Guan Hongmei, a modern tie-dye artist, unexpectedly transmigrates to Shanghai in the late 1920s, a city battered by storms. She wakes beside the indigo vat of Chen's Dye Works, which is on the verge of collapse. The color in the vat has gone bad, and a huge compensation bill is about to crush the business. With her bold, tigerish Northeastern spirit, knowledge of chemistry far ahead of its time, and deep understanding of traditional colors, she fights with everything she has to pull the ancestral vat back from the brink. Her first striking creation, a cheongsam in the shade of Skywater Green, makes its debut in Shanghai's world of fashion. She opens a shop called Rainbow Garments and revives a lost palette of traditional Chinese colors: the noble Crimson Purple, the vibrant Pine-Flower Yellow, the poetic Moon White, and more, restoring their cultural spirit. Beyond the lanes, however, the smoke of commercial warfare billows. Guan Hongmei refuses to fall. Amid the flames of war, she uses Cinnabar Red to inspire patriotic acts. Under the blockade, she dyes fabric with medicinal-herb residue to create Isolated-Island Green, a symbol of life on the besieged island, and uses stove ash and rust to make Battlefield Gray, a color that carries the memory of war. When her shop is trashed and her mentor dies protecting their craft, she raises the banner of Unyielding Red among the ruins, turning the dye works into a secret base of resistance. She compiles The Rainbow Garments Color Guide, pouring her life's work and love for her country into its pages. And in the darkest hour before dawn, she divides her forces to move their precious knowledge to safety, delivering intelligence in a breathtaking mission with a gown of Imperial Yellow. From a dye vat in a backstreet lane to Shanghai's foremost hall of original art, from an artisan in pursuit of beauty to a guardian of cultural heritage, watch Guan Hongmei tell the story of how a Northeastern tiger girl dyed all of Shanghai in splendor with a single vat of indigo.
