Hwang Jini is the illegitimate child of a nobleman and Hyun Geum, a blind gisaeng. A gisaeng is a singer, dancer and hostess who lives a life catering to the whims of the yangban elite. Fearing that her young daughter will follow in her footsteps and determined that she should become more than a mere plaything for men, Hyun Geum sends Jini to a remote mountain temple to be cared for by an old monk. But one day, the seven-year-old Jini slips away from the temple and comes across a gisaeng performance, and is drawn to her destiny. Enraptured by the beauty of their singing and dancing, Jini runs away and enters the gibang, or gisaeng house, where she meets her mother for the first time. They discover that she displays an outstanding talent for dancing and playing the geomungo. From that day on, Jini trains to become Joseon's top gisaeng. She studies under Im Baek-moo, one of the best court dancers in the kingdom and a harsh and manipulative teacher.
Jini then falls in love with Kim Eun-ho, son of a powerful nobleman, but his parents refuse to accept the relationship due to the difference in their social status. Jini's first love ends in tragedy when in a futile attempt to elope with her, Eun-ho catches pneumonia and dies.
Unable to forget Eun-ho, Jini no longer has any desire to dance; for the next five years, she spends her days making music and conversation with the middle class (becoming enormously wealthy in the process) and her nights drowning herself in misery and alcohol. While drunk, she decides to kill herself, but the poet Kim Jung-han saves her. Thus, Jini begins a troubled love affair with Jung-han. Meanwhile, she continually rejects Byuk Kye-soo, a royal relative who is obsessed with her, and faces off against Bu-yong, her rival in dancing and love. At Jini's side in times of need is her devoted bodyguard Yi-saeng. Jini later finds out that Baek-moo's scheming had a hand in Eun-ho's death, and jealousy and bitterness build between the two as they prepare for what turns out to be a fateful performance of the crane dance.
In an age when women were treated as if they were invisible, Hwang Jini becomes a celebrated gisaeng-singer-dancer-poet of the 16th century. Her beauty, wit and intellect propels her from obscurity into the company of Joseon's most powerful aristocrats, eventually winning the acclaim of King Jungjong and his court. In a relentlessly class-based society, Hwang Jini was a woman ahead of her time, who pursued art relentlessly and saw life in beautiful colors. She was both revered and reviled in her lifetime, and left her mark in history.
