Tianyi is a painter and writer whose life coincides with perhaps the most turbulent era in China's vast history. Raised in a world whose ageless traditions were on an irreversible collision course with modernity and the West, Tianyi heads to Paris on a scholarship at the age of 23. Upon his return after nine years, he finds the China he had cherished in his memory is almost unrecognisable. Arrested as a Western 'sympathiser', Tianyi becomes an exile in his own country.