A new teacher and her brother, who has been appointed head of fisheries control, arrive in a village on the shores of an estuary. Despite the hidden resistance of their fellow villagers, they manage to engage the village schoolchildren in an active fight against poachers.
A documentary film about the discovery of the "dead city" of Khara-Khoto by the Russian traveler K.K.Kozlov in 1908 and about the work of philologist and linguist N.A.Nevsky on deciphering the ancient Tangut language.
