Left in the hands of her opium-addicted uncle, an orphan girl is delivered to The Hall of Eternal Splendour which seems destined to break her spirit. And yet the girl survives and one day hope appears in the unlikely form of a customs inspector, a modest man resistant to the charms of the corrupt world but not to the innocent girl before him.

At the age of fourteen Pan Yuliang, an orphan girl in the care of her opium-addicted uncle, finds herself in the third-class cabin of a steamship bound for a strange new town.When Pan and her uncle arrive in the city he sells his niece to 'The Hall of Eternal Splendour', where she is destined to live out her life as a prostitute in its smoky back rooms.

And yet, two years later, escape appears in the unlikely form of a government inspector who will take Pan as his concubine and introduce her to a glamorous new life in 1920s Shanghai: a life of love and of art.