Tianjin, 1937. In a city of grand foreign-style mansions and winding alleyways, the concessions resound with decadent music on the surface, while beneath it the forces at play have tangled into a knot.
Zhou Hu, a ruthless figure in the Green Gang, is quietly killed at a night market, setting the already tense city ablaze. The Northern Gang is immediately named the prime suspect.
Elsewhere, an opera house in the French Concession is staging Farewell My Concubine. Su Wan is its star. Having just won first place in the Tianjin Famous Performers competition, she is known as “First Lady Su.” Carrying the blood feud of her murdered family, she maneuvers among Tianjin’s powerful, determined to find the person who destroyed her family ten years ago. Then Shen Yanshan, head of the Haihe Merchants’ Guild, takes a seat in the opera house’s private box, and her fate takes another turn.
Amid gunfire and opera, the two stumble their way into each other’s lives. With her heart and soul devoted to Shen Yanshan, Su Wan can only tell Lu Shaozhou, the young master of the Lu family who keeps pursuing her with lavish gifts, “I’m honored by your affection.” As the feelings between the three become an inescapable knot, Shen Yanshan’s identity as an undercover operative for the Northern Gang is exposed. Every faction targets their vulnerabilities, with the Green Gang proving the most ruthless. To eliminate Shen Yanshan, they dig up the old case involving Su Wan’s parents and expose the Shen family’s failure to act, hoping to use her hand to kill him.
The rickshaws of Tianjin still roll, and the fiddles in the opera house still play. But from their first meeting in stage makeup and a suit, the two are gradually driven into a dead end in an alley of the concession. Perhaps in those times, the harder you tried to hold on to someone, the more easily the chaos trapped you both like moths, burning through a lifetime without ever escaping the city’s fog.
