When Wang Yanting was magistrate of Lingbi there was a farmer’s wife in one of the villages named Li, about thirty, ugly and blind, who had been ill with dropsy for over ten years and whose belly was huge as a pig’s.
One night she died. Her husband went to town to buy a coffin.
The coffin arrived. They were about to put her in it.
She was alive. Both her eyes could see, and her belly was flat again.
The husband was delighted and went to her. She pushed him off and wept.
“I am Miss Wang, of such-and-such village. I am not married. What am I doing here? Where are my father and mother and sisters?”
The husband was horrified and sent at once to that village — where the whole family was wailing for a young daughter already buried.
Her parents came at a run. The woman saw them and wept and held them, and told them the whole of her life, and everything matched.
The family she had been betrothed to came to look at her too. She was bashful with them, and blushed.
Both families claimed her, and went to law over it.
Wang Yanting settled it between them and awarded her to the farmer.
This happened in the twenty-first year of the Qianlong reign.