| China as a unified country did not exist until the third century B.C. Instead, various kingdoms rose and fell until, when the film begins, there were seven kingdoms, the most powerful of which was the Zhou dynasty, which ruled China from 1122 to 255 B.C. In The Emperor and the Assassin (Jing ke ci qin wang), we observe how the Ch’in kingdom conquered three rival kingdoms in the north. Kaige Chen, who won a Political Film Society special award in 1993 for Farewell, My Concubine, directs this epic production with a cast of thousands. Divided into five chapters, the first part deals with Ch’in’s conquest in 246 B.C. of the Han kingdom, and we are introduced to all the characters in the court who are to become important later in the movie. King Ying Zheng (played by Xuejian Li) has a vision of a unified China that will provide a lasting peace and build a wall on the north to keep out the barbarians, but he must pay a tragic emotional price to fulfill his ambitions. (The king’s name is usually transliterated Ch’in Shihuang, who as the film indicates was the bastard son of a prostitute by a merchant.) Fearful of rivals and of those who could expose his true origins, one of his first acts in the movie to is relieve Prime Minister Lu Buwei (played by the director himself) of his duties and place him under house arrest; as it turns out later, Lu Buwei is the king’s father. The Prince of the Yan kingdom (played by Sun Zhou) is held hostage in order to provide leverage against the forces of Yan. Chapter 2 deals with the king’s relations with Lady Zhao (played by Gong Li), his concubine, who misses the good old days when she and the king were commoners in love. Accordingly, she concocts a plot. She first orders a lower court official to scar her left cheek with a branding iron, and then persuades with the king that she could tell the Prince of the Yan kingdom that she had been punished and exiled, if the two were allowed to leave for Yan, and the Prince would surely send her back with an assassin to kill the king. Proof that Yan wanted to assassinate the ruler of Ch’in would, she reasoned, would thus cause the people of Yan to accept peaceful merger with Ch’in without provoking the southern kingdoms to unite against the Ch’in juggernaut. Chapter 3 focuses on the Yan dynasty, in which Jing Ke (played by Zhang Fengyi) the best man for the job of assassin refuses to do any more killing, thereby frustrating the intrigue. Lady Zhao, however, falls in love with Jing Ke, and they live together. Chapter 4, called “The Children,” is about a court mutiny led by the effete Marquis Changxin (played by Wang Zhiwen), who plots with the king’s mother to kill the king so that his four-year-old son will become king, the Marquis will serve as regent, and her native land of Zhou will be spared annihilation. However, the Marquis tells the former Prime Minister, who in turn leaks word of the plot to the king, and the mutiny is foiled. In Chapter 5, Lady Zhao learns that the Ch’in armies are about to subdue the Zhou kingdom; since she was born there, she hurries to stop the war. When she arrives, it is too late; the people of Zhou, including children buried alive, consist of corpses in a scene reminiscent of the field of the dead in Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexandr Nevsky. Jing Ke finally agrees to assassinate King Ying Zheng, goes to the Ch’in court, but he is unsuccessful. Credits at the end note that the body of Ying Zheng is preserved in a tomb at Xian, and the seven kingdoms were united in 221 B.C. by Ying Zheng, who thus becomes what is known as the title of the film in some countries — “The First Emperor of China.” However, the credits note that the first emperor died in 220 B.C., and the Ch’in empire is dissolved by 211 B.C. Many themes in the film resonate with the present, such as the “manifest destiny” of China to become unified, suggesting that Taiwan has two options as China grows in military strength — a peaceful surrender or an immense bloodbath of the sort depicted in the film. Indeed, Chairman Mao revered the first emperor. However, the idea that brutal war will bring about the good life also calls to mind not only certain Shakespearean plots, which the director had in mind, but also Plutarch’s Cyneas, who noted that the good life could be obtained far more quickly if megalomaniacs would jettison their grandiose military ambitions. MH |