During the Yongle era of the Ming Dynasty, Song Miaoyan, daughter of a Nanjing porcelain merchant, has managed the family business since childhood and is clever and capable. She sees with her own eyes as her father, to pay off debts and curry favor with the powerful, gives her gentle older sister, Song Miaoyu, to their official uncle to raise. The sister is then married off as an “official's daughter” to an eighth-rank imperial physician. She seems to marry in splendor, but in truth she forces a smile, her fate traded like a commodity.
Song Miaoyan and her childhood friend, the scholar Cheng Duhe, are in love with each other. But because of the gap between her humble status as a “merchant's daughter” and his prospects as a “candidate in the imperial examinations,” she buries her feelings and dares not confess. Trapped by both the rigid hierarchy of “scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants” and the expectation that a woman's marriage is decided by “her parents' command,” Song Miaoyan ultimately cannot escape a fate arranged for her. Her father chooses a wealthy family of Four Treasures of the Study merchants who have moved to Beijing. At twenty, she marries the widower Zong Shuzhe as his second wife, severing her ties with Cheng Duhe for good and setting out on an uncertain journey north, far from home.
