They supposedly killed dozens and then committed suicide by throwing themselves off the top of the mountain to escape capture by the Japanese.

[2] Hong Zhenkuai, a Chinese historian, has disputed the myth, saying that the five men had slipped rather than jumped, and that they had not in fact killed any Japanese soldiers.

Jiang Keshi, a professor at Okayama University in Japan, found in a search of Japanese military records that no soldiers had died in their encounter with the five on Langya.

[1] Publishing doubts about the historicity of the official account of the story has been implicated in the closure of the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu in 2016.

[3] A court decided in 2016 that the historian behind the article, Hong Zhenkuai, had defamed the heroes and was ordered to publicly apologize.