When Xu Xiake died in the fourteenth year of Chongzhen (164 1), his Journey to the West had not been compiled. Before he died, he asked Ji Huiming, a teacher at his home school, to compile it, and asked permission to help him engrave it. Ji Huiming failed to live up to his great trust. After searching, correcting and modifying all the manuscripts, he compiled Xu Xiake's Journey to the West in the twelfth lunar month of the fifteenth year of Chongzhen (1642), which is the earliest transcript of travel notes. In the second year of Shunzhi in Qing Dynasty (1645), Jiangyin defended the city against Qing Dynasty and suffered from war. Xu Men was also enslaved, and Xu Xiake's eldest son Xu Yi and nephew Xu Yuqing were killed. Ji Huiming's travel notes and Xu Xiake's poems were looted or lost, but there are still some travel notes compiled by Ji Huiming, and later Liu Guodian, governor of Jiangnan, Shandong Province, admired Xu Xiake. He paid a special visit to Shaq's grandson Xu Jianji and asked him for this travel book. Xu Jianji gave Liu Guo the rest of the manuscript and marble of Shaq's Travels. Liu Guo soon returned to his hometown in Shandong, and his travel notes have been missing ever since.
The first thing Li Ji read was a rearranged travel note, but it was not the original and was changed beyond recognition by the scribe. He still copied the truth casually and put it on his desk as a treasure. Travel notes are copied by you, and the copy is far-fetched, overlapping and deleting, and it is even more incomplete and distorted to the thirty-third year of Kangxi (1683), when Li Ji was 65 years old. When he was sorting out the travel notes again, he saw a note added by Ji Huiming, saying that the first Complete Works of Xu Xiake's Journey to the West was only copied by Cao, a student born in Yixing. He immediately asked someone in Yixing and learned that Cao Chao's manuscript had been transferred to Yixing history 18 years ago. He was overjoyed, so he walked to Yixing on crutches, visited the 73-year-old Stone Salon and found the earliest travel notes. If Li remembers the treasure, he will take the manuscript back to Yuli Mountain in Jiangyin.
In the following years, Li Ji collated, supplemented and revised the manuscripts obtained in Yixing with his own manuscripts in Xiufengge, a mountain residence, and combined with the travel materials collected at ordinary times. Although the manuscript he got from the Shi family in Yixing was only four volumes, it was not all manuscripts, but it was the only book available for school at that time. Based on this, Li Ji wrote three articles: Diary of Visiting Huashan Mountain in Taiwan, Story of Visiting a Cave and Examination of Panjiang. He also wants to "reflect Cao Shi's original text from the Japanese shadow and proofread it with the seasonal book." After many hardships, Li Ji finally compiled a relatively complete Travel Notes of Xu Xiake, known as Li Jie Edition. Over the past 300 years, there have been dozens of manuscripts of Xu Xiake's travels. In the study of Xu Xue in Xu Xiake's Travels, Li Lijie Ben has always been regarded as the "ancestor of all books".
Li Ji was 70 years old when he compiled Xu Xiake's Travels. Old and weak, exhausted and seriously ill. He went to his friend Xia Shiming and said to Xia Shiming before he died, "Don't prepare a coffin for me. There is an old waterwheel behind your house, which is cut into two parts, half padded and half covered, enough to hide my body. " 1690, Li Ji died at the age of 72. Xia Shiming did not follow Li Ji's instructions, but held a funeral for Li Ji according to etiquette and was buried next to his mother's grave in Yulishan. Li Ji's works, poems and books were also collected by his master Chen Qizhong. Some of the works we can see now were obtained from Dignā ga and handed down by later generations.
After that, Yang, Chen Hong proofread Xu Xiake's Travels successively. Until the forty-first year of Qianlong (1776), Xu Zhen, according to Li's collation, carved the Travels of Xu Xiake into a volume and officially published it. At this time, it has been 135 years since the death of Xu Xiake and 86 years since the death of Li Ji.