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Historical person
1636–1703
Songgotu was a senior Qing statesman and diplomat during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor. He served in high office and took part in the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. The Deer and the Cauldron makes him one of Trinket’s court associates.
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
