Telling the story of Lin Zexu and the First Opium War, the film was designed by producers Kawakita Nagamasa and Zhang Shankun to offer "an interpretive fluidity to accommodate every spectator's ideological position." For Japanese audiences, the film could be read as anti-Western, as promoting the ostensibly "anti-colonialist" agenda of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. To Chinese audiences, on the other hand, the film promoted a spirit of resistance to a foreign enemy – namely, Japan – and upon its release garnered the largest audience in Chinese cinematic history. Ultimately the film (and the Shanghai filmmakers) was seen as tools of the enemy once the war was over, with many involved in the production (notably directors Bu Wancang, Ma-Xu Weibang, and Zhu Shilin) eventually moving to Hong Kong due to the hostile environment.