It was early 2012 and for the ambitious men of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), possibility was in the air.
After a decade under Hu Jintao as president and Wen Jiabao as premier, it was time for a changing of the guard.
Due to term limits and a mandatory retirement age of 68, both men were preparing to stand down.
The rules also meant that seven of the nine members of the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee were on the way out.
To win a seat on the committee meant you were immediately vaulted into the upper echelon of Chinese power.
A chance like this wouldn't come along again for years.
The next generation were ready to do whatever it took to become one of the handful of men who ran the nation.
For the top job of president, there were only two viable contenders.
Xi Jinping was a savvy politician with an impeccable pedigree who had ascended through the ranks of the party over decades while making few enemies.
Li Keqiang, a mild-mannered academic from a modest background was considered an outside chance. But his status as the protege of outgoing President Hu kept him in the race.
There was one man, however, who threatened to up-end it all.
Bo Xilai was tall, handsome and charismatic. A rising star of the party, he was widely tipped to be given one of the coveted seats of the Politburo Standing Committee.
What he could do from there was anyone's guess.
There were rumblings that he would slowly undermine the anointed president and then manoeuvre himself into the top job.
Many of his associates knew he had the capacity for such a dastardly plot.
Bo had blazed a trail through the vicious world of Chinese politics, and by 2012 he seemed unstoppable.
But then the body of a British businessman, who may have been a spy, was found dead in a Chongqing hotel room.
It was the biggest scandal to rock the Chinese Communist Party in decades, and it altered the course of a superpower's rise.
Two princelings work their way up through the ranks
On paper, Xi Jinping and Bo Xilai followed remarkably similar trajectories, as part of the generation of 'princelings' primed to inherit their parents' status and political power.
Sons of elite figures who were Communist heroes of the civil war, they grew up as the People's Republic of China was just beginning.
Bo's father, Bo Yibo, and Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun, were both exiled during the brutal Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s that saw the Mao regime purge the country of "counter-revolutionaries" and capitalists.
Then teenagers, both Bo and Xi were sent away to 're-education camps' in the Chinese countryside designed to quash anti-socialist ideals among urban youths.
But with the death of Mao came the end of the Cultural Revolution, and a new beginning for these once-powerful families.
While Xi's academic pursuits followed the typical technocrat path of engineering, Bo opted to study world politics at Peking University.
With their fathers freed, each family began their bids to ensure the next generation would claw their way back into power.
At one stage, the Bo family bankrolled a nationwide PR blitz including TV appearances and flattering articles written by well-known authors.
One described the young Bo "as statesman-like as Henry Kissinger, as environmentally conscious as Al Gore, and almost as beloved by the public as Princess Diana".
Bo went to work on policy at party headquarters in Beijing, while Xi took a job with one of his father's friends. But both men knew they would need to spend time further afield to build their legacies.
Xi always saw China's provinces as "the only path to central power", and shipped out to the northern Hebei province, where he began to build a profile as a competent regional official.
Bo, meanwhile, set his sights on Dalian in the coastal Liaoning province, where he worked his way through a number of local county positions.
As mayor, Bo went big on foreign investment, built museums and hotels, cracked down on noise pollution with a decree for drivers to stop honking their horns, and introduced an all-female horseback police squad to roam the city's streets.
He was often seen out and about pressing the flesh with his second wife Gu Kailai, who was well known for being one of the first Chinese lawyers to win a civil lawsuit in the US — a feat she later turned into a book and TV miniseries.
"He had a certain charisma, a certain style, she was attractive — as a couple, they were a modern JFK and Jackie O," Lloyd Donaldson, a hotelier who worked closely with Bo in Dailin, told the BBC.
And it was here that they met Neil Heywood, the man whose demise would lead to their own.
The scandal that sealed Bo Xilai's fate
By 2011, Bo Xilai had been climbing the political ranks for several years.
After Dailin, he served as governor and then minister of commerce, before finally landing a coveted position in the Politburo — the decision-making body of the CCP.
Things were heating up a year out from the 18th National Congress, where the future party leader would be announced.
Bo, now the CCP secretary in the south-west city of Chongqing, stood out among the CCP elite as someone who was hungry for a seat at the top table.
"He was openly competing for a place on the Politburo Standing Committee, maybe even to unseat Xi Jinping as the choice for party secretary," said Richard McGregor, senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute.
"He was really running against the grain of how you're meant to do things in China, which is to be part of a collective … to rise through the ranks with other people and to not openly compete or campaign for power."
But everything changed when Chongqing's police chief walked into a US consulate, apparently terrified for his life and requesting asylum in America.
He had driven more than 300 kilometres, to the neighbouring city of Chengdu, reportedly disguised as an old woman and pursued the whole way by police.
Only a handful of people know for sure exactly what happened during the 30 hours that Wang Lijun was inside that Chengdu building.
But with Chinese police surrounding the consulate, it's believed Wang presented US officials with what he claimed was evidence of corruption by Bo Xilai.
Then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton confirmed that they refused to grant Wang asylum.
"He did not fit any of the categories for the United States giving him asylum," she said in 2013, several months after she'd left office.
"He had a record of corruption, of thuggishness, of brutality. He was an enforcer for Bo Xilai."
With no hope of escaping China, Wang then asked American officials to help him send a message to the party leadership.
"He kept saying that he wanted to get the truth to Beijing," Clinton said, though she declined to reveal the contents of his message.
After more than a day inside the consulate, Wang finally left the building and was immediately taken away by the waiting police.
Chongqing government officials insisted he was suffering "intense mental stress" and they'd simply spirited him away for some "vacation-style medical treatment".
The government moved swiftly to block a plethora of memes and chatter about the incident.
An open letter Wang purportedly sent to friends also made its way around the internet. In it, he described Bo as "the greatest gangster in China".
A month later, a stony-faced Bo made an appearance at China's annual parliamentary session.
But by then, there was blood in the water and Bo's political enemies were circling.
At the end of the session, Wen Jiabao made the first public rebuke of Bo, openly linking his rival to the murky situation involving his loyal police chief.
"The current [Chongqing] party committee and government of Chongqing must seriously reflect on the Wang Lijun incident and learn lessons," he said.
In the months that followed, all the scandalous details came pouring out.
Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel
After Wang's extraordinary plea for asylum, the rumour mill kicked into overdrive.
A tape emerged suggesting that the police chief had fallen out with his boss over an investigation into the Bo family.
British authorities demanded that China re-examine the strange death of Neil Heywood, who they were initially told had succumbed to alcohol poisoning in his Chongqing hotel room.
Finally, the walls came crashing down.
Bo was suspended from the Politburo, and his wife was arrested on suspicion of involvement in Heywood's murder.
At the trial, which lasted a single day, Gu explained what happened on the night of his death.
On November 13, 2011, her longtime associate Neil Heywood had boarded a plane from Beijing to Chongqing. Sitting next to him was Gu's staff member, Zhang Xiaojun.
Upon arrival, Gu took Heywood out for dinner. On the way back to his room at the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel — also known as the Lucky Holiday Hotel — they stopped to buy an expensive bottle of whisky.
In room 1605, the pair began drinking. Heywood became so inebriated he started to vomit.
Zhang, waiting outside the room with a couple of vials of poison Gu had prepared earlier, stepped in and helped her put Heywood to bed.
Heywood asked for a glass of water but instead, Gu poured the deadly cocktail directly into his mouth.
After scattering various drugs around the room, Gu and Zhang left the hotel at 11:38pm. By morning, Heywood was dead.
When hotel workers discovered the body, they alerted the local police chief.
Wang Lijun, who had been looped in on Gu's plan the day before, instructed his officers to take away blood samples and other pieces of evidence.
The official police report listed Heywood's cause of death as overconsumption of alcohol, and with the family's consent, his body was sent off to be cremated without a full autopsy.
But within days, Wang cracked.
With his relationship with the Bo family in tatters, he made a run for the US consulate to reveal everything.
A business deal gone wrong, paranoia, or a foiled spy plot?
Over the years, there have been varying theories as to what Gu Kailai's motivations may have been for arranging and carrying out Neil Heywood's murder.
Prosecutors told the court the relationship had soured over a failed business deal, with Heywood demanding millions of dollars from the Bo family to recoup money he expected to make in a real estate venture scuppered by Chinese political interference.
They claimed Heywood "locked up" Gu's son Bo Guagua in "a residence in England".
The 25-year-old called his mother for help.
Gu asked police chief Wang Lijun for assistance but became convinced she would need to step in to protect her own son.
"The few days last November, when I learned my son's life was [in peril], my mind indeed collapsed," she told the court, according to Xinhua.
One consistent thread in all the alternate versions of events is that Gu had become unstable in the lead-up to Heywood's death.
Heywood told friends Gu had grown paranoid about her inner circle after being targeted in a corruption investigation a few years prior.
The high-powered lawyer was anxious about maintaining her lavish lifestyle and her son's expensive education abroad.
Gu's lawyers told the court she had been suffering from manic depression and mild schizophrenia at the time and was not in full control of her actions.
Speculation was also rife that Heywood, who had worked for a private intelligence-gathering firm known to hire former MI5 and MI6 agents, had been spying on the Bo family.
Motive aside, Gu accepted full responsibility for the murder plots and contested none of the facts written in the indictment.
"The tragedy which was created by me was not only extended to Neil, but also to several families," she reportedly told the court.
"The case has produced great losses to the Party and the country, for which I ought to shoulder the responsibility, and I will never feel at ease."
As Gu stared down life in prison, a different sentence was coming down the pike for Bo.
Bo's downfall allows for Xi's rise
With mounting allegations of corruption, bribery and even an extensive wire-tapping network used to spy on top Chinese officials, Bo's days in the party were numbered.
"The wire-tapping was seen as a direct challenge to central authorities. It revealed to them just how far Bo … was prepared to go in his efforts to grasp greater power in China," wrote New York Times journalists Jonathan Ansfield and Ian Johnson.
By October 2012, Bo had been expelled from the Communist Party and the parliament, paving the way for his prosecution.
Once seen as the most charismatic Chinese politician of his generation and a future leader, Bo was now an emblem of the rot of corruption in Chinese politics and was largely a scapegoat for it.
Xi Jinping, meanwhile, was ready to take his position at the very top.
But few would have predicted he would consolidate power and set himself on a path to be China's president for life.
Richard McGregor says whether Bo's ambition was to replace Xi as the next party leader, or simply to use his position within the Politburo to fragment power, "it certainly influenced the way that Xi behaved in office".
Within his first 100 days as party leader, Xi unleashed a fierce campaign to crack down on the "tigers and flies" – high-level officials and lowly bureaucrats — accused of various forms of corruption.
Bo, eventually charged with corruption, bribery and abuse of power and sentenced to life in prison, had paid the ultimate price.
In the years since, scholars and journalists have summarised that the scandal triggered the most damaging split in the CCP leadership since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
Some have even speculated that the murder investigation and Wang's defection to the US consulate may all have been a set-up, designed to bring down the man seen as Xi's rival.
McGregor believes it's more likely that Bo's enemies simply saw their opportunity, and pounced.
"[Xi] was already waiting in the wings. And it would have required an earthquake to shift him," he said.
"But we're probably still learning about what happened in 2012, because, clearly, Xi felt threatened.
"The roots of Xi Jinping's power now really lie in 2012. So it's been enormously influential in shaping what's happened since then."
