In 1960, a Chinese mountaineering team makes its first bid to conquer Everest. Acting team leader Fang Wuzhou faces a pivotal choice: save his teammate Qu Songlin Yi Zhang, or safeguard the camera clutched in Qu Songlin’s hand. He chooses the life beside him, and the team pushes forward to reach the summit from the perilous North Face—a feat the global mountaineering community had long deemed impossible. Yet the victory goes unrecognized by many Soviet climbers who trained most of the crew, largely because there is no 360-degree photographic record of the peak. Alongside the climb, Xu Ying Ziyi Zhang, a meteorology student, becomes a quiet beacon of support for Fang as his love for her quietly deepens, even as the political winds of the Cultural Revolution threaten to shatter the team.
The narrative jumps to the early 1970s, when the Cultural Revolution has dispersed the climbers only to reunite them with renewed resolve. In 1975, determined to earn global recognition, Fang Wuzhou and Qu Songlin lead a fresh generation of climbers—among them Li Guoliang Boran Jing and Yang Guang Ge Hu—toward another perilous ascent to the world’s highest peak. Li, seasoned in photography, promises to bring back striking images that could finally cement their place in mountaineering history. With government and military backing, a robust base is established, and Xu Ying supplies constant weather updates that guide the team through increasingly demanding conditions. The group faces harsher weather, injuries, and the admonitions of Tibetan monks who urge them to respect nature.
Undaunted, Fang orchestrates improvisation and disciplined grit as they advance. A brutal windstorm collapses their tents and ruptures Yang Guang’s sleeping bag, leaving him with a life-altering injury that costs him a leg. Li Guoliang devises a strategy to scale the mountain in a condensed timeframe. At the Second Step, tragedy strikes when an oxygen cylinder strikes Yang Guang in the face, injuring him and pulling the team toward a dangerous cliff edge. Yang wakes in time, hands the camera to the next climber, and makes the ultimate sacrifice to prevent a fatal fall. The survivors press on, listening to Xu’s weather signals as they ascend toward glory. Yet fate has one more blow: Xu collapses, coughing blood, and dies just as they reach the summit, where they plant the Chinese flag in triumph.
Decades later, in 2019, Old Yang Guang returns, now with a prosthetic leg, and climbs to the Second Step. He sees the ladder his team left behind—a beacon that has since aided more than 1,300 climbers—and a renewed sense of the legacy forged by those who risked everything to redefine national achievement. The film’s final arc celebrates endurance, camaraderie, and the enduring question of recognition in the annals of mountaineering, as the laddered path to the summit continues to inspire new generations of climbers.
