China has abundant available marginal land that can be used for cultivation of lignocellulosic energy plants. Saccharum arundinaceum Retz. is a potential energy crop with both high biomass yield and low soil fertility requirements. It can be planted widely as cellulosic ethanol feedstock in southern China. In the present work Saccharum arundinaceum was pretreated by liquid ammonia treatment (LAT) to overcome biomass recalcitrance, followed by enzymatic hydrolysis. The monosaccharide contents (glucose, xylose, and arabinose) of the enzymatic hydrolysate were determined by high performance liquid chromatography. Experimental results show that the optimal LAT pretreatment conditions were 130 0C, 2:1 (W/W) ammonia to biomass ratio, 80% moisture content (dry weight basis) and 5 min residence time. Approximately 69.34% glucan and 82.60% xylan were converted after 72 h enzymatic hydrolysis at 1% glucan loading using 15 FPU/(g of glucan) of cellulase. The yields of glucose and xylose were 573% and 1 056% higher than those of the untreated biomass, and the LAT-pretreated substrates obtained an 8-fold higher of total monosaccharide yield than untreated substrates. LAT pretreatment was an effective to increase the enzymatic digestibility of Saccharum arundinaceum compared to acid impregnated steam explosion and similar to that of acid treatment and ammonia fiber expansion treatment.