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SCMP Reporter

The year is 1838. The time, night. The place Canton and the scene opens in the smoky candle-lit study of a top mandarin, Lin Zexu. The audience knows a terrible, dark crime is about to be committed.

   In fact, a gamut of ghastly crimes - drug running, murder, theft are to be inflicted against an aged, helpless and innocent victim - China.

    The wind whistles softly through the branches of a peach tree, a gentle tremor ripples along the elegant painted scroll hanging on the wall.

   At any moment we know the red-faced criminals - profit-crazed barbarians from a distant alien civilisation - will emerge from the shadows. Somewhere a door hinge creaks eerily.

 'Cut! Cut! I can hear an electric drill!' shouts director Xie Jin . The Mandarin relaxes and takes off his pigtail, the cameramen light up Marlboros while some one goes off to tell the worker to turn off his drill.

   Xie Jin, China's most honoured film director, is making one of the grandest epics in the history of Chinese cinema.

   The First Opium War will be released on July 1, 1997 to celebrate the return of Hong Kong and to close symbolically the book on 150 years of national humiliation.

   'I got the idea after watching Steven Spielburg's Schindler's List in Hong Kong,' Xie Jin explained.

   'It was very good and I thought, he is a Jew and after 50 years he wanted to commemorate what happened to the Jews, but I am a Chinese and we should do something similar about the tragedy of the Chinese,' he continued.

   The first opium war will also be long, two hours and 40 minutes, and although it will not be in black and white it will, he claims, stick to the facts. Xie Jin says it was his son, who now works in Hong Kong also as a film director (although he has a green card), who first suggested to him that he should tackle a patriotic theme.

  'Of course, some of my friends in Hong Kong have different views about Hong Kong - they tell me lots of people are leaving - but emotions also run high about sovereign territory.

  'Look at how Thatcher sent a fleet to recapture the Falklands,' he said.

   With the severance of many government subsidies, much of the Chinese film industry has fallen on hard times, but Xie Jin will raise over 90 million yuan for the film, making this one of the most expensive ever made on the mainland with a cast of thousands.

   Nothing of old Canton is left but Xie Jin and the rest of the crew have had to go to Foshan, a boom town an hour's drive from Canton, where a Qin dynasty mandarin's home provides the set.

   Somewhat symbolically, the whole building and gardens which are surrounded by housing blocks, are being rebuilt from scratch with plenty of concrete even as the film is being shot.

   But Xie Jin is sparing no expense. He says he has come here because of the trees, pointing to one of the two left on the building site.

   He will also hire six English actors, including the lugubrious Bob Peck, last seen in China looking bewildered in a television film about Tiananmen called Children of the Dragon.

   Peck will play the chief English merchant and opium trader.

   Part will also be filmed in London, especially the scene where by a narrow majority Parliament votes to send a fleet to China to avenge the confiscation of opium.

   The climax and the most expensive segment will be the naval battle scenes off the coast of Zhejiang province where the Manchu war junks are sunk by the superior technology of the Royal Navy.

   The film's producer, Ling Bingkun, a short tubby man with a deeply worried look, says he is still not sure whether he can raise enough money in time.

  Shooting began in May and will go on until the end of the year, making it a rush to edit 20 hours of film in time for the release.

   Ling is now knocking on the doors of all kinds of companies and enterprises, asking them to venture a stake.

  'It has worked before but I never tried it on such a huge scale,' he confessed.

   Asked why he did not approach Hong Kong investors, Ling said it was because they wanted to keep full control over the content and distribution.

   So far Xie Jin and his Hong Tong Film and Television company have raised over half the money needed, largely from somewhat mysterious backers: the Hui Tong Bank in Sichuan, the Chinese National Cultural Promotion Foundation and the Shanghai Spiritual and Cultural Development Office.

   Neither of the last two is listed in the telephone book.

   However, Xie Jin insists that although there is no direct state investment, he has the full backing of President Jiang Zemin with whom he discussed the project in a two hour and 40 minute meeting in Zhongnanhai over a year ago.

  'We know each other quite well because Jiang Zemin used to be Mayor of Shanghai and I am one of the directors of the Shanghai film studio so we often met,' Xie Jin said.

   Xie Jin's long record in Shanghai makes him an unlikely person to identify himself with Spielburg or even his favourite American director, Oliver Stone, since he is reputed to have been Jiang Qing's favourite.

   The former Shanghai film starlet who took charge of China's arts in the early 1960s had a close relationship with Xie Jin making such Cultural Revolution hits as Red Detachment of Women.

   Xie Jin quickly changed the subject when her name came up apart but hinted that he too was a victim of her rages and that his 1986 indictment of the Cultural Revolution, Hibiscus Town, had cleared his name.

   Besides, he stressed that his latest film is not propaganda but history.

  'It is didactic though because we have to explain to young people what happened and why Hong Kong became a colony,' he said.

   'We have to explain why we lost the Opium War, why China failed and was so backward, just like we had to do the same with the Cultural Revolution.'    What in fact Xie Jin has in mind is not an excoriation of British imperialism or mercantilism but eulogy to the open door policy.

   Even such arch villains as William Jardine or James Matheson will make no appearance.

   Indeed, one might infer that what Xie Jin and his crew are trying to do is to celebrate the achievements of Deng Xiaoping who in July 1997 might still be around to come to Hong Kong. (Xie thinks this is quite likely because he knows Deng's eldest son, Deng Pufang , quite well as they are both on the board of the China Disabled Person's Federation).

  'China was a closed society, that was why it was so weak, now it is not,' Xie Jin said. His younger co-director, Zhuang Hong Sheng, emphasises the point.

  'How could 400 million Chinese be defeated by a small island? Why later was China again defeated by another small island, Japan?' he asked.

    In the film the central figure is Lin Zexu, the upright commissioner appointed by Manchu emperor Dao Guang to stamp out the opium trade.

   In a 1959 production, Lin was portrayed as a traitor but not because he failed to defeat the foreigners.

    'Lin was shown as an enemy because he liked Western things, and all Westerners were then our enemy. Lin wanted to modernise industry and technology by learning from the West,' Zhang said.

   This time round, Lin will be a national hero, according to Bao Guoan, the actor who will play him.

  'He is the first person to urge China to open to the outside world. He liked English people and even tried to study the language,' Bao said.

   Short and stocky like the original, Bao is famous across the country for playing the brilliant and manipulative Cao Cao, in the popular and endless TV series, The Romance of The Three Kingdoms.

   Although honest and able, Lin was historically a failure.

   He failed to persuade the Manchus to tolerate any imports from the outside world - it was then a criminal offence even to read a foreign book - which was why Western traders finally resorted to opium smuggling.

   And he failed to stamp out opium consumption but, as Chinese officials continue to do, he always informed Beijing that magnificent victories were being won.

   Yet every schoolboy in China reads about him.

   Had the circumstances allowed him to succeed, then China might be where Japan is today.

   In 1853, Commander Perry's naval task force arrived in Japan but the Japanese did not go to war, instead it opened up its ports and began to modernise.

  'The tragedy is that China remained closed,' Bao said.

   The film closes with the Treaty of Nanjing, where after defeat China agreed to open five Treaty ports and secede Hong Kong.

   The Manchus drew no lessons from defeat which was followed by others forcing China to sign a succession of unequal treaties relinquishing more and more territories.

   Yet in some ways, it was Lin Zexu who set in train the events which made Hong Kong what it is today.



Re-living the Opium War