In The Words of the Orange Seller, Liu Ji tells of a fruit seller in Hangzhou whose oranges kept through summer and winter. They looked “like jade in substance and gold in color” and sold for ten times the price. Liu bought one and cut it open. Something like smoke hit his nose. Inside, it was dry as old cotton wadding.
The seller laughed. “I have done this trade for years, and I live by it. I sell them, people buy them, and no one has ever said a word. Are you alone not satisfied?” Then he asked whether the generals with their tiger tallies and the officials in tall hats could really do what they appeared to do. “Where would one go and not find gold and jade outside, rotten wadding inside?”
The idiom jin yu qi wai, bai xu qi zhong comes from this line.