In the latter years of the Ming dynasty, Ming warriors on thesouth coast of China face Chinese-Japanese pirates. Military attacks on the pirates are expensive and ineffective and the weak emperor Jiaqing sends the strategist Yu Dayou to the arena to find a peaceful end to the conflict. Yu Dayou however finds out that a local functionary is conspiring with the pirates. A member of Yu's staff, Wu, and his wife Ruoshi (Hsu Feng), pretend to be mercenaries wanting to betray Yu and penetrate to the headquarters of the pirates. The pirates are then cleverly lured into an ambush. Zhonglie Tu was shot entirely on location. The fights were filmed with a circling camera, ensuring an incredible control of space. The film hardly has any dialogue, giving the mysterious and abstract mood of the film an extra dimension.

[Reviewed by Anonymous]