MASTERPIECE!!!!! FABULOUS!!!!! BEAUTIFULL!!!! wonderful movie indeed!! shown history of China in a most realistic manner...... It's an arthouse film and i recommend people to get some prerequisite knowledge regarding the history of China and most importing Pekking or Beijing Opera Culture so that you won't miss on any details, although you can yourself understand the history through movie but for that you must know something about visual storytelling and must notice dialogues & incidents with timeline, for e.g. Japanese colonization, Nationalist Party in power, emergence of Communist Party, Mao Zedong era, Cultural Revolution, Props, and so many minute details that i could tell you but it would be too much for here!! Social issues raised in the movie were way ahead of its time especially for a country like China.
If you could gather the brief information about the topics i mentioned it would be sufficient to understand the movie.

At last i would recommend this movie to everyone out there who has a bit of slight interest in such movies and i would be more than happy to help you out in clarifying the movie further :)