In Taipei, there is a place called: XIMEN. There, tons of people come to visit, but most of them forget to see and feel the craziness, the loneliness, the love, and the color within that area. Tigger, a smart-but-lonely girl, whose mother is away, comes to XIMEN to start her own business. She quickly comes to the realization that there are 3 unique things in Ximending: movie, money, and madness. One day, she meets the maddest of them all: a homeless man called: XimenKing, aka, the mad king of Taipei town. He is so mad because: A.he likes to give out money that no one knows where they come from B.he never stays inside of a building, and he even sleeps in a tent at night C.rumor has it that he used to have a family, but the 921 earthquake back in 1999 turned his world upside down.
In December 1937, during the Second Japanese-Sino War, a Chinese doctor, his Japanese pregnant wife, their teenage daughter and their young son travel from Shanghai to Nanjing seeking shelter in the Capital during the Japanese invasion. The family faces the Rape of Nanking by the Imperial Japanese Army, with rapes, mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians including women, children and elders, and disrespect of international conventions.
Reminiscing about his youth in Taiwan's turbulent 1920s, Guo Xuehu reflects on his passion for art, a friendship with a painter -- and a doomed romance.
Chi-Chung Huang is the second son of the Huang family, which owns Taiwan Chao-Lian Group. Chi-Chung and his older brother, Chi-Long Huang, bribe the prosecutor for a death penalty case that his family is involved in. However, the prosecutor changes his mind about the matter. Chi-Chung leads his men to confront the prosecutor, who later falls off an elevated expressway and dies. To lay low for a while, Chi-Chung accepts his brother's arrangement and goes into hiding in the southern region of Taiwan. However, after he arrives there, he is controlled by a crime syndicate. After he is drugged and becomes hardly conscious, he inadvertently rapes Chia-Yi, who is a nice good girl. After the rape, Chia-Yi swears to get Chi-Chung to face up the legal consequences; later, she finds she is impregnated by Chi-Chung, and this strengthens her will to fight a battle between the rich (Chi-Chung) and the poor (herself). As a storm is quietly approaching, who will turn out to be the winner?
