At first glance, there was nothing unusual about the Chinese couple recorded on video in a casino in Macau on the south China coast. The man was expensively dressed and the woman dripping with jewellery, fairly normal for the private rooms of the gambling dens of the former Portuguese colony where the budget of a Chinese city might be wagered of an evening. It was probably not that unusual either that Mr Cheng Kejie, a top Chinese official in his 60s, was not with his wife that evening when the recording was secretly made by criminal investigators, but with his mistress, a Ms Li Ping.
As she watched her lover throw gaming chips on the tables, Ms Li probably thought they were untouchable. He was not only deputy governor of south-western Guangxi Province, but a vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress in Beijing.
But Mr Cheng was in fact the target of a crackdown on official corruption, and shortly afterwards was arrested and tried. Last week he was sentenced to death on corruption charges at the end of a lengthy investigation which has left China agog. Yesterday came the day of reckoning for his mistress when she was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Beijing court in the first known case in China where police have gone after the object of a criminal's affections and beneficiary of his largesse. But Ms Li was apparently more than just a lady friend. China's newspapers have been filled with stories of how the lovers conspired together to extract "brown envelopes" from businessmen and developers in Guangxi, home of the famous tourist site of Guelin, in return for selling state land cheaply, granting development contracts and promoting colleagues.
Ms Li acted as agent for Mr Cheng in collecting "political donations", which reportedly included cash, diamond rings and expensive watches, totalling $5 million in value. Ms Li was planning to leave her husband, the son of a senior Guangxi official and Mr Cheng his wife, so they could live together in a luxury villa, according to the press.
Now she faces life in a squalid prison cell and confiscation of her personal possessions, worth $3.5 million. No one quite knows where Ms Li came from before she met Mr Cheng while working in a hotel in 1992. Some reports said she was born in a poor family in Guangxi and is part Japanese. Others said she was from a wealthy land-owning family or had worked as a taxi driver.
But she has today achieved widespread notoriety as the femme fatale in China's most serious case of corruption at the top. Cheng has appealed his death sentence. If this fails he will become the highest-ranking Communist Party official to be executed since the founding of modern China 51 years ago. State media have said his fate should serve as a "negative example and a cautionary lesson", especially to senior party members, to deepen the fight against corruption.
This year already Hu Changqing, a former vice-governor, and Li Chenglong, a former deputy mayor, have been put to death for corruption.