In an old Western-style house shaded by plane trees in Shanghai’s French Concession, twenty-six-year-old cultural relic restorer Su Li is bent over a Song dynasty glazed-glass heart lamp. She has no idea that the lamp will illuminate an epic love story spanning three eras and entwining the fates of three generations.
In early autumn 1937, the lamp’s first owner, Lin Wanqing, daughter of a prominent Jiangnan family, meets Lu Huaijin, an architectural designer recently returned from France, in her family’s library. He is hired to design a “library that will never sink” for her family, while she helps him uncover architectural secrets scattered through ancient books. Amid the artillery fire of the Battle of Shanghai, Lu Huaijin gives his life to fulfill his promise to Lin Wanqing: he hides the library blueprints in a compartment inside the glazed-glass heart lamp, so she can take it and flee to Hong Kong.
In the bitter winter of 1978, the lamp finds its way to a corner of the storeroom in a Central pawnshop in Hong Kong. While sorting through her family’s belongings, Xu Mingyue, the daughter of an antique shop owner, discovers it. A hand-drawn architectural plan inside the lamp catches the attention of young architect Gu Yanshen. He is Lu Huaijin’s grandson, returned from London to fulfill his grandfather’s unfinished wish. Xu Mingyue and Gu Yanshen are brought together by the lamp, but become rivals because of business competition between their families. They clash over the demolition and preservation of Kowloon Walled City, yet grow closer as they work together to restore a glazed-glass lamp. When Gu Yanshen discovers that the secret behind his grandfather’s plans is connected to Xu Mingyue’s family, the previous generation’s grudges surge back like a rising tide.
In the spring of 2019, Su Li finishes restoring the glazed-glass heart lamp and unexpectedly discovers a stack of yellowed blueprints and two love letters written eighty years apart inside its hidden compartment. At an exhibition, she runs into Lu Chenzhou, an architect from Hong Kong, Gu Yan
