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.

[1] 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.

[2] The film was cast primarily with Chinese actors out of (what remained) of the Shanghai studio system (now under the control of Zhonglian).

[3] Helped by the massive pop hits "Candy-Peddling Song" (賣糖歌) and "Quitting (opium) Song" (戒煙歌), the film would catapult Li into stardom, as her earlier works had been in films so blatantly pro-Japanese, as to turn off most of the Chinese audience.