To save his neck from the Huns, Mao insists he's been sent by the Emperor to arrange a marriage between Khan and Zhaojun. The painter, Mao Yanshuo, alerted by his accomplice, the Emperor's court secretary, flees for his life and heads out over the plains to the camp of the neighboring Huns, whose leader, Huhanxie Khan, had once taken notice of Zhaojun during a diplomatic visit to court. When he learns what the court painter was up to, he erupts in rage.
When the Emperor chances upon her playing a melancholy tune on her pipa (a stringed instrument), he is enchanted with her and wants to know why she'd never been brought to his attention in the three years she's been there. Here Lin Dai plays Wang Zhaojun, a concubine who is ignored by the Emperor because an unfavorable portrait of her had been submitted by the corrupt court portrait painter after she'd refused to pay the painter a bribe. Huangmei opera film, mixing dialogue and singing, set in old China, in this case the Han Dynasty, and stars Linda Lin Dai, the Hong Kong diva who specialized in this genre (DIAU CHARN, THE KINGDOM AND THE BEAUTY, THE LAST WOMAN OF SHANG). BEYOND THE GREAT WALL (1959, the date given on the DVD case) is another Shaw Bros.
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