Born in the latter days of a crumbling Qing dynasty and the evaporation of centuries of Confucian order, Bia Lang struggles to find a place in a world that keeps shifting underneath his feet. Unable to follow his father’s path as a Confucian scholar, he is mesmerized by exciting tales of heroic bandits and crusaders for righteousness and the welfare of common people. He gravitates towards military service during Sun Yat-sen’s Republican revolution at first and eventually becomes a formidable bandit in North China seeking to restore an imagined golden past that may never have existed and could not be compatible with the convulsions of the birthing of a modern China.