It begins in the Mountain Hospital in Shandong Province in the year 1940. The hospital is run by an unconventional Scottish doctor, Edmund Airton, who had retreated to Shandong Province with his wife 10 years before. The doctor and his wife, already having seen their share of war and suffering, gave every patient the care they needed. But the Japanese came and shattered the idyll in which the couple brought up their son, Harry Airton. The grown-up Harry joins the army and years later is dispatched by the British Secret Service to Beijing. There, he struggles with his past and grapples with having found love that might soon slip way.