Drunk on paper and gold

In 1937, the Japanese invasion of China broke out, bringing devastation to the land and suffering to its people. Under the trampling feet of the invaders, the then-capital Nanjing could not escape its fate of being occupied. Wei Duanben (played by Shao Feng), a small civil servant in the Nanjing government, was forced to leave his wife Wang Yulan and flee with the crowd to the temporary capital Chongqing. On the journey, Wei unexpectedly meets the beautiful young girl Tian Peizhi (played by Chen Hao), who is six years younger than him. Both are lost souls in despair and find solace in each other, eventually becoming husband and wife. Time passes swiftly, and six or seven years go by in the blink of an eye. The Wei couple now has a pair of children. Wei Duanben works in a government agency; he is honest and sincere but somewhat dull and rigid, barely supporting his small family with a meager salary. Although Tian Peizhi is a mother, she maintains her innocent and lively personality, growing tired of their impoverished and monotonous life. Softer to vanity and extravagance, she becomes infatuated with gambling, starting with small bets that escalate into major losses, leading their family's finances to become increasingly strained and resulting in frequent quarrels between the couple. Tian becomes deeply entrenched in the gambling world, unable to extricate herself, and in order to fund her gambling, she becomes involved with unscrupulous merchants and moneylenders. With the appearances of characters like Fan Baohua (played by Yu Hewei), Hong Wuye (played by Yuan Yuan), and Granny Zhu Si (played by He Saifei), the Wei family finds itself sinking deeper into a dark quagmire... This film is adapted from Zhang Henshui's original work of the same name.