Preoccupied with the interaction between humanity and history, Xie Jin turned his lens to the lives of intellectuals in China. He did a thorough analysis of the fate of intellectuals. In the trilogy of Legend of Tianyun Mountain, Horse Herder, and Furong Town, Xie Jin explored the underlying reasons of the survival and development of the Chinese nation.

Xie Jin was born into a family of scholars in the town of Shangyu in East China. In 1939, he joined the theater circles' resistance efforts against the Japanese Aggression. Since then, his life has been closely linked to the fate of China. His works witnessed the developments of Chinese society through the decades. His movies are considered a presentation of the conscience of China's intellectuals.

In 1989, the movie "Last Nobles" marked another phase in Xie Jin's filmmaking career. Different from all his previous works, the production puts the emphasis on the psychological and spiritual loneliness of its main characters. It was considered an exercise in existentialism.

Xie Jin has created a set of aesthetic values and principles that influenced both his own filmmaking and the Chinese cinema. He is definitely a monumental figure in the 100 years of China's film history. It is impossible to underestimate his value in terms of artistic achievement. It was Xie Jin who has formulated a distinctly Chinese film vocabulary in a time dominated by monotony, ambiguity and chaos.