Du Heng, a doctor from a prestigious university, stepped into the provincial government office with ideals in mind, but ran into the high wall of cold rules.
When rigorous academic thinking encounters vague official expressions, and when truth-seeking conscience succumbs to the injunction to "grasp one's sense of proportion," he is forced to struggle between ideals and reality.
Every compromise is accompanied by the pain of the soul, and every training session wears away the edges and corners of the past.
See how Du Heng rises and falls in the furnace of power and walks alone in the wasteland of emotion. When the celadon pen washes away the soul, the halo of the ivory tower finally becomes the light on the other side - where can the ideal of intellectuals sink under the scale of the system?
