Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

Uploaded at: uploads.worldlibrary.net/uploads/pdf/20130423230739the_outlaws_of_the_marsh_pdf.pdf TODO legality? World Library seems like a legit website. Reads "Copyrighted materials".

The ball game is named cuju.

He is extremely despicable and petty, enjoys only useless things, and is vengeful and disloyal. Rooting for sport teams is stupid.

Surely his family name 俅 is a pun on the same sounding character 求 for ball.

Early on, he's usually called by others as Major Lu (魯提轄).

His original name is Lu Da 魯達

He then receives the Buddhist name Zhishen (智深, profound wisdom) during conversion.

Erniang is way more popular than her ranking in the 108 Stars of Destiny.

This is of course in part because she is one of the only 3 108 Stars of Destiny women. But her story about making human mantou is particularly fun!

She's also quite seductive, which gives directors a good opportunity for a bit of fan service. See e.g. kknews.cc/history/6epp2pp.html for a still from The Water Margin showing some good cleavage for example.

He used to train the 800,000 imperial guard troops at the Capital, much like Lin Chong. He's not one of the 108 Stars of Destiny.

Only after Ciro became an adult did he finally understand that Sun Wukong was the basis for Dragon Ball as mentioned at: Figure "19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong". And that Sun Wukong was a million times more famous overall. Mind blown.

His given name "Wukong" literally means "the one who mastered the void" (Wu = Comprehend, Kong = void), so clearly a Dharma name. Edit: it is actually given in the novel, he was born without name. They seem to be Taoist however.

The family name sun1 孙 is the same character as "grandson", but most educated Chinese people seem to be able to recognize it as a reference to "monkey" from some archaic context not anymore in current usage.

The definitive Journey to the West adaptation.

Bibliography: