Luoyang is the setting for two encounters whose significance reaches beyond the city itself: the Hundred Flower Gathering exposes how Madam Ma turned Xiao Feng’s failure to notice her into a lasting grievance, while the White Horse Temple brings Duan Yu back into contact with his family’s affairs even as his thoughts remain fixed on Wang YuYan. In both episodes, the city’s public spaces become stages where what people see—or fail to see—shapes what follows.

The Hundred Flower Gathering

Two years before Madam Ma explains her hatred to Xiao Feng, she had stood beside a yellow peony at the Hundred Flower Gathering in Luoyang. Xiao Feng attended with many Beggar Clan brothers. He remembered playing rock-paper-scissors and drinking wine, but not meeting her. His recollection was not a calculated slight: he said that Ma Dayuan had attended, but had not brought his wife over to meet him.

Madam Ma remembered the same gathering as a contest of attention. She said that the heroes present had looked her over, and that even men of reputation who avoided staring openly had stolen glances when they thought no one noticed. Xiao Feng, she insisted, was the exception: his gaze passed over her without pausing, as though she were an ordinary woman. Because he was the famous leader of the Beggar Clan, she treated his inattention as especially meaningful. In her account, the men had placed Xiao Feng first among heroes and the women had placed her first in beauty; his refusal to look unsettled that imagined balance.

Xiao Feng eventually recalled women standing beside the peony, but explained that he had been absorbed in wine and had paid little attention to the people around him. He added that if she had been a senior female hero, he would naturally have gone to pay his respects; as Ma Dayuan’s wife and therefore his sister-in-law, however, he considered it more proper not to look at her. To him, the restraint was a matter of manners, not contempt. Madam Ma instead demanded that he acknowledge the deliberate act she believed she had witnessed. Their opposed interpretations make the gathering’s central irony plain: what Xiao Feng regarded as indifference to women generally, Madam Ma experienced as a conspicuous rejection directed at her.

The memory also exposes the limits of the gathering’s public admiration. Madam Ma said that more than a thousand men had looked at her, yet their attention could not compensate for the one gaze she wanted from Xiao Feng. Her account makes beauty dependent not simply on being seen, but on being recognized by a particular person whose standing gives his attention exceptional weight. Xiao Feng’s explanation—that he had not looked even at a woman a hundred times more beautiful—could not undo the meaning she had assigned to the moment; when he referred to that other woman, Madam Ma immediately demanded to know who she was.

The White Horse Temple

Later, Duan Yu was at the White Horse Temple in Luoyang, discussing the Agama and the Buddhist teaching of the Seven Treasures of the Chakravartin with the abbot. He was particularly drawn to the Jade Maiden treasure, described in the discussion as neither long nor short, neither black nor white, and warm in winter but cool in summer. The abbot tried to clarify that the treasures were an analogy and that Buddhist teaching regarded them as impermanent, but their conversation was interrupted before he could finish.

Three men entered: Fu Sigui, Gu Ducheng, and Zhu Danchen. They had come to Luoyang carrying a letter from Duan Zhengchun, who wanted the Beggar Clan to know that Xiao Feng had been wrongly accused of killing Ma Dayuan. They had hoped to deliver the letter at a gathering of the Beggar Clan’s Hall of Great Wisdom, after finding no leading figures at its main hall. In a restaurant, they had heard about a daydreaming gentleman whose appearance and manner sounded like Duan Yu, and followed that lead to the temple.

The meeting reunited Duan Yu with the three men. He agreed to accompany them to deliver the letter and then asked them to take him to his father. Their arrival thus joined his personal search to an effort to correct the accusation against Xiao Feng: the message had been written to vindicate Xiao Feng, while Duan Yu was eager to find Duan Zhengchun, who was then in Henan.

A city of intersecting pursuits

The temple encounter shows that Duan Yu’s journey through Henan had been shaped less by its sights than by his hope of finding Wang YuYan. For a month he had described his wandering as sightseeing, though he was really looking in every direction for a strand of her hair or the corner of her clothes; he paid no attention to the region’s scenery. Even news that his father was nearby did not displace his longing. He hoped that he might see Wang YuYan at the Beggar Clan gathering, but that hope came to nothing.

Luoyang therefore links several journeys without resolving them in the same way. The old gathering remains fixed in Madam Ma’s memory as the moment Xiao Feng supposedly denied her recognition; the temple offers Duan Yu a practical reunion and a mission, but not the encounter with Wang YuYan he desires. In one episode, a past failure of attention gathers force long afterward. In the other, present-day longing makes the surrounding landscape almost invisible. The city’s narrative importance lies in these contrasting forms of attention: whom a crowd admires, whom one person overlooks, and whom a traveler cannot stop searching for.