Jin Ping Mei begins by lifting an episode out of Water Margin and refusing to end it. In the earlier novel, Ximen Qing and Pan Jinlian poison her husband, Wu Song kills them both, and the outlaw story moves on within a few chapters. Jin Ping Mei takes the same characters at the same moment and lets them live instead, then spends a hundred chapters inside Ximen Qing's household: his wives, his money, his officials and his decline. It is the first major Chinese novel about domestic life rather than about heroes, and it is built by opening a door the source closed.