“ ‘Empress of China’! I nor rule nor reign: I wear the purple but to hide the chain— Free only to hold back the open door For foreign devils drunk upon my floor.”
Where this text comes from
First published in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume IV (1910). This date is uncertain. Taken from Volume IV of the Neale collected edition (copyright 1910). That is the printing this text comes from, not the poem's first appearance: the volume's own preface speaks of the verses republished in this volume and the next, and which newspaper or earlier book printed this poem first has not been established here. [1]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-20.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/ambrose-bierce_poetry, the-scrap-heap.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (11)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L4.
Cite this poem
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?).
“A Voice from Peking.” First published in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume IV (1910).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/ambrose-bierce/a-voice-from-peking/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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