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Historical person
1610–1695
Huang Zongxi was a Chinese scholar, historian and political thinker who remained associated with Ming loyalism after the Qing conquest. His writings criticised autocratic government and helped shape later Chinese political thought. Jin Yong places him among the dissident intellectual world evoked at the beginning of The Deer and the Cauldron.
Jin Yong’s fiction uses this historical figure within a narrative that blends documented events, popular legend and wuxia invention.
Series
Set during the early reign of the Kangxi Emperor, The Deer and the Cauldron follows Wei Xiaobao—called Trinket in John Minford’s English translation—from a Yangzhou brothel into the Forbidden City. Illiterate, irreverent and almost entirely without conventional martial virtue, he survives through mimicry, bribery, luck and an instinct…
All books in this series
