Living in a village, Ye, a beautiful and skillful woman, makes all kinds of small toys in clay and bamboo which her husband sells in the nearest town.
One day, he dies from sunstroke and their young son disappears. Soon, the village is destroyed as warlords keep fighting each other and Ye takes refuge in Shanghai with her daughter. Ye teaches her her art and the young girl becomes even more skilled than her mother. Yet life becomes harder and harder as traditional toys sell for less and less faced with the invasion of cheap modern toys. During the bombing of Shanghai by the Japanese, the daughter gets killed; alone and destitute, her mother keeps selling her toys in the street. One day, she gives a wooden soldier to a little boy, unaware that he is her own son who was kidnapped by a child trafficker and sold to a rich childless family. As New Year crackers go off she thinks bombs are exploding again and calls people to take up the fight once more. Thought to have become mad, she gets arrested by the foreign concession police.
