Reborn in Republican-Era China: The Film Queen Becomes a Bound-Foot Child Bride

Bai Meiluo, a 33-year-old award-winning actress, accidentally takes a cephalosporin instead of a hangover remedy at her celebratory banquet and dies unexpectedly. When she opens her eyes again, she has become the child bride of the Zhao family in early Republican-era Shanghai: a 17-year-old girl who shares her name, with tiny bound feet shackled by feudal custom and a timid, docile nature like something out of an old painting.

Her “husband,” Zhao Ningzhou, is a patriotic businessman who has returned from studying abroad. He despises their feudal marriage and sees her as a burden hidden away in the family compound, then throws himself into industry and education as a way to save the country.

When they first meet, he sneers, “What can a woman with bound feet know about the nation and its people?” She laughs and says, “You act cold so badly.” From using the cadence of opera to mock the powerful at banquets, to helping him expose a traitor's disguise; from secretly loosening her foot bindings to learn to walk freely, to teaching knowledge from the podium at a girls' school, she uses an actress's keen instincts and resilience to tear open a path of light in the dust of a turbulent age.

He watches her race through the flames of war on her tiny feet and sees her navigate with ease between the family compound and the fate of the nation. Only then does he understand what a burning soul lies within her delicate frame. As the hem of her qipao sweeps through smoke and gunpowder, and account books overlap with intelligence reports beneath the lamplight, these two who went from bitter adversaries to companions in life and death turn their personal portrait of a turbulent world into a sweeping chronicle of a nation bound together by a shared fate.