The story is set in Beibin City, a heavy industrial city in the Songnen Plain of Northeast China from 1985 to 1995, and the surrounding Songhua River Basin. Through the protagonist Zhang Chengwu, a man who struggled to rise from the bottom, he eventually became the master of river transportation and even influenced the city. From the perspective of a complex figure who is the lifeline of the economy, it shows the decline of state-owned factories and mines, the transformation of the collective economy, the reshaping of the rules of the world under the great changes of the times, as well as the difficult choices between interests, friendship, and survival of the people in it, as well as the ups and downs of human nature.
