Zhao Weiguo, a modern-day veteran, dies unexpectedly after stepping in to help someone. When he opens his eyes again, it is the winter of 1965.
He is still the veteran Zhao Weiguo, but he has traveled from the 1990s back to the turbulent 1960s, returning home with honors from the storied battlefields of the southwest.
With hazy memories from a future beyond his time and a body just beginning to recover from its wounds, he follows his registered hometown address to a home in Nanluoguxiang, south of the capital: a true courtyard house, crowded with a complicated mix of people and full of life's warmth, hardships, and everyday squabbles.
A stern father and a loving mother, brothers who get along? Still, there's no escaping cramped housing, scarce food, and everyone looking out for their own interests.
As soon as he returns home, his father's decision is final: the family will split up, and everyone will live separately!
Faced with the tides of a changing era, the courtyard's daily troubles, family ties, and uncertainty about his own future, how will Zhao Weiguo, armed with only a meager resettlement allowance, forge his own path in this courtyard, a place of both warmth and scheming?
Beginning with Love in the Courtyard, he writes a story of a life lived against the current in the 1960s!