OIL FOR THE LAMPS OF CHINA
Alice Tilsdale Hobart
Introduction
to 2003 edition by Sherman Cochran, Cornell University
Oil for the Lamps of China (1934) was a
best-selling novel when it was first published, just a few years after Pearl
Buck’s The Good Earth (1931). The
hero of the story is a keen, young American businessman who wants to bring
“light” and progress to China in the form of oil and oil lamps, but who is
caught between Chinese revolutionary nationalism in the 1920s and the heartless
American corporation that has built his career.
The title
became a catch phrase for expansive American dreams of the vast China market
even though the novel itself, written at the beginning of the Great Depression,
was skeptical of large business and any supposed American ability to improve
China.
The author presents a clear portrait of Western
idealism versus Eastern pragmatism in the doubly exotic setting of Mainland China before
the advent of large-scale industrialization. The portrayal is unflattering to
both sides.
While some might now regard
the more sympathetic treatment of the young American as out of date, others
would counter that the picture is both historically and contextually
accurate. "Now, nearly seventy years
since it was originally published, . . . Oil
for the Lamps of China again seems timely. Once again ambitious young Americans
like Stephen Chase are working for big corporations in China. . . . Once again
sensitive young spouses like Hester are coping with the rigors of living
simultaneously in American corporate culture and Chinese culture. . . . As
these parallels suggest, if Oil for the
Lamps of China was timely in the 1930s, then it also seems timely
today.”
— from
the introduction by Sherman Cochran
On the original edition…
“Of amazing scope, and a
richness and integrity difficult to convey”
— The New
York Times
“What Mrs. [Pearl] Buck
has done for the Chinese peasant in The
Good Earth and Sons, Mrs. Hobart
has done for the Chinese and the American trader in Oil for the Lamps of China. Hester & Stephen, Kin and Ho are
unforgettable characters, but greatest of all, of course, is the Oil Company to
which justice is excellently done. Mrs.
Buck might have created Kin and Ho
but only Mrs. Hobart — out of her tragically intimate knowledge — could have created Stephen and oiled the
portrait of ‘the Company.’ ”
— Harley Farnsworth MacNair (Professor of
Chinese history, University of Chicago) in a letter to D.L. Chambers (Vice
President, Bobbs-Merrill, Publishers) September 3, 1933
Alice Tisdale Hobart (1882-1967) went to China in 1908 and there met her
future husband, an executive in the Standard Oil Company. Her first book, Pioneering Where the World Is Old
(1917), was based on their experiences in Manchuria. Within the Walls of Nanking (1928) describes their experiences in
1926 when troops of the revolutionary Northern Expedition threatened
foreigners. When she and her husband returned to the United States, she turned
to writing full time and became a best-selling author.
EastBridge D’Asia Vu Reprint Library 2003 432 pp illustrations
ISBN 1-891936-08-5 (pb) $29.95