Are the nights on Chang'an Street long enough to bury a dream? Lin Yuan'an, a restorer at the Palace Museum, is forced to sign a marriage contract and become the caged songbird of Shen Yanzhou, a rising star in Beijing's elite circles. On the night she moves into a luxury apartment by Chang'an Street, she sees a costume hanging in the dressing room. It belonged to A Ruan, Shen Yanzhou's deceased first love, and the face in the mirror looks nearly identical to hers.
He takes her to the Chang'an Club and teaches her to recognize the wolves in the game of power. But when he's drunk, he strokes her face and murmurs A Ruan's name. When she clutches a pregnancy test, hoping to fight for a future, an “accidental” miscarriage stains Chang'an Street's first snow red. Three years later, they meet again in Suzhou. He crushes the sugar painting she has just made. “Yuan'an, you can't escape me.”
A blood-written confession about her birth reveals an even deeper wound: she is A Ruan's twin sister, switched at birth and made a scapegoat for the Shen family's political enemies. So she chooses the tallest tower on Chang'an Street as the stage for her revenge, beneath the spotlights of the Shen Group's listing celebration. She raises the family's treasured painting, Cold Mountain, and tears the truth wide open: “My sister's hair is sewn into this fake!”
The day her late-stage lung cancer is confirmed, Chang'an Street lights up for the night. Leaning against the floor-to-ceiling window, she smiles faintly. “Shen Yanzhou, scatter my ashes along this street.” He holds her trembling, cooling body as traffic streams past the window like a golden river.
Years later, after getting out of prison, the Shen family patriarch still wanders Chang'an Street at midnight. Some say he's searching for a speck of ash. Others say he's waiting for a dream that will never see the dawn.
Chang'an Street can hold power enough to shake the heavens, but not one humble dream.
