Yau Nim Chi is the matriarch of the new rich Kam House and a single mother of the 24-year-old Kam triplets. The Kam family owns a restaurant in town, famous for its noodles, which are notoriously cooked by Nim Chi's arrogant younger brother, Yau Nim Fu.
The bubbly Princess Sam Tin, the emperor's favorite and only child, is of age to marry, and the emperor decides to hold a contest for scholars around the capital city to compete for her hand in marriage. Nim Chi's oldest son Kam Nin, a young and intelligent fifth-ranking scholar-official working for the royal court, is forced to join the contest. Nin's future career would have remained stable if it wasn't for his frank tongue; in the contest, he writes a poem denouncing the princess for being too childish and oblivious to hardships of the common people. This angers the princess, and she demotes him to a lowly ninth-ranking official, sending him back to his hometown Chi Lik Kung Town to be the town's magistrate.
The emperor soon arranges Princess Sam Tin to marry the Persian prince after failing to find a suitor for her in the contest. Displeased, she and her eunuch Siu Yuen escapes the palace and ends up in Chi Lik Kung Town. In town, she is happy to see men working for her lily pond, but when she sees a very ugly statue of herself being built, she grows angry and smashes the statue into pieces, leading her to be tried in court, where she confronts Magistrate Nin. Nin, oblivious to the fact that she's the princess, asks her for her name. Hiding her identity, the princess invents the name "Kung Yan-so" on a whim. Upon hearing her name, Nim Chi takes the princess home, mistaking her to be the daughter of the Kam family's savior, who died to save Nin. Seeing that the Kam household is a good place for shelter, she and Siu Yuen decide to stay in the Kam household until it's safe for them to leave, simultaneously completing a chain of community labor in Nin's office as a punishment for destroying government property.
