Lee threw himself into the work. He plowed through thousands of pages of documents in the provincial government's archives and, with the help of seven or eight students in the Chinese department at National Cheng Kung University, conducted two weeks of interviews in the southern Taiwanese towns of Nanhua, Hsilai An, Yuching, Alikuan and Chiahsien.
他不僅熟讀了台灣省文獻會裡三百多萬字的資料，還帶著七、八位成大中文系學生到台南南化、西來庵、玉井、阿里關、甲仙等地，做了半個月田野調查。