The geography of Sons

Part of the appeal of Pearl Buck's style is that she's vague about names and personages, and flat-out doesn't provide dates -- intentionally giving an air of timelessness and making it difficult to correlate her events with those in the real world. (That's when she sticks to real-world chronology at all. In the novel Peony, she puts Tzu Hsi in the 1820s.) This makes for detective work when you want to line up her events with history, but once in a while, there's an event so distinctive that all her vagueness can't conceal it.

For the chronology of The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided, that event is the April 12th Incident, when Chiang Kai-shek entered Shanghai and massacred the Communists of the city, who were deep in the Kuomintang and expecting him to arrive with a Communist revolution. That event occurs early in A House Divided, and is the cause of Wang the Gormless (Wang Yuan) departing for the United States; he's perhaps 20 years old at the time, perhaps older.

Wang the Tiger is an old man at that time. He began his campaign late in life; I'd guess he was 40 years old, although he might have been as young as his mid-30s. (Chinese warlords remained vigorous for a pretty long while.) It was about 5 years after the beginning of his conquests before Wang Yuan was born, so he was probably 65 as of the April 12th Incident -- aged more by his sense of failure, due to inactivity after his early conquests, than by the march of time.

The "weak and unready" man in the seat of the central government early in Wang the Tiger's career must have been Yuan Shikai, carrying on Yuan Shao's 1,700-year-old family tradition. (Pu-yi is spoken of very differently by Buck's characters and narrator, with a level of contempt and hatred that's startling for a writer whose attitude towards rape and torture is basically "boys will be boys." Then again, her genial, forgiving attitude is reserved for Chinese atrocities, and she calls down the thunder of Heaven on the Japanese in Dragon Seed -- despite the fact that Japanese crimes were no worse than Chinese, and often less bad. So her hatred for Pu-yi is because of who he worked for, not what he did.)

Wang the Tiger was born around 1882. Pearl Buck mentions that Anhui is Wang Lung's home province in the passage about the fire-wagon in The Good Earth. (The city that they take the firewagon to is Shanghai, almost the only city in China in the 1860s-70s where you could find Westerners, railroads, and so on.) We know that Wang the Tiger's conquests were just over the border from his home province, and they were to the north; this means either Shandong or Jiansu.

But there was a disastrous flood late in Sons, where the river burst its embankments and drowned the countryside. Most of Shandong is very flat, and the Yellow River flows through it in embankments, while it doesn't flow through northern Jiansu at all; this means southwest Shandong must have been the scene of Wang the Tiger's early conquests.

The only city in southwest Jiansu which is directly on the Yellow River, near a substantial chain of mountains, just over the border from Anhui, and a long but doable march from a port city is Jining. The port Wang the Tiger later took was Rizhao; he marched through a secondary city to get there, and this would have been Linyi. (Pearl Buck also used the name Linyi for a character in Pavilion of Women -- a philosophical novel, not a licentious one, but and/or and strongly recommended -- further collaborating this theory.)

I can't guarantee that Double Dragon Mountain is not imaginary, but if it was historical, I'm pretty sure that it's the pair of peaks just east of the Moting Reservoir and southwest of Zhangzhuangzhen.

The "lords of the north" to whom Wang the Tiger pledged alliegance were the Beiyang Government, specifically the Zhili Clique. The revolutionaries in the south, opposed to all warlords, were the Kuomintang. Wang the Tiger was among the numerous warlords left in place as administrators after the KMT victory in the Northern Expedition of 1926-28, which destroyed the Beiyang Government, shifting the alliegances of the various remaining warlords over to the KMT.

Wang the Tiger probably died in 1932, the year in which Japan siezed Manchuria, FDR began his first term in office, and Hitler and the social-conservative parties got 40% each of the vote in the Wiemar election of '32, with the Communists (with 20%) as tie-breakers.

The distance from Jining to Rizhao is about 200 miles, which give a sense of just how much the automobile distorts our perception of distance: a 3-hour drive in modern terms is enough in real-world terms to allow the subordinate leader of the other place to operate pretty much as a governor.

To see these areas in Google Maps: the Shandong Peninsula is the peninsula of China that juts out into the East China Sea, facing Korea. Zoom in there and look a bit south; Rizhao is just southwest of the larger port of Qingdao. Jining is almost due west. The probable Double Dragon Mountain is east of Jining: zzom in until you can see the Yishan Scenic Areas (which are probably where Wang the Tiger made his camp when he first entered the Jining region), then go a bit east, and look just southeast of the Moting Reservoir, west of the Zaogou Reservoir and southwest of Zhangzhuangzhen.