The iron box (simplified: 铁盒, traditional: 铁盒, pinyin: Tiě Hé, jyutping: tit3 hap6) was a rusted iron box with a hidden opening mechanism that had belonged to Hu Yidao. It first held his family’s jewels and the fist and blade manual, and later held Li Zicheng’s Treasured Dao, the heirloom of the Tianlong School. In Flying Fox of the Snowy Mountain, the struggle for the box began in the snow of the Changbai Mountains and continued in Du Ximeng’s manor on Jade Brush Peak.
Description
The box was rectangular and about two chi long (ch. 1). It was covered in rust, pitted and uneven, and looked more than a hundred years old. It had no keyhole and no catch, and the lid would not lift however hard it was pulled. It opened only when the lid was lifted three times at each of its four corners and the centre of the base was then pressed upward with a thumb, at which the lid sprang open (ch. 3, 5).
The box also held a mechanism that shot short arrows. When Tao Zian flipped its edge, three short arrows flew out: two struck the monk Jingzhi in the throat and killed him, and the third lodged in Xiong Yuanxian’s left shoulder (ch. 1). Tao Baisui knew both of the arrows and of the way to open the box (ch. 7).
History
Hu Yidao’s box
According to Baoshu, on a night during Hu Yidao’s duel with Miao Renfeng at Cangzhou, Hu Yidao took the box from his clothes bag and told his wife to give it to their son on his sixteenth birthday. At that time Li Zicheng’s dao was not in it; it was still with the Tian family of the Tianlong School (ch. 4).
Ping Asi, then a kitchen boy at the inn, later described what he had seen. Hu Yidao tipped the box out onto a table: it was full of pearls and jewels, together with the fist and blade manual written in the hand of Hu Yidao’s great-great-grandfather. Madam Hu promised that if he fell she would raise their son and sell the jewels a little at a time. Hu Yidao put everything back in the box and placed it under her pillow (ch. 5).
After Madam Hu took her own life, the bonesetter Yan Ji, who later became the monk Baoshu, took the box from under the pillow and opened it by the same method. He was handling the jewels and leafing through the manual when Ping Asi struck him senseless with a door bar. Ping Asi escaped with the infant Hu Fei, and in snatching the manual he left its first two pages in Yan Ji’s grip (ch. 5).
In the Tian family’s keeping
According to Tao Zian, his father had seen Tian Guinong seize the box from Hu Yidao’s orphan, and Tian Guinong later kept the Tianlong School’s treasured dao in it (ch. 7). Tian Guinong prized the box and guarded it closely, but his disciples never saw him open it; when they saw the dao, it came out of an old wooden box (ch. 3).
On the day Tian Guinong closed his gates and sealed his jian, he took the box from a chest and found the dao gone: his disciple Zhou Yunyang had stolen and buried it (ch. 7). That night Tian Guinong gave the box, wrapped in brocade, to Tao Zian, his prospective son-in-law, telling him to bury it somewhere hidden beyond the passes and never to open it. The Taos opened it anyway and found it empty. Tao Zian took the errand for a plot to brand him a thief (ch. 7).
The fight in the snow
On the fifteenth day of the third month of the forty-fifth year of Qianlong, the Taos were digging below the Changbai Mountains when men of the Pingtong Armed Escort, who had waited for days in a pit hidden under the snow, ambushed them. Tao Zian gave in, dug up the box and held it out to Liu Yuanhe, then fired its arrows at him (ch. 1). The Tianlong School party then fell on both sides. Ruan Shizhong seized the box, calling it “the supreme treasure of our Tianlong School”, and passed it to Tian Qingwen, who ran off with it (ch. 1). The fighting stopped only when Baoshu arrived and led everyone up to the manor on Jade Brush Peak (ch. 1, 2).
On Jade Brush Peak
Ruan Shizhong tucked the box into his belt to fight Hu Fei’s two page boys (ch. 2). When it fell from his clothes as his wounds were being dressed, Baoshu knocked him aside and took it. Baoshu challenged the Tianlong men to say what was in it. None of them knew how to open it except Zhou Yunyang, and inside lay the dao (ch. 3).
Baoshu kept the box and the dao (ch. 6). When Liu Yuanhe produced the treasure map, Baoshu took the box from his robe, opened it and drew the dao to search for Li Zicheng’s Treasure (ch. 8).
See also
- Li Zicheng’s Treasured Dao, which the box held on Jade Brush Peak
- Hu Yidao, the box’s first owner in the novel
- Tian Guinong, who handed the empty box to Tao Zian
- Baoshu, who took the box on Jade Brush Peak
- Flying Fox of the Snowy Mountain items