The story is about the tragedy of the royal family. Empress Phoenix (Li Gong) fell in love for crown prince Xiang (Ye Liu) who was her step son. Emperor Ping (Yun Fat Chow) found that out and decided to poison the empress slowly to death. The secret leaked and the empress decided to take revenge with a coup, hoping that second prince Jie (Jay Chou) would become emperor. When the celebration of the Chung Yeung Festival was going on, Prince Jie led an army to attack the palace…

At the beginning of the film, there are two things exceptionally noticeable. One is that the scenes are grand. Many actors are involved in a lot of scenes. The battle towards the end of the film reminds me of the battle featured in The Lord of the Rings III. The other one is that all actresses wore tight costumes that showed the upper halves of their boobs. For this one, I do not really understand. I do not think that women in ancient China wore dresses like the costumes.

Anyway, my attention was directed away to the story towards the middle of the film. For a while, I have not written a review that is very long because of my own priorities. But this film makes me think about some many things in the film that I want to talk a little bit more than usually about the film.

I think we can look at the situation of the story from a lot of angles, namely from the perspective of the different characters.

From Emperor Ping's point of view, he had to do something to "remove his green hat", especially his wife was having an affair with his own son. When two of the princes turned against him, he had no choice. Although he looked calm all along, you could feel the pain inside him when the family tragedy was to happen.

For Empress Phoenix, she married a man who did not love her. Their marriage was for the sake of inter-state relationship. The only "love" that she could have, as she thought, was from Prince Xiang who was old and royal enough and not her own son. With that, she was destined to do something drastic.

From Prince Jie's perspective, he was stuck in the middle between his father and mother. He did not want to hurt his father, but at the same time he could not stand seeing his father killing his mother. No matter what he chose, he was to lose.

For Prince Xiang, he did not care about the throne. He did not care if the emperor was to make Prince Jie the crown prince because he understood that the prince with more talent should become the emperor. He was also stuck between the emperor and the empress. The Emperor was his father, and the empress was his (ex-)lover/step-mother. He chose his father over his step-mother, but obviously it was a difficult position to take.

And finally, Prince Cheng (Junjie Qin), the neglected child. It is hard to imagine how he could secure some followers to be loyal to him. He was young, and did not seem to have any backers in the palace. He was so jealous that he could not bear, and wanted a coup of his own. Killing the crown prince was probably something no one could imagine a young prince with no backers could do. But in any case, it shows how unintelligent he was to think that he had a chance.

With all that, a tragedy was destined to happen when Emperor Ping married Liang State's princess Phoenix. It was probably nobody's fault. It just had to happen.