num_pages: 564
description: The second part of a three-volume picaresque historical romance by one of China's most popular authors follows the turbulent adventures of mercurial anti-hero Trinket as he embroils himself with flair in ever more complex intrigues at court and in the dense underworld of seventeenth-century China. All is definitely not as it seems in the palace of that Old Whore, the Empress Dowager. Trinket begins to suspect an incursion into palace politics by a strange sect based on an offshore island, fanatical practitioners of a powerful, manta-based kungfu, while contending forces struggle to lay hands on the secret contained in eight copies of a short Sutra, a secret that will somehow yield mysterious power.Posing this time as a pilgrim and monk, Trinket takes holy orders in order to penetrate the mysterious Buddhist realm of the Shaolin Monastery, of fighting-monks' fame, and the more exotic Lamaist pilgrimage site of the Wutai Mountains. While his multiple personae take on the world, young Trinket experiences, with growing frequency and intensity, the delights of female companionship. This does not seem to distract him from his kungfu quests, and Trinket finds himself faced with his most important mission yet...
language: English
title: The Deer and the Cauldron: The Second Book
titlecomplete: The Deer and the Cauldron: The Second Book
genres: Fiction, Chinese Literature, China, Classics, Novels
ratings_count: 187
series: The Deer and the Cauldron
publisher: Oxford University Press