Fans of sweeping, luxuriously filmed epics from the East such as Ran and The Last Emperor will be swept up in the Shakespearian drama of this tale about China's genesis as a unified empire in the third century B.C. Ying Zheng, King of Qin (Li Xuejian), believes that it is his mandate from heaven to bring together seven divided kingdoms. He conquers Han and, despite the protests of his prime minister (Chen Kaige), shows no mercy toward the people.
To triumph over the Kingdom of Yan will take some subterfuge. Lady Zhao (Gong Li), his lover and confidant, comes up with the idea of having herself branded a traitor, fleeing to Yan, and hiring an assassin to kill Ying Zheng. When this is all brought to light, the King of Qin will have reason to wipe out Yan. Things go awry when Lady Zhao falls in love with Jing Ke (Zhang Fengyi), an assassin who has renounced his profession.
Director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) draws out the dramatic fireworks in the last two sections of this 161-minute production. Here we see the idealism of Ying Zheng tainted with power and revenge in his treatment of a coup by Marqui (Wang Zhiwen), lover of the Queen Mother (Gu Yongfei). Even more dastardly is the Emperor's order for the mass murder of the children of Zhao after he promised Lady Zhao he would not do so.
This lengthy meditation upon Chinese history proves the truth of John Kenneth Galbraith's observation that "politics is the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."