As a symbol of Chinese modern drama, Thunderstorm has garnered praise through -out the literary circle after its publication in 1934. The plot of the play centers on one family's psychological and physical destruction as a result of incest, as perpetrated at the hands of its morally depraved and corrupt patriarch, Zhou Puyuan. The play reveals the events of two families within a short day, which resolved in a tragic ending.

      A son of a wealthy family, Zhou Puyuan, has an affair with the family maid, Shiping, and she bears two sons. However, he marries a wealthy woman and drives away Shiping along with her sickly second son, and Shiping, after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, marries a greedy butler Lu Gui and conceives Sifeng. Years later, the grown up Sifeng works, along with her father, in the Zhou family as a maid. While Puyuan has become a domineering and dictatorial mine owner, his wife Fanyi and eldest son Zhou Ping develops a relationship, though Zhou Ping has fallen in love with the young and naïve Sifeng, who is also admired by the son of Puyuan and Fanyi, Zhou Chong. As Shiping arrives at the mansion to find Sifeng, she unexpectedly meets Puyuan again. Reluctant to have her daughter serve as a maid of the Zhou family, Shiping decides to take Sifeng away without realizing the ties between Sifeng and Zhou Ping. Fanyi, who has failed to convince Zhou Ping to take her away from the family, reveals the hidden secrets, only to elicit more unbearable truths, which have eventually led to the families’ disintegration and the characters’ tragic downfall.