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‘Destroy the foreigners’: The Boxer Rebellion, November 1899-September 1901
At the turn of the 20th century, a violent uprising swept northern China, and an international expedition was sent to rescue those trapped in Peking’s diplomatic quarter. Stephen Roberts tells the story.
A nationalist uprising against European intrusion, the Boxer Rebellion in northern China was anti-foreign, anti-imperialist, and anti-Christian – although that didn’t preclude Chinese people being targeted if, for example, they followed the Christian faith. The ‘Boxer’ name came from a Chinese secret society known as the Yihequan (‘Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists’), whose members practised Chinese martial arts, or ‘Chinese Boxing’. An officially supported peasant revolt, it peaked in June 1900, when the Boxer militiamen, expecting a supernatural force to descend from Heaven to help, and believing they were impervious to foreign weaponry, descended on Peking, procl
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