The movie tells a love story that occurs between 1988 and 2003. Beautiful Yu Hong leaves her village life to study in Beijing. At university, she discovers an intense world of sexual freedom and forbidden pleasures. There she meets Zhou Wei, who she falls madly in love with and with whom she begins an obsessive relationship as all around them, their fellow students begin to demonstrate, demanding democracy and freedom. With a dazzling mise-en-scène, Summer Palace is a generational portrait that reflects convulsive times lyrically and, at the same time, brutally, explicitly and profoundly erotically.