प्लॉट

The time is circa 1900, the place is rural northern China. Wang Lung, a humble farmer, makes tea for his father and takes a bath one morning. Given how poor he is, both of these are extravagant, but it is a special occasion: his wedding day. Wang goes to the marketplace and then on to the house of the local great lord to collect his new bride, a former kitchen slave named Olan. After returning home, Wang invites a few of his friends and relatives over for a meal, which though modest was still extravagant by his standards. Among the guests are Wang's shiftless uncle, and his neighbor Ching. Olan plants a peach pit behind the house on the first night.

Olan proves to be a diligent, frugal, and industrious wife to Wang. She cooks meals for Wang and his father, makes and mends clothes, takes care of the chores around the house, and helps Wang work in the fields, even after she becomes pregnant. A nasty storm comes in right at harvest time, and Olan rushes into the fields to help bring in the wheat before it can blow or wash away, despite being in the early stages of labor. Thanks to Olan, Wang is able to save most of his wheat crop. Shortly afterward, Olan delivers Wang's first child, a son. No sooner is the child born than Olan is back at work, helping turn the harvested wheat into finished grain, ready to cook or sell. Wang sells his surplus wheat for a handsome profit.

Wang hears from his uncle that the great lord is in financial distress, as wealth had made him complacent and lazy, without enough income to finance his lavish spending on luxuries such as opium. Wang and Olan return to the great house, where Olan shows off her new son to her former mistress and co-workers while Wang takes some of his profits from the wheat to buy one of the great lord's fields, on which he will grow rice.

The years pass and Wang prospers. By 1910, he has five fields, and Olan has borne him a second son and a daughter. However, luck turns against him. Drought takes hold across northern China, and Wang's crops fail. With Wang and Olan, their three children, his father, and his mooching uncle to feed, his stored food is soon exhausted. Famine takes hold across the land. Wang does not have the heart to butcher his beloved ox, so Olan does it instead, and the family has food for a week but no ox to pull the plow next year. Wang's neighbors, including Ching, become suspicious that Wang is hoarding food and break into his house, but find that by that time, Wang and his family are literally eating dirt. Wang reflects that he was wise to invest in land, for food and money would have been stolen.

Wang's uncle and some of his friends try to take advantage of Wang's desperation, by offering to buy his land for a tiny fraction of what it cost him. Wang is a broken man and ready to sell out, but Olan rallies Wang's courage, reminding him that not only will he have nothing next year if he sells, there is no food for the money to buy anyway. Wang refuses to sell the land. Instead, he says, he and Olan and their children and his father will join tens of thousands of others traveling south on the "fire wagon" - the steam powered train, relatively new to China - in search of work and food.

Upon arriving in a southern city, Wang builds a hut in a shanty town and looks for work, but there are far more men streaming into the city than jobs available for them, and Wang has no luck. The children and the elderly father turn to begging, but fail at that task, too. Wang contemplates what was once unthinkable: selling his daughter into slavery. Wang catches a break when a man in an adjacent hut dies in a work accident. Wang rushes to take his place before anyone else can, and finds himself pulling heavy carts through the muck for a very low wage.

Wang becomes angry at his sons when they steal food, not wanting them to grow up as thieves. Olan cooks the stolen food anyway, for they must eat if they are to live. Each day for Wang is spent simply trying to survive to the next day, and he despairs of ever seeing his farm again, especially after he meets another man who was forced off the land ten years earlier and has still not raised enough money to return home, much less buy seed, tools, and draft animals. Wang fears his fate will be the same.

The teeming, impoverished masses of people become more hungry and discontent, and a soapbox speaker informs them that armies are on the move and a revolution is brewing. Wang cares nothing for this, but when the speaker mentions offhand that it is raining in the north, Wang perks up. The drought is over, and he can farm again, if only he can get back home. Soon, the revolution arrives in the city. The security forces flee the city, and the masses of people first loot the marketplace and then break into and pillage the local great house, taking anything they can carry. While Wang gathers food, Olan enters the great house and is trampled. However, she finds a bag of valuable jewels left behind when all the other rioters have left.

A new army arrives in the city. They inform the people that the Manchu Dynasty has fallen, ending 21 centuries of Imperial China's history. China is now to be a republic. However, they take a dim view of the looting. They begin searching people and summarily shooting anyone found to have stolen anything of value. Olan is alarmed, for she has taken the jewels. Just before the soldiers discover the jewels in Olan's clothes, their commander arrives and tells them that they must drop what they're doing and march again, thus saving Olan's life. The soldiers leave with a stern warning to the people that they are republicans, not bandits.

Wang and Olan are reunited, and with their new wealth, they are able to return home and buy two new oxen, farm tools, and plenty of seed. Wang sells the jewels, except for two small pearls which he gives to Olan. Wang discovers that Ching and some of the other villagers were forced to sell their land to survive. Wang forgives them for breaking into his house and hires them as farmhands. Wang's uncle half-jokingly suggests that Wang is now rich enough to take a second wife, much to Olan's dismay.

Wang's prosperity is restored. His sons go to school and learn to read, something Wang never learned himself. They help Wang with his business and accounting. His daughter, however, never completely recovers from the famine; it appears that malnutrition has left her mentally retarded. As Wang grows richer, he begins to spend some money on niceties - tea, entertainment, fancy clothes, and an imported mechanical alarm clock. Soon, he buys the great house from the now-bankrupt landlord. Olan is unhappy, having many bad memories of being a slave in that house. Wang also becomes interested in another woman, Lotus, and takes her home as a concubine. Olan bears this betrayal as best she can, even after Wang takes the pearls to give to Lotus. Wang's increasingly senile father also dislikes Lotus.

Lotus, having no friends in the house, becomes lonely while Wang is working. Soon, she makes friends with Wang's second son, who is also dissatisfied with his life and wishes to leave to seek glory as a soldier. The Republic of China in the 1920s was unstable, and there were battles to be had if he sought them. It is unclear whether Wang's son and Lotus were ever more than friends, but the gossip spread around town. When Ching finally tells Wang what was right in front of his face, Wang angrily dismisses him. He then returns to the house and finds his son and Lotus talking. Outraged, he beats his son and kicks both him and Lotus out of the house.

As the second son is making his goodbyes to his mother Olan, Wang's uncle arrives and tells them that a plague of locusts is approaching, and the crops are in danger. All the members of the older generation are fearful of their livelihood, but Wang's son uses the knowledge he got at school to tell them how to fight the locusts by selectively burning and flooding some areas, sacrificing part of the cropland to save some of the fields, which otherwise would have been devoured. Wang, rediscovering his love of the land, gets to work, along with his sons and neighbors. Only his shiftless uncle does not pitch in. The plan works, and Wang is able to salvage some of his crops. He welcomes back Ching.

Wang's elder son is soon to be married to the local grain merchant's daughter, with hopes for grandsons for Wang. Olan, however, has been sick for some time, and now she is dying. Wang returns the pearls to her and tries to comfort her, now realizing that she was the best wife a man could want and he was wrong to turn to Lotus. After she dies, he buries her near the tree she planted at the beginning and says aloud, "Olan, you are the earth."