An account of the author’s administration of Huimin 惠民 (leading county of Wuding 武定 prefecture, Shandong) from 1896 to 1900. According to the prefs., it should serve as a model to the profession. The text is a chronological narrative in the first person. The author’s colophon indicates that it was based on notes he took in the course of his work, which included much traveling to ensure tribute transportation, fight bandits, relieve famine, and so forth. His friend Li Fenggang convinced him to preserve the directness of the style and not try to polish and reorganize his text, which was “modeled on the genre of brush jottings and random notes practiced by the ancients” (仿古人筆記漫錄之體). The narrative is interspersed with quotations of a large number of proclamations, rhymes, accounts, stele texts, prefaces, and other set pieces. The entries deal with such topics as controlling clerk and runner exactions, discouraging lawsuits, keeping criminals in custody, river control works, charitable schools, levying grain tribute, planting trees, tax administration, famine relief, sacrifices, road and dike repairs, etc. The last entries provide a vivid account of the conditions created by the Boxers in the region. The mulu in the copy reproduced in GZSJC provides captions to the entries, though they are absent from the text proper. The author’s discussion of the issues he was confronted with is at the same time exhaustive and critical, and clearly written with a didactic intention; it delivers a detailed picture of the conditions in an important county located on the Grand Canal during the last years of the nineteenth century. At one point the text was to be appended to a supplement to the 1886 Huimin local gazetteer compiled in 1899 (惠民縣志補遺), to which Liu Tang wanted to contribute materials from his own diaries during the four years he spent in the locality; he eventually decided to publish them separately in order to abide by the principle that the policies of the incumbent official should not be included in the contents of a new gazetteer. The prefaces celebrate Liu Tang’s abilities and “concrete government” (實政), and the fact that, unlike many scholars, he could prove himself not only in words but also in deeds (能言而亦能行).