishments, taxation, landowning, paperwork, and more, at places going into details that only a practitioner could know. J. 5 contains 72 regulations for the official’s underlings to follow, regarding registers, deadlines, behavior, procedures, paperwork, tax collection, prisoners, and so on. J. 6 is a proclamation in 29 items with rules for the common people. J. 7 contains three proclamations (lit. placards 牓): one (in 21 items) to village personnel (耆壯), one (in 7 items) to inn-keepers (客店戶), and one warning the people to beware of impostors claiming to be associated with a new official. J. 8 is composed of six proclamations concerning guarantor-house scribes (冩狀鈔書鋪戸), tax collection, brokers (牙人), family information sheets for administration runners (公人), the permits used by official staff to make purchases from guilds, and reception in official hostels. J. 9 provides formats for administrative documents (判狀印板) and examples of proclamations (勸諭牓). J. 10 contains instructions on traveling (登途須知). These concrete items deal with the most basic administrative practices, institutions, and regulations; yet the text is at places allusive and hard to understand.