When Cheung Mo Gei first assumed the role of Ming Cult Leader in HEAVEN SWORD & DRAGON SABRE, he was informed that one of the reasons that the Ming Cult had been unable to elect a new Cult Leader after Yeung Ding Teen's death was their failure to recover the cult's Sacred Fire Tablets, which (unknown to the Chinese Ming Cult) had been stolen by the Persian Ming Cult about 100 years earlier.
100 years, eh? That's interesting...because so much else was happening 100 years before HSDS. That was the era of the end of ROCH, when the wulin careers of Cheung 3 Fung and Gwok Seung (the founders of the Mo Dong and Ngor Mei Sects, respectively) began. Jin Yong could have picked any number of years for the Sacred Fire Tablets to have disappeared...50 years, 70 years, 200 years....but he picked 100. It makes you wonder if there was any kind of connection between the characters of ROCH and the disappearance of the Sacred Fire Tablets.