Boxer Rebellion

• 1. Introduction

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  The Boxer Rebellion, an anti-foreign uprising in North China between 1899 and 1901, rested on a belief that bullets could not kill its fighters. To convince new initiates, members fired guns loaded with blank rounds at one another. The demonstration was meant to prove that ordinary weapons were powerless against the faithful.

  How did a belief like that carry thousands of fighters to the gates of Beijing? Why would a ruling dynasty, and an empress who had hesitated, end up siding with them? What became of the diplomats and missionaries who hurriedly fortified their compounds in the capital? And who paid for it all, for the next 39 years?

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• 2. Shandong Roots

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  Shandong, a northern coastal province, is where the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists took shape in its inland districts. The region had long been plagued by social unrest, religious sects, and martial societies. The movement it produced was anti-foreign, anti-imperialist, and anti-Christian.

  American Christian missionaries were probably the first to call these athletic young men Boxers. The name came from the martial arts they practised and the weapons training they underwent. Their central ritual was a kind of spiritual possession, with whirling swords, violent prostrations, and incantations to deities. The chance to fight Western encroachment appealed most to unemployed village men, and many of them were teenagers. The tradition of possession and invulnerability went back several hundred years. Against the new weapons of the West it took on fresh meaning, and Boxer groups popularly claimed that millions of soldiers would descend from heaven to help purify China.

  In 1895, Yuxian, a Manchu who was then prefect of Cao Prefecture, cooperated with the Big Swords Society despite his ambivalence about its unorthodox practices. The society's original purpose was fighting bandits. German Catholic missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word were building up their presence in the same area, partly by taking in converts "in need of protection from the law". A large bandit gang defeated by the Big Swords that year claimed to be Catholic to avoid prosecution. Historian Paul Cohen remarked, "The line between Christians and bandits became increasingly indistinct". Missionaries such as Georg Maria Stenz also used their privileges to intervene in lawsuits. The Big Swords answered by attacking and burning Catholic properties. Diplomatic pressure in the capital pushed Yuxian to execute several Big Sword leaders, but he punished nobody else. More martial secret societies began to appear.

  Martial folk-religious societies such as the Baguadao, or Eight Trigrams, prepared the way for the Boxers. Like the Red Boxing school and the Plum Flower tradition, the Boxers of Shandong cared more about values such as filial piety than about foreign influence. One leader, Zhu Hongdeng, known as Red Lantern Zhu, started out as a wandering healer who specialised in skin ulcers. He gained wide respect by refusing payment for his treatments. His surname was the surname of the Ming imperial family, and he claimed descent from Ming emperors. Zhu announced his goal as "Revive the Qing and destroy the foreigners".

  The early years brought a variety of village activities, not a movement with a united purpose. Still, the followers did settle on an enemy. Christian missionaries were the "primary devils" and Chinese converts the "secondary devils", and both had to repent, be driven out, or be killed. A close variant of Zhu's slogan would later be the cry of fighters converging on Beijing in June 1900.

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• 3. Mounting Grievances

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  A drought followed by floods in Shandong in 1897-98 forced farmers to flee to the cities in search of food. North China suffered more disasters in 1898, including flooding of the Yellow River, and the Boxers blamed them on foreign and Christian influence. Northern Shandong's economy was built largely on cotton, and imported foreign cotton hurt it. Traffic on the Grand Canal was also shrinking.

  The Treaty of Tientsin and the Convention of Peking, signed in 1860 after the Second Opium War, let foreign missionaries preach anywhere in China and buy land for churches. Chinese temples were dispossessed and replaced by Catholic churches, which many people saw as deliberately anti-feng shui. Some linked the church placement and design to the drought, and blamed Chinese Christians for not worshipping local deities. Burial sites were destroyed to make way for German railroads and telegraph lines. When Chinese protested the railroads, Germans shot the protestors.

  In November 1897, in Juye County, Chinese rebels attacked the missionary quarters of Father Stenz, a German Catholic priest who was accused of serially raping Chinese women. They failed to find him and killed two other missionaries instead. The German Navy's East Asia Squadron was sent to occupy Jiaozhou Bay on the southern coast of the Shandong peninsula. In December 1897, Kaiser Wilhelm declared his intent to seize territory in China, which set off a "scramble for concessions". Germany won exclusive control of developmental loans, mining, and railway ownership in Shandong. Russia gained influence over all territory north of the Great Wall. France secured Yunnan and most of Guangxi and Guangdong, Japan took Fujian, and Britain claimed the whole Yangtze valley. Only Italy's request for Zhejiang was declined.

  In October 1898, a group of Boxers attacked the Christian community of Liyuantun village, where a temple to the Jade Emperor had been converted into a Catholic church. Disputes over the building dated back to 1869, when the temple was granted to the village's Christian residents. The attack was the first time the Boxers used the slogan "Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners". In October 1899, at the Battle of Senluo Temple, a clash with Qing government troops, they called themselves the "Militia United in Righteousness" for the first time. The word Militia set them apart from forbidden martial arts sects and gave them the look of defenders of orthodoxy.

  In 1899, the French minister in Beijing helped missionaries obtain an edict granting official status to every order in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Local priests could now back their people in legal or family disputes and bypass local officials. After Germany took over Shandong, many Chinese feared that missionaries were part of an effort at "carving the melon", the colonising of China piece by piece. One Chinese official stated the resentment plainly: "Take away your missionaries and your opium and you will be welcome."

  The Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, in which progressive reformers persuaded the Guangxu Emperor to modernise, had been crushed by Empress Dowager Cixi and Yuan Shikai. The Qing political elite was struggling over how to keep its power, and the government came to see the Boxers as a tool against foreign powers. In 1899, the Boxer Rebellion grew into a mass movement.

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• 4. Relief Columns

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  In April 1900, foreign warships took up stations in Bohai Bay as a show of force. On the 30th of May, diplomats led by British Minister Claude Maxwell MacDonald asked for soldiers to defend the legations in Beijing. The Chinese government reluctantly agreed, and the next day 435 navy troops from eight countries travelled by train from the Taku Forts to the capital. On the 5th of June 1900, Boxers cut the railway line to Tianjin, and Beijing was isolated.

  On the 10th of June, a second multinational force of 2,000 sailors and marines set out under Vice Admiral Edward Hobart Seymour, with British troops forming the largest contingent. The distance from Tianjin to Beijing was only 120 km, so Seymour planned to repair the railway or walk on from the break. At Langfang the line was destroyed, and the force found itself surrounded as the tracks behind it were torn up too. On the 18th of June, 5,000 of Dong Fuxiang's Gansu Braves and an unknown number of Boxers won a costly victory over Seymour's men at the Battle of Langfang. The Allies could not locate the Chinese artillery that was raining shells on them. Chinese troops used mining, engineering, flooding, ambushes, pincer movements, and sniping.

  Seymour then tried to advance along the Beihe River toward Tongzhou, 25 km from Beijing, but stiffening resistance forced a retreat south with over 200 wounded. Food, ammunition, and medical supplies ran low. The column stumbled on the Great Hsi-Ku Arsenal, a hidden Qing munitions cache the powers had not known about, and dug in there. A Chinese servant slipped through Boxer and Imperial lines to reach Tianjin and report their plight. A relief column of 1,800 men, including 900 Russian troops from Port Arthur and 500 British seamen, reached Seymour on the 25th of June. The men spiked the captured field guns and burned what munitions they could not carry, an estimated £3 million worth. Seymour's casualties were 62 killed and 228 wounded.

  Back at the coast, Qing forces had laid electric naval mines in the Beihe River on the 15th of June to block Allied ships. Two days later, Allied forces under Russian Admiral Yevgeni Alekseyev stormed the Dagu Forts that commanded the approaches to Tianjin. The invading coalition, the Eight-Nation Alliance, drew on American, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Russian troops. British Lieutenant-General Alfred Gaselee commanded it, and its strength eventually reached 55,000. Japanese forces under Fukushima Yasumasa and Yamaguchi Motomi, numbering over 20,840, made up the majority. French forces under General Henri-Nicolas Frey were mostly inexperienced conscripts from Vietnam and Cambodia. The "First Chinese Regiment", raised at Weihaiwei from Chinese collaborators serving the British, earned praise for its performance. British Commander Roger Keyes boarded and captured four Chinese destroyers. Among the foreigners trapped in Tianjin was a young American mining engineer named Herbert Hoover, who would become the 31st President of the United States.

  The Alliance captured Tianjin on the 14th of July, and the Battle of Tientsin cost it its heaviest casualties of the rebellion. About 20,000 allied troops then marched the 120 km to Beijing. Along the way stood roughly 70,000 Qing imperial troops and anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 Boxers, yet the Allies met only minor resistance, at Beicang and Yangcun. The weather did more damage. Temperatures reached 42 degrees Celsius, horses died, and soldiers suffered from dehydration and insects. Chinese villagers killed Allied troops who went looking for wells.

  The British won the race to reach the besieged Legation Quarter. American troops took part because ships and soldiers were already stationed in Manila after the conquest of the Philippines, and the US military calls the operation the China Relief Expedition. Photographs and accounts of United States Marines scaling the walls of Beijing became an iconic image of the rebellion. The British Army arrived on the afternoon of the 14th of August 1900 to find the legations still standing.

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• 5. Fifty-Five Days

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  The Beijing Legation Quarter lay south of the Forbidden City and held the legations of eleven countries. Between the 20th of June and the 14th of August 1900, Chinese soldiers and Boxer irregulars besieged it. Inside sheltered 473 foreign civilians, 409 soldiers, marines, and sailors from eight countries, and about 3,000 Chinese Christians. Most of the foreign civilians, including many missionaries and businessmen, took refuge in the British legation, the largest compound. The Chinese Christians were housed mainly in the adjacent palace of Prince Su, known as the Fu, whom the foreign soldiers forced to abandon his property.

  Under the British minister, Claude Maxwell MacDonald, the defenders had small arms, three machine guns, and one old muzzle-loaded cannon. The gun was nicknamed the International Gun because its barrel was British, its carriage Italian, its shells Russian, and its crew American. Chinese Christians in the legations led the foreigners to the cannon, and it proved important in the defence. American missionary Francis Dunlap Gamewell and his crew of "fighting parsons" fortified the quarter, but they pressed Chinese Christians into most of the physical labour.

  The siege turned on a death. After the diplomats met on the 20th of June and refused the Empress's offer of an escort out of Beijing, German Imperial Envoy Baron Clemens von Ketteler decided to take his complaints to the royal court. Against the advice of his colleagues, he set out with a single aide and a team of porters carrying his sedan chair. A Manchu captain killed him on the streets of Beijing. The aide escaped and carried the news back, and the other diplomats concluded that they would also be murdered if they left.

  On the 22nd and the 23rd of June, Chinese soldiers and Boxers set fire to areas north and west of the British Legation. The flames reached the Hanlin Academy, which housed what one account called the oldest and richest library in the world. Each side blamed the other for the loss of its books. When fire failed to drive the foreigners out, the Chinese built barricades and advanced brick by brick, forcing the guards back a few feet at a time. Fusillades of bullets, artillery, and firecrackers came almost every night but did little damage, though sniper fire took its toll. Despite their numbers, the Chinese never attempted a direct assault. One of the besieged wrote that a swift movement by the numerous Chinese troops could have annihilated the foreigners in an hour.

  The Tartar Wall, 45 feet tall and 40 feet wide, was perhaps the most crucial position. German barricades faced east on top of it, and American positions faced west 400 yards away. "The men all feel they are in a trap," said the US commander, Captain John Twiggs Myers, "and simply await the hour of execution." One American described 20,000 Boxers storming the walls: "Their yells were deafening, while the roar of gongs, drums, and horns sounded like thunder." On the 30th of June, the Chinese forced the Germans off the Wall and left the American Marines to hold it alone. At 2 am on the 3rd of July, 56 British, Russian, and American marines and sailors under Myers attacked the nearest Chinese barricade. They caught its defenders sleeping, killed about 20, and drove out the rest, and the Chinese never advanced on the Wall again.

  MacDonald called the 13th of July the most harassing day of the siege. The Japanese and Italians in the Fu were pushed back to their last defence line, and a mine beneath the French Legation drove the French and Austrians out of most of it. On the 16th of July, the most capable British officer was killed and the journalist George Ernest Morrison was wounded. American Minister Edwin H. Conger then established contact with the Chinese government, and the Chinese declared an armistice on the 17th of July.

  Across the city, the Catholic Northern Cathedral, the Beitang, endured its own siege. It was defended by 43 French and Italian soldiers, 33 foreign priests and nuns, and about 3,200 Chinese Catholics. Hunger and mines exploded in tunnels beneath the compound caused heavy casualties. Japanese soldiers relieved the Beitang on the 16th of August, and the French officially followed.

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• 6. A Court Divided

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  In December 1899, the Qing court removed Yuxian as governor of Shandong under foreign pressure and replaced him with Yuan Shikai, who sought to suppress the movement. Yuxian became governor of Shanxi and kept supporting the Boxers. In January 1900, with conservatives in the majority at court, Cixi changed her position and issued edicts in the Boxers' defence. She urged provincial authorities to back them, though few did. The court also replaced Prince Qing at the Zongli Yamen with Manchu Prince Duan, who was anti-foreigner and pro-Boxer.

  On the 16th of June, Cixi summoned the court for a mass audience on whether to use the Boxers to evict the foreigners or to seek a diplomatic solution. When a high official doubted the Boxers' power, she replied that popular support for them in the countryside was almost universal. Suppressing them, she said, would be both difficult and unpopular while foreign troops were on the march.

  The next day, Cixi received an ultimatum demanding that China surrender total control over its military and financial affairs to foreigners. Before the Grand Council she said, "Now they the Powers have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent." She went on, "If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why don't we fight to the death?" On the 21st of June, she issued an imperial decree stating that hostilities had begun and ordering the regular army to join the Boxers. It was a de facto declaration of war, though the Allies made none either.

  The south refused to follow. Regional governors with substantial modernised armies, including Li Hongzhang at Guangzhou, Yuan Shikai in Shandong, Zhang Zhidong at Wuhan, and Liu Kunyi at Nanjing, formed the Mutual Defense Pact of the Southeastern Provinces. They called the declaration of war a luan-ming, an illegitimate order, and withheld it from the public in the south. Yuan Shikai used his own forces against Boxers in Shandong, and Zhang negotiated with foreigners in Shanghai to keep his army out of the conflict. The republican revolutionary Sun Yat-sen even proposed to Li Hongzhang that he declare an independent democratic republic, although nothing came of it.

  Inside the capital, the supreme commander, the Manchu general Ronglu, worked against the siege. He concluded that fighting all the powers at once was futile, and he later claimed he acted to protect the foreigners. He blocked the transfer of artillery that Zaiyi wanted for Dong Fuxiang's troops, which stopped them from destroying the legations. He and Prince Qing sent food to the legations, and their bannermen fought the Gansu Braves who were pressing the siege. To satisfy conservatives, Ronglu's men also fired on the legations and let off firecrackers to look as if they were attacking. When Dong complained to Cixi on the 23rd of June, she told him, "Your tail is becoming too heavy to wag." After the siege was lifted, the Alliance discovered large stores of unused Chinese Krupp guns and shells.

  Ronglu also hid an imperial decree from General Nie Shicheng that ordered him to stop fighting the Boxers because of the foreign invasion. So Nie kept fighting the Boxers, committing thousands of troops against them and not the foreigners, and Ronglu had him protect parts of the railway. Those saved sections let the invading army move into China quickly. Blamed for attacking the Boxers, Nie chose to sacrifice his life at Tientsin by walking into the range of Allied guns.

  Opposition at court was punished. Xu Jingcheng, who had served as envoy to many of the states under siege, argued that the evasion of extraterritorial rights and the killing of foreign diplomats were unprecedented in China and abroad. He and five other officials urged Cixi to suppress the Boxers, execute their leaders, and settle with the foreign armies. Outraged, she sentenced them to death. They were executed on the 28th of July 1900, and their severed heads were displayed at the Caishikou Execution Grounds in Beijing.

  As the foreign armies reached Beijing, the court fled to Xi'an, with Cixi disguised as a Buddhist nun. The journey was arduous because nothing had been prepared, and she insisted it was not a retreat but a "tour of inspection". Xi'an lay beyond protective mountain passes, deep in Chinese Muslim territory and guarded by the Gansu Braves. The foreigners had no orders to pursue her, so they stayed put.

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• 7. Violence And Loot

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  A total of 136 Protestant missionaries, 53 children, 47 Catholic priests and nuns, 30,000 Chinese Catholics, and 2,000 Chinese Protestants are estimated to have been killed during the uprising. So were 200 to 400 of the 700 Russian Orthodox Christians in Beijing. The Protestant dead are collectively known as the China Martyrs of 1900. Some were killed by Boxers and others by government troops and authorities.

  Yuxian, named governor of Shanxi in March 1900, carried out a brutal anti-foreign policy after the declaration of war. On the 9th of July, reports said he had executed forty-four foreigners from missionary families, including women and children, whom he had invited to the provincial capital Taiyuan with a promise of protection. The purported eyewitness accounts have recently been questioned as improbable, but the Taiyuan massacre became a notorious symbol of Chinese anger. The England-based Baptist Missionary Society, which had opened its Shanxi mission in 1877, lost all its missionaries there along with all 120 converts. Journalist Nat Brandt called the massacre of Christians in Shanxi "the greatest single tragedy in the history of Christian evangelicalism". Some 222 Russian-Chinese martyrs, including Chi Sung as St. Metrophanes, were locally canonised on the 22nd of April 1902.

  The march to Beijing was already brutal. Accounts describe Allied soldiers killing Chinese civilians and raping women and girls, and the Chinese answered with similar cruelty, especially toward captured Russians. Lieutenant Smedley Butler saw the remains of two Japanese soldiers nailed to a wall. Field Marshal Alfred von Waldersee, a German, was appointed to command the Alliance but arrived after most of the fighting had ended. Beijing, Tianjin, and Zhili province were then occupied for more than a year.

  On the 27th of July 1900, at a ceremony for the departing German relief force, Kaiser Wilhelm II told the troops to give no quarter and take no prisoners. He compared them to the Huns of King Attila, hoping that no Chinese would again dare to look cross-eyed at a German. From September 1900 to March 1901, European and American forces carried out attacks on suspected Boxer areas. They included public decapitations, systematic looting, the shooting of farm animals, the destruction of crops and of religious and public buildings, the burning of religious texts, and widespread rape. British and American observers aimed their harshest criticism at German, Russian, and Japanese troops, though other observers rated the Japanese as more orderly. MacDonald and the American missionary W. A. P. Martin were among those who judged Japanese conduct better than that of other forces. British journalist George Lynch wrote that there were things he must not write, which would show Western civilisation to be a veneer over savagery.

  The Americans and British paid General Yuan Shikai and his army to help suppress the Boxers. His forces killed tens of thousands of people in Zhili and Shandong after the Alliance captured Beijing. The American general Adna Chaffee estimated that for every real Boxer killed, fifty harmless laborers, including women and children, had been slain.

  The capital itself was plundered. Newspapers called the aftermath a "carnival of ancient loot" and "an orgy of looting", recalling the sacking of the Summer Palace in 1860. An American diplomat, Herbert G. Squiers, filled several railway carriages with loot and artefacts. Every day except Sunday through 1900 and 1901, the British held loot auctions in front of the main gate of the British Legation, where MacDonald, Lady Ethel MacDonald, and Morrison of The Times were active bidders. The Catholic Beitang was called a "salesroom for stolen property". Chaffee banned looting by American soldiers, but the ban was ineffectual.

  William Scott Ament, a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, guided American troops through villages to punish suspected Boxers and confiscate property for Christian families who had lost theirs. Mark Twain read of the expedition and wrote a scathing essay, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness", attacking the "Reverend bandits of the American Board". The controversy was front-page news during much of 1901.

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• 8. The Price Of Peace

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  On the 7th of September 1901, the Qing imperial court signed the Boxer Protocol, the peace agreement between the Eight-Nation Alliance and China. Alfons Mumm, Ernest Satow, and Komura Jutaro signed for Germany, Britain, and Japan. The protocol ordered the execution of 10 high-ranking officials linked to the outbreak, along with others found guilty of the slaughter of foreigners. Foreign troops were also to be stationed in Beijing. Among the dead was Yuxian, executed on the 22nd of February 1901, and Prince Zhuang was forced to commit suicide the day before. On the 31st of December 1900, German soldiers had beheaded the Manchu captain Enhai for killing Clemens von Ketteler. The court refused to execute the Han Chinese general Dong Fuxiang, even though he had encouraged the killing of foreigners. Cixi intervened, and Dong was only cashiered and sent home to Gansu, where he lived in comfort. When he died in 1908, his stripped honours were restored and he received a full military burial.

  China was fined 450,000,000 taels of fine silver, more than the government's annual tax revenue. The sum matched roughly one tael for each of China's 450 million people. It was to be paid by 1940, within 39 years, and with 4 percent annual interest the total came to 982,238,150 taels. Customs income and salt taxes guaranteed the payments, and the tariff rose from 3.18 to 5 percent, with formerly duty-free goods taxed for the first time. China paid 668,661,220 taels from 1901 to 1939, equivalent to US$61 billion in 2010 on a purchasing-power basis. The indemnity was never fully paid and was lifted during World War II. Cixi had accepted the terms once she was assured of her continued reign and that China would cede no territory.

  A large portion of the reparations paid to the United States was diverted to the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, which sent Chinese students to American universities. An institute was founded to teach them English and prepare them, and the first returnees taught the next group. From that institute was born Tsinghua University. The China Inland Mission lost more members than any other missionary agency, with 58 adults and 21 children killed. Yet in 1901, its Hudson Taylor refused payment for loss of property or life, to show the meekness and gentleness of Christ to the Chinese.

  The damage to the dynasty was lasting. The occupation of Beijing and the failure of the rebellion eroded support for the Qing, and support for reform fell while support for revolution rose. In the ten years after the rebellion, uprisings in China increased, particularly in the south, and the Tongmenghui, an alliance of anti-Qing groups that later became the Kuomintang, grew. Cixi returned to Beijing, since the powers believed that keeping the Qing government was the best way to control China. The Qing abolished the imperial examinations in 1905 and sought to introduce consultative assemblies. These efforts failed to save the dynasty, which was overthrown in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911.

  Russia used the pretext of Boxer activity to move some 200,000 troops under Paul von Rennenkampf into Manchuria, at the insistence of war minister Aleksey Kuropatkin. In October 1900 it occupied the Manchurian provinces, which threatened Anglo-American hopes of keeping China open to commerce under the Open Door Policy. In the United States, historian Walter LaFeber argued that President William McKinley's decision to send 5,000 troops without consulting Congress marked "the origins of modern presidential war powers". Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. agreed that the intervention began a shift toward using force against sovereign states, and not just nongovernmental groups.

  Judgments of the Boxers have never settled. Historian Joseph W. Esherick said there is no major incident in China's modern history on which the range of professional interpretation is as great. Sun Yat-sen, who worked to overthrow the Qing, called the Boxers bandits and criticised their anti-foreignism and obscurantism, yet praised their spirit of resistance. By 1918 he was praising their courage in fighting to the death at Yangcun. The liberal Hu Shih, who urged China to modernise, still condemned their irrationality and barbarity. Chen Duxiu, a leader of the New Culture Movement, forgave their barbarism given the crimes foreigners had committed in China. Mark Twain declared, "the Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success." The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy also praised the Boxers.

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