It's the end of the year, and the top-ranking executives of one of the world's biggest banks have converged on their employer's palatial compounds to collect their dues. Drunk on their buccaneering deeds for the past 12 months - mostly involving high-interest loans to all walks of life - they whoop and holler as the chief accountant announces the amount of business each one of them has generated for the financial empire. The mood hardly changes when it emerges that the best-performing branch manager was recently sacked for misconduct - because he's going to receive his whopping bonus anyway. And while the alcohol flows freely within those high walls, the poor and destitute line up at soup kitchens outside, as they struggle to survive yet another harsh winter. But this is not New York in 2009. This scene, which launches Christina Yao Shu-hwa's maiden feature as director, Empire of Silver, is set in Shanxi province in 1899, and introduces viewers to Tianchengyuan, a fictional financial institution run by the Kang family and an entity as powerful as the Qing authorities, if not more. Just like its modern counterparts on Wall Street and in the City of London, the bank commands an unassailable influence over the economy, as it counts businesses and even provincial governments among its borrowers. Together with its peers, the bank forms a powerful cartel, which rewards - and, on rare occasions, punishes - its ruthless, go-getting employees with scant regard to the legal and moral codes of the day. 'When I got on this project, it was during the time of the Enron fiasco,' says Yao, referring to the American energy corporation's collapse after revelations of the systematic malpractice by its management. 'And then I thought, looking at what's happening there and how the Kangs lived, I thought maybe there's a connection which can be meaningful for people today. But I never realised then that it could be that meaningful nowadays. But even during the Enron [scandal], the abuse of power and trust was already happening - so if you look back [at the Tianchengyuan story], that's the beginning of what's happening now.' Empire of Silver is based on Cheng Yi's The Silver Valley, a literary epic, which paints a vivid picture of the social and political upheaval in China at the turn of the 20th century through a detailed chronicle of the rise and fall of a Chinese financial institution. At the centre of the book are two bankers' clans, the Kangs and the Qins, who are sworn enemies because of their fight for domination. Their struggle for power unfolds during one of the most tumultuous times in recent Chinese history, with the country beset by internal chaos (in the shape of the ultra-nationalist Boxers' Rebellion) and foreign aggression (which eventually led to the invasion of the so-called Eight-Nation Alliance, whose armies swept into Beijing and looted the city). Cheng's story concludes with the demise of the two banks, which collapsed on themselves because of external circumstances, and also their proprietors' misdeeds. Yao wasn't aware of Cheng's book - or the modus operandi of the piao hao, the 19th-century Chinese precursor of modern banks - until 2006, when Taiwanese businessman Terry Guo Tai-ming, whose family hailed from Shanxi, alerted him to The Silver Valley while she was in Beijing working on another project. 'There's a lot of research about these merchants, but books with a fictional structure like Cheng Yi's are very few,' says Yao. 'We thought that would be a good point to depart from.' By removing the Qins completely from her story, and stripping the family saga to the barest essentials, Yao says her take revolves around the clash of ideas between the tyrannical Kang Snr (played by Zhang Tielin) and his liberal-minded third son (Aaron Kwok Fu-shing), whom the patriarch seeks to groom as his successor. 'I see it as a comparison and also a juxtaposition of two thinking systems: legalism and Confucianism,' she says. The former, she explains, teaches its followers how to manoeuvre people in order to control and govern, and it's embodied in the film by the elderly banker's way of drawing loyalty through intimidation and financial incentives. The latter, meanwhile, 'is about how to inspire and use moral principles when facing himself and others' - which is Kang Jnr's view, an approach which she admits to running completely against the dominant values espoused by big business today. What Empire of Silver boils down to, says Yao, is a reflection of how individuals are to 'reconcile the differences' between seeking their own prosperity and the upholding of something resembling a moral code. For someone who has spent most of her life in capacities where profit margins are rarely a major source of anxiety - she has a doctorate in Asian theatre from Stanford University, and is a prominent academic, writer and stage director who works for Taiwan's National Theatre and the American Conservatory Theatre - Yao says her first foray into filmmaking posed a similar dilemma. 'Do I want to make it solely commercial, or make a movie which I really want to be proud of, something I could claim I had done my job?' she says. 'You try to do both. That's why I have a lot of fight scenes - and somehow I had to make it organic.' As an example, Yao cites the scene in which Kwok's character is seen fending off a large pack of wolves during his self-imposed exile in the Gobi desert. 'I had the idea of doing that first and then I think, wolf, nature - so it's about the Third Master facing nature,' she says, laughing. Yao becomes serious, though, as she notes the moral message in the film for a country where economic success has rendered self-reflection secondary. 'Coming back, there's a lot of nostalgia,' she says. 'We know what has been lost ... For those in a position to spend money, we want to tell them not to hold a party for a 10-year-old and give out cars for prizes. People need to be told where the values are. Why should we be ashamed to say we have a culture with a strong value system? We don't have to.' Empire of Silver opens on Thu
