The groundbreaking novel that was the basis for Frank Capra’s strange, shocking drama starring Barbara Stanwyck and Nils Asther.   Traveling to Shanghai to marry her medical missionary fiancé, the beautiful Megan Davis finds herself caught in the toils of civil war between Republican and Communist forces. Determined to save the inhabitants of an orphanage in a Communist-occupied city nearby, Megan joins a nighttime rescue mission that ends up under attack by a mob. She avoids death only thanks to the intervention of General Yen, who brings her to his palace, where they come to form an unlikely trust and companionship in one another. As the political climate sours and violence outside the palace walls escalates, the motives behind various associates of the General are called into suspicion, leading to an unexpected and irreparable betrayal.   Originally published in 1930, this absorbing novel of war-torn China was adapted into a film in 1933.  With a new foreword by Victoria Wilson. Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based. Grace Zaring Stone was an American novelist and short story writer. She is perhaps best known for having three of her novels made into films: The Bitter Tea of General Yen , Winter Meeting , and Escape . She also used the pseudonym of Ethel Vance. She died in 1991 in Mystic, Connecticut. Excerpted from the Foreword "I try to write the kind of book that I like to read. That is, tight, with plenty of incident, all of it going somewhere". —Grace Zaring Stone* "I want as a matter of fact to see your point of view as far as I can. I believe I can do it better when you don’t argue with me." —Megan Davis to General Yen Tso-Chong "There is something about the European eye, I can’t explain the effect it has on me. It gets so—large. . . . But I am glad you are trying not to think too ill of us." —General Yen Tso-Chong The Bitter Tea of General Yen was Grace Zaring Stone’s third work of fiction, published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company in 1930, following Letters to a Djinn (1922) and her acclaimed novel of the year before, The Heaven and Earth of Doña Elena (1929; also Bobbs-Merrill); “Admirable; brilliant,” said Louis Golding, prolific novelist, short-story writer, essayist, poet, author of Magnolia Street (a sensation in America). Doña Elena , set in the Caribbean in the days of the conquistadors, was about women of the Church, a Mother Superior, the seventh daughter of a Spanish hidalgo, who is sent to a new convent and hospital in the frontier town of San Juan. The Bitter Tea of General Yen takes place in a more contem- porary time, the Far East in the late 1920s. It’s about a New England woman of the finest Puritan stock, daughter of a college president, who arrives in a China torn apart by civil war to marry a medical missionary, son of an Episcopal rector. Both have grown up in the same New England town and known one another “always,” gone to dancing class, had picnics together, “indifferent companions until suddenly, [at] seventeen,” they fall in love. Bob, now a doctor, has come to China to serve in Changsha at Yale-in-China. His sole intent: to relieve the suffering of others. Megan sees his calling as being filled with beauty and dignity, and has come to China to be a part of it. She sees her role as being one of bringing happiness to others, showing that evil, sickness, poverty, and injustice can be alleviated in the filling of the heart with love for one’s fellow man. On arriving in Shanghai, Megan Davis is met at the boat by a missionary couple of the China Inland Mission. Her fiancé has been waylaid in Changsha, caught in the midst of heavy fighting between Republican and Communist forces. Rebel skirmishes are flaring up at Sunkiang, a mere thirty miles outside of Shanghai. There is no doubt that the rebels will take the city, and Megan, full of boundless energy and restless vitaiity, volunteers to accompany Doctor Strike, missionary, learned scholar, translator of the Odes, on a night foray to Chapei, a “labor-ridden” no-man’s section of the city, to help rescue women and refugee orphans in their charge, all of whom are trapped at a mission school between the lines. Doctor Strike, a man of power, spiritual as well as physical, sees the Chinese as “the most tragic people . . . For hundreds of centuries they have enjoyed the highest plane of living and thinking. . . . Like the Greeks they have been permitted to miss persistently the one essential truth. . . . the existence of a God of love.” The whole of Chapei is ablaze, a fiery inferno, and as Megan and Doctor Strike make their way with the women and children, with packs and bundles, through barricaded streets, past bullet-ridden buildings and terror-stricken civilians running for cover, to a rickshaw stand and waiting coolies squatting between the shafts, Doctor Strike lifts t