In pre-unified China, the King of Qin sends his concubine to a rival kingdom to produce an assassin for a political plot, but as the king's cruelty mounts she finds her loyalty faltering.

2008 film by Chen Kaige

An unschooled young man, one of the countless victims of Mao's Cultural Revolution, is laboring in the countryside when he is assigned to teach in a nearby school. Gradually, he abandons the Maoist textbook and encourages the barely literate kids to write about their own lives and feelings.

A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.

Two boys meet at an opera training school in Peking in 1924. Their resulting friendship will span nearly 70 years and endure some of the most troublesome times in China's history.