Guarding the Three Passes: I Reign Supreme Over the White Mountains and Black Earth

In 1928, he failed to save Marshal Zhang Zuolin from the explosion at Huanggutun. All he got in return was the marshal's final order and a stain on his name for “failing to protect the marshal.”

When the young marshal asked what post he wanted, Zhao Xi pointed toward the bitterly cold frontier. “I want Tongliao.”

From then on, accompanied by the “Eight Pillars,” the hidden agents left behind by the marshal, and his sworn brothers, the “Six Stars,” he raised his own banner in this no-man's-land. He recruited bandits, opened an arms factory, laid down the rules of the underworld, and put bounties on Japanese invaders and traitors. Right under the Kwantung Army's nose, he built an iron fortress bristling with banners of loyalty and honor.

From the White Mountains and Black Waters to the shores of Hong Kong, from renowned anti-Japanese general to business magnate, he took a road no one believed in, only to have everyone look up to him in the end.

“If the mountain will not come to me, then I will go to the mountain.”

This is the century-spanning legend of a man and his brothers, who carved loyalty and honor into the land and the passage of time.