Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast.

This is a supplemental episode.

So from time to time, listeners will write in and ask if I can do a supplemental episode on this or that side character.

Alas, the answer in most cases is that I just don't have enough historical material about those

characters, or that their historical lives do not differ enough from their characters in the

novel for me to do a whole supplemental episode on any one of them.

But, now that the show is winding down, I would like to use this episode to do a rapid-fire

look at a number of side characters. But instead of doing their live stories, I'm just going to

give one interesting tidbit about each of these characters.

So let's start with the characters in the Kingdom of Wei,

and I'm going to expand this to include people who served under Cao Cao,

which was technically before the founding of the Wei,

and people who served in the successor kingdom of Jin,

which seized power from the way in the

final pages of the novel.

All right, here we go.

First up is Xia Hou Dun, Cao Cao's kinsman, and veteran general who lost an eye in the battle

and proceeded to swallow that eyeball.

Not surprisingly, he was very sensitive about having just one eye.

He got saddled with the nickname Blind Xia Hou,

and it's said that whenever he looked in the mirror,

he would become so displeased with his cyclopic countenance

...