The film contains various stories about the "Comb Sisters", a group of women working in the silk mills of Southern China in the 1900s, who vow never to marry. The chief of the Comb Sisters is the beautiful lesbian Miss Shang. One of the Comb Sisters, Ah Di, had been promised in marriage when she was a child, so Miss Shang arranges a fake marriage for her. However Ah Di gradually falls in love with her husband. Miss Shang also buys very young girls, brings them up, and sells them when they are a marriageable age. Miss Shang asks the ridiculous sum of 20,000 yuan for one such girl, just to tease the men in the town, but the ploy backfires on her.—Will Gilbert