Stylish gangster film set in the modern metropolis Tai¡pei, a world city with organised crime on a world scale. The discrepancy between rich and poor is enormous and violence is just as daunting. Against this realistic contemporary background, the young directory Chen Kuo-Fu set his romantic story.The young protagonist Fong comes from the countryside and Ütries to make ends meet in the big city. He has a job at a large and glamorous nightclub, a few good friends and also a girlfriend. A chance encounter however brings him into contact with the more dangerous side of city life. While sheltering from the rain in a bar, he meets the beautiful and mysterious Tan. After she has left, Fong sees she has left her diary be¡hind. He does everything he can to trace her and return the diary. During his quest he becomes entangled in a very violent network of gangsters. Fong becomes more and more obsessed by the beautiful and unhappy Tan, who is the plaything of a po¡werful and merciless crime boss. In the end, Fong and his friends are sucked into a sudden and fierce storm of violence where even the perpetrators of that violence cannot keep their feet.With Treasure Island Chen has made a modern variant on an age-old genre film. What Chicago was to gangster films in the thi¡rties and forties, present-day Taipei is to Treasure Island.
