The Heathen Chinee

HARTE, Bret.

The Heathen Chinee.

FIRST EDITION THUS. San Francisco: Bray & Beran, 1930.

[10] pp., printed in orange and black on one side, on 7 unnumbered double leaves in a Chinese-style format, with Chinese characters to the margins and cover; string-tied in orange and gold wrappers. Composition and design by C. Raymond Beran, with a woodcut by Edgar Vaughan Simpson. A near fine copy, with faint edgewear and rubbing. Laid in is a contemporary review of this edition, "Literary Notes" from the Oakland Tribune of August 24, 1930.

A San Francisco fine-press setting of Bret Harte's poem "Plain Language from Truthful James," better known as "The Heathen Chinee." Harte first published it in the Overland Monthly in September 1870, writing it as a satire on the anti-Chinese prejudice then widespread in California — he had a genuine interest in Chinese culture and deplored the treatment of Chinese immigrants. The irony was largely lost on its audience: the poem was widely misread and embraced for the very prejudice it set out to mock, becoming a fixture of the anti-Chinese movement and reinforcing the stereotypes that fed the era's exclusionist politics in the years before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

SKU TO-2026-068