The fictional country in O. Henry’s Cabbages and Kings is Anchuria.
More formally called the Republic of Anchuria, the invented Central American nation provides the setting for the book’s linked stories. The action moves among places such as Coralio, a coastal town, and San Mateo, the country’s capital, while its unstable politics supply much of the satire.
Cabbages and Kings was published in 1904 as a “novel” made from interconnected short stories. O. Henry drew on his own experiences in Honduras during the late 1890s, so Anchuria is fictional but its political atmosphere reflects real Central American conditions of the period.
Readers sometimes confuse Anchuria with Coralio because Coralio is the most prominent town in the narrative. The other options are also fictional place names from elsewhere: Costaguana is associated with Joseph Conrad, Elbonia with Dilbert satire, and “San Serrife” is a typographical-art joke. Anchuria is the country and Coralio is one of its towns.