The British-backed concessionaire William Knox D'Arcy strikes oil at Masjid i-Sulaiman in southwestern Persia, marking the first commercial petroleum discovery in the Middle East. This historic strike leads directly to the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP), establishing a powerful footprint of British strategic and economic interests in the region. The discovery alters global geopolitics, prompting the British Royal Navy under Winston Churchill to convert its fleet from coal to oil, setting off a century of intense foreign intervention in Middle Eastern oil infrastructure.

This discovery introduces themes of resource exploitation, colonial mapping, and shifting cultural identities into modern Persian poetry. Iranian poets of the Constitutional Revolution and later generations write verses lamenting the extraction of their national wealth by foreign corporations. The oil well becomes a potent poetic symbol for the violation of national sovereignty and the painful friction between ancient Persian traditions and the aggressive forces of Western industrial modernity.