The Ambush at Yanmen Pass is the foundational mistake behind Xiao Feng’s divided identity and the deaths and suspicions that follow him. A false report of an impending Khitan raid on Shaolin Monastery brought Song martial artists to confront Xiao Yuanshan’s family; the attack killed Xiao Yuanshan’s wife and led him to leave a final account on the cliff before jumping to his apparent death. Decades later, Zhiguang explained that the raid story was a deliberate prank, exposing the ambush as a tragedy built on misinformation rather than a genuine attempt to seize Buddhist scriptures.

The false report and the confrontation

The incident began with a claim that Khitan warriors were going to Shaolin Monastery to steal its scriptures. The men who acted on that intelligence believed they were confronting an imminent threat. As Zhiguang later explained, they had understood Xiao Yuanshan to be leading Khitan warriors toward the monastery, but the family he encountered did not fit that explanation: Xiao Yuanshan was traveling with his wife, who had no martial-arts skill, and their baby son, who was just over a year old.

The ambush instead caught a family on the road. In the account Xiao Yuanshan left on the cliff, he wrote that he and his wife were on their way to visit his mother-in-law for a banquet when they suddenly encountered the Song attackers. His wife was killed. The decisive human cost was therefore not the thwarting of a raid, but the destruction of a family that had been mistaken for an armed threat.

Xiao Yuanshan’s inscription and vow

Before jumping from the cliff, Xiao Yuanshan left a message explaining both his grief and his shame. His inscription said that he had lost the desire to live after his wife’s death. It also recalled his vow, made before his martial-arts teacher, never to kill Han people. In the aftermath of the attack, however, he had killed more than ten of them. His last words joined bereavement to remorse: he felt he had no face to meet his teacher after breaking the vow.

The inscription was written in Khitan characters that Xiao Feng could recognize but not read. Zhiguang had it rubbed onto a large piece of cloth made from stitched-together scraps and gave Xiao Feng the translation. Seeing the writing associated with his father and hearing its contents, Xiao Feng wept; he then understood that Xiao Yuanshan’s apparent suicide followed not only his wife’s death but also his anguish at having violated his promise.

The prank and the belated correction

Zhiguang said that the attackers had initially believed the report about the Shaolin raid. Only after studying Xiao Yuanshan’s words did they conclude that it had been a grave mistake. Xiao Yuanshan’s final message, Zhiguang reasoned, gave no reason to think he had invented a false account to deceive anyone: its admission of grief and broken vows made the supposed mission to rob the monastery implausible.

The inquiry traced the report to an ignorant, absurd person who had deliberately played a trick on the man later called the Leading Big Brother, sending him thousands of li in the wrong direction for amusement. By the time the truth was uncovered, the prankster had fled and no one knew where he was. Thirty years later, Zhiguang thought the person might no longer be alive. The belated discovery could clarify the cause of the violence, but it could not restore those who had died.

Consequences for Xiao Feng and the wider story

When Zhiguang gave Xiao Feng the rubbing, Xiao Feng received it as his father’s last words and thanked the monk for revealing the incident’s cause and aftermath. The account altered his understanding of Xiao Yuanshan: the cliff-jump had not been simply a response to bereavement, but also the act of a man tormented by having broken a vow against killing Han people. It also replaced the assumption of a planned attack on Shaolin with the knowledge that the family had been caught in a false and deliberately circulated story.

The episode’s consequences persist beyond the deaths at the pass. In a later explanation of Liao’s succession crisis, the narrative recalls the earlier generation’s struggle: after the Holy Emperor favored his eldest son, YeLu ZongZhen, the empress sought to place her second son, YeLu ZhongYuan, on the throne. YeLu ZongZhen learned of the scheme from his brother, who gave up the chance to rule and supported him. That history belongs to a separate political conflict, but it echoes the book’s concern with inherited loyalties and the disastrous effects of concealed or distorted accounts of the past.

The ambush’s central irony is that the men who believed they were preventing an attack instead created the catastrophe they feared. Its delayed explanation does not undo the killings; it changes their meaning. For Xiao Feng, the recovered inscription turns family history into evidence of a double injury: a mother lost to mistaken violence, and a father left with grief and the shame of breaking his own vow.