During the troubled times of the Republic of China, the city of Peiping gradually lost its blood under the iron heel of the Japanese army. Cheng Anlan, a down-and-out scholar, entered a theater troupe and became an old student after his family broke up. He used opera as a blade to hide his "anti-Japanese" aspirations in the lyrics of "Mother-in-law's Tattoo" and awakened people's hearts in the streets; Jiang Liheng, a young master from a distinguished family, refused to accept his family's dependence on the Japanese puppets and opened "Liji Bookstore" in Liulichang, secretly selling progressive books and periodicals, and igniting the ideological fire for young people.
After the September 18th Incident, the two became connected in the theater because of the word "home and country". From the initial collision of ambitions of "playing to awaken the world" and "writing to convey one's ambitions", to guarding the bookstore and protecting students together during the North China Incident, and then to after the fall of Peking in the July 7th Incident, an actor pretending to be a dissenter to convey information about the Japanese army's defense, and a fake young master to explore the movements of strongholds, risking his life to weave a hidden line of resistance against Japan.
In the cold winter of 1938, before the singing of "Loyalty and Martyrs" at the Yingchun Hall had finished, the traitor's informant led to a roundup by the military police. In order to protect intelligence and comrades, the two of them would rather die than surrender, and eventually fell in the snow and wind of the execution ground. The theater stopped vibrating and the pages turned to dust. Only the belief that "mountains and rivers share the same origin" will forever be engraved in the dust of Peiping.
Mission: Different identities, different paths, but the same family and country