In the troubled times of the Republic of China, Lin Yanqiu, an orphan girl who was abandoned by her family, relied on an old sewing machine blueprint to make a comeback. She secretly planned to build a women's textile workshop to invent improved looms to break the monopoly of male merchants. When the warlords commandeered her machines for military use, she used the patent as bait to form an alliance with female students, widows and overseas engineers, exchanging technology for dignity, and weaving a business lifeline that could survive without men under fire.
