As China's once-glorious Ming dynasty tears itself apart, a young man and woman struggle to stay together. Set before the backdrop of one of the great upheavals in Chinese history, Southern Rain is the story of a carpenter's son who falls for a brilliant Buddhist nun just as she is set to become a powerful man's concubine. Their adventures lead them north to Beijing and south to the Yangtze valley, as art, theater and poetry give way to foreign invasion, banditry and chaos. In a world of turmoil, their search for freedom and safety comes to mirror China's own. Southern Rain is both an intimate portrait of a man and a woman and a sweeping historical epic, presenting China's tumultuous seventeenth century on a human scale.