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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, proclaiming: ‘Support the Qing government and exterminate the foreigners.’ More than 30,000 Chinese Christians and 200 foreign missionaries died during the uprising, with total deaths numbering some 100,000. These events occurred towards the end of the Qing dynasty, China’s last imperial dynasty, which ruled from the mid-17th century, and was replaced by the Republic of China in 1912.
Seeds of discontent
Hostility towards Westerners had festered for a while. The First Opium War (1839-1842), a conflict between China and Britain, arose from Chinese attempts to suppress opium-smuggling, in which British merchants were prominent. When the Chinese government refused to offer compensation for confiscated opium, fighting ensued, with a British force bombarding the southern Chinese port of Canton (now Guangzhou). The Treaty of Nanking, on 29 August 1842, made China pay an indemnity, cede Hong Kong to the British, and open five so-called ‘treaty ports’ (including Canton) to British traders – but popular opposition to foreign entrance into Canton exacerbated Anglo-Chinese friction.
A Second Opium War followed (1856-1860), with the 1858 Treaties of Tientsin between China and Britain, France, the US, and Russia forcing more concessions on China – including opening 11 more ports, permitting foreign legations in Peking, and legalising the importation of opium. Further humiliation was to follow.
On 12 October 1860, the Chinese suffered the indignity of Peking being occupied by 17,000 British and French troops, with the subsequent Conventions of Peking increasing indemnities to these two countries. On 21 June 1870, a massacre in the port of Tientsin (now Tianjin) – an attack by a Chinese mob on a French consul and missionaries in which 60 people died – led to grovelling on the part of the Chinese authorities, while the murder of 54 Japanese sailors the following year saw another indemnity. An interpreter’s murder led to the 1876 Chefoo Convention, imposed by Britain, which opened ten more ports, and improved foreigners’ standing; then the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and resultant Treaty of Shimonoseki saw the loss of Formosa (now Taiwan), another huge indemnity, and four more ports opened to foreign commerce.
The Sino-Japanese conflict prompted the beginnings of military reform in China, but also left villagers in northern China dreading the expansion of foreign spheres of influence and resenting the privileges extended to Christian missionaries that enabled them to protect their Chinese followers. Meanwhile, the Boxer movement, made up originally of secretive and largely independent village groups, began in the neighbouring coastal provinces of Shandong and Hebei, south of Peking, in the mid-1880s. By 1897, the desire to eradicate Christian influence was manifested in attacks by militiamen on German missionaries in western Shandong: the so-called ‘Scramble for China’ among foreign powers had evoked its reaction.
Meanwhile, defeat to Japan led conservatives and reformers at the Qing court to push contrasting programmes, while foreign powers demanded yet more concessions via treaties with the Russians (June 1896), Japanese (July 1896), and British (February 1897). In December 1897, the German Emperor declared his intention to seize Chinese territory, thereby triggering a further ‘scramble for concessions’, with Britain, Germany, Russia, France, and Japan all securing agreements by June of the following year. And, as discontent built, it was exacerbated by natural calamities – including, in 1898, both flood and drought, which the Boxers blamed on foreigners and Christians, and their ‘cultural imperialism’.
The Hundred Days of Reform
In June 1898, the reformers at the court were briefly in the ascendant – with the ninth (and penultimate) emperor of the Qing dynasty, Kuang-hsü (1871-1908), embarking on a short-lived push for constitutional reform: the pro-foreign, modernising period known as the ‘Hundred Days of Reform’. The reformers wanted railways, naval training, schools, and a university in Peking – but the decrees issued between August and September struck at vested interests, abolishing sinecures and provincial armies.
Conservative forces rallied behind the Dowager Empress Cixi, and Kuang-hsü was abducted and imprisoned. Reforms were revoked, and reactionaries put back in charge – but an opportunity perhaps to avoid the bloodshed of the Boxer Rebellion was lost. In October 1898, the Boxers attacked a Christian community in Liyuantun, a village on the border between Shandong and neighbouring Zhili, where a traditional temple had been converted into a Catholic church. This was the first occasion on which the Boxer slogan was heard: ‘Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners.’
The demands from Western states continued. In February 1899, it was the turn of the Italians, demanding a port and concession in the coastal province of Chekiang. However, this request was rejected with an unforeseen display of force by the Qing empire – interpreted in retrospect as a significant change in strategy by the imperial Chinese government towards the Western colonial powers. Meanwhile, the Boxer movement was spreading across the North China Plain. Foreign property, including railroads, was targeted, while Christian missionaries and Chinese converts were murdered. In October 1899, in an attempt to confer legitimacy on themselves, the Boxers dubbed themselves the ‘Militia United in Righteousness’, even as they clashed with government troops at the Battle of Senluo Temple.
Rebellion breaks out
The violently anti-foreign Boxers were organised in response to imperial decrees, and showed overt hostility to pushy foreign powers by persecuting their visible representatives, Christian missionaries and converts. In this, they were encouraged by Yü-hsien, a Manchu provincial governor, who was labelled the ‘Butcher of Shanxi’ after an incident in which he used false promises of protection to lure a group of 45 Christians to their deaths. Support for the Boxers was far from universal, however. Along with other provincial governors, Li Hung-chang, the powerful statesman dubbed the ‘Oriental Bismarck’, could see the rebellion was mistaken, and acted swiftly to dissociate himself.
Driven from Shandong into Zhili, the Boxers were encouraged by the court’s anti-foreigner Manchu faction, which schemed to use them as auxiliaries to expel all foreigners from China. Foreign diplomats issued broadly identical notes in Peking between January and May demanding suppression of the movement, which only raised tensions and increased resentment. On 28 May, a mob attacked Peking’s Feng-t’ai railway station, prompting demands by diplomats, led by Britain’s Sir Claude MacDonald, that foreign troops defend the area of the city reserved for foreign diplomatic compounds, known as the Legation Quarter. The next day, a multinational force of 458 legation guards disembarked from warships, travelling by train to Peking, where they began creating defensive perimeters around the diplomatic missions. The rail line to Tientsin was cut on 5 June, effectively isolating Peking. Less than a week later, the murder of the secretary of the Japanese legation, on the same day the Germans executed a young Boxer, brought further escalation, with Christian churches torched, German, American, and British troops repulsing attacks, and Boxers killed.
The Chinese advanced slowly, picking off defenders with snipers.
With the situation rapidly worsening, a second, larger international force was dispatched on 10 June: the Seymour Expedition, commanded by the experienced Vice-Admiral Edward Hobart Seymour. This joint naval column of 2,066 men was again drawn from a so-called Eight-Nation Alliance of Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, with the largest contingent of sailors and marines being British. Moving inland from Tientsin, and operating without the Chinese imperial court’s permission, this de facto invasion force reached Langfang, halfway along the 75-mile route from Tientsin to Peking, but there suffered a defeat on 18 June to a mixed Chinese force of imperial troops, irregulars, and Boxers, after the Dowager Empress ordered its advance blocked. The force still tried to reach Peking, but ultimately needed rescuing itself by a relief column of another 1,800 men (half Russian, with 500 British), which reached Seymour on 25 June. The combined force marched back to Tientsin the following day, with Seymour’s casualties totalling 62 dead and 228 wounded.
Another international expeditionary force, the Gaselee Expedition, commanded by British Lieutenant-General Alfred Gaselee, was dispatched to raise the siege, and the rising, mostly restricted to north-west China, would eventually be suppressed, that comprised some 45,000 foreign soldiers, with Japanese troops in the majority. For now, however, things were moving quickly. On 17 June, the seizure by allied forces of the Taku Forts, the historic defences commanding approaches to Tientsin, saw more foreign troops brought ashore. On 19 June, Cixi ordered the legations to remove diplomats and foreigners from Peking under escort of the Chinese army within 24 hours – but the order was rejected as most of the diplomats agreed the Dowager Empress and her forces couldn’t be trusted.
Neither the foreign allies, nor the Chinese, issued a formal declaration of war. After initial hesitation, however, Cixi now came out in support of the Boxers, and on 21 June issued an imperial decree that was effectively (though unofficially: the Emperor himself still being under house arrest) a declaration of war against the foreign powers. The decree applied to 11 powers: the eight comprising the military alliance, and three others that held degrees of influence in China – Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
The murder of the German minister Baron Clemens von Ketteler on 20 June was the opening salvo in the climactic struggle known as the Siege of the International Legations, which saw diplomats, missionaries, soldiers, and Chinese Christians sheltering in Peking’s Legation Quarter. A rectangle 1,300 metres long by 700 metres wide, the Quarter lay adjacent to the imperial city’s south-east corner. With its own taxes and postal service, and with Peking’s imposing, 13-metre-high ‘Tartar Wall’ bordering its south, it could truly be described as a city within a city. Here, 473 foreign civilians and 409 soldiers, marines, and sailors from eight nations built improvised defences, and about 3,000 Chinese Christians hunkered down, as intimidatory fires were started in adjacent areas north and west of the British legation on 22-23 June. Just a couple of miles away, at the Catholic Northern Cathedral known as the Beitang, a separate siege began in which 43 French and Italian soldiers, 33 priests and nuns, and around 3,200 Chinese Catholics held on against Chinese attacks, suffering losses from starvation and from mines detonated in tunnels below.
55 days at Peking
The rebellion’s standout event was the occupation of Peking and the siege of foreign legations, which lasted from 20 June to 14 August 1900, and would later be immortalised in a 1963 movie, 55 Days at Peking, starring Charlton Heston. The British minister MacDonald (a version of whom was played in the film by David Niven) organised the defence, becoming the ‘hero of Peking’, utilising small arms, three machine-guns, and an old muzzle-loading cannon dubbed the ‘International Gun’. The Chinese advanced slowly, behind barricades, picking off defenders with snipers, rather than risking all-out assault – although their numerical advantage could have prevailed, with an inevitable massacre ensuing.
The most crucial point was the Tartar Wall, where German troops faced east and Americans west, and where the Chinese got ever closer behind barricades. On 30 June, they forced the Germans off the wall, advancing to within 20 yards, then just a few feet, when the remaining defenders counter-attacked. In the early hours of 3 July, more than 50 British, Russian, and American marines attacked the Chinese barricade, killing around 20 and ending the advance.
According to MacDonald, the most harrowing day was 13 July, when French, Italian, and Austrian forces all came under pressure – but on 17 July, an armistice was declared by the Chinese, whose infighting saw the Qing military leader General Ronglu, for one, believing it futile to oppose all foreign powers simultaneously. The leading diplomat and politician Xu Jingcheng, who had supported the Hundred Days’ Reform, was one of six officials who urged the Dowager Empress to suppress the Boxers and make peace with the foreigners. The appeal fell on deaf ears, however: on Cixi’s orders, all six were executed on 28 July, and their severed heads placed on display.
The siege would have succeeded but for the protection offered by Ronglu, a favourite of Cixi and the supreme commander of Chinese forces, who later claimed he had acted to safeguard foreigners. Officials in the southern provinces also ignored imperial orders to attack foreigners. Chinese officials split between Boxer supporters and those preferring conciliation – the latter group headed by Prince Qing, a Manchu noble and politician of the ruling dynasty.
The international force suffered its heaviest casualties of the campaign at the Battle of Tientsin (13-14 July) – with 250 killed and 500 wounded, as the foreign powers were initially held at bay by the Chinese imperial military and Boxer militias, before the city was relieved. Among those besieged had been a young American mining engineer, Herbert Hoover – the future 31st US President. As the 20,000-strong Alliance force now advanced amid temperatures of 108°F (42°C) from the coast towards Peking, further battles were fought – at Beicang (5 August), where a Japanese contingent led the attack, and at Yangcun (6 August) – though for the most part resistance was limited.
Peking was finally taken on 14 August, with the British winning the ‘race’ to be the first to reach the Legation Quarter – where MacDonald was reported to have greeted the British commander General Gaselee dressed in ‘immaculate tennis flannels’ and surrounded by cheering ladies in party dresses. The Beitang was relieved two days later. Plunder and looting of the capital and surrounding countryside followed, along with executions of suspected Boxers. On 15 August, the court fled to the ancient city of Xi’an, in the central province of Shaanxi, with Cixi disguised as a nun, and others left behind to conduct negotiations with the foreign powers.
Indemnity and legacy
A total of up to 100,000 people (mostly civilians) are estimated to have died in the conflict – and it’s fair to say that atrocities were committed by both sides. Ultimately, however, the European powers, assisted by Japan and the US, suppressed the rebellion and strengthened their hold on the Chinese government, with foreign troops occupying Peking and huge indemnities demanded. The Chinese court, in supporting a revolt which at least one historian has described as ‘absurd’ (Frank Welsh, A History of Hong Kong, 1993), had picked a fight with the Western powers with an inevitable result: humiliation beyond recovery. Although the Empress was now, reluctantly, converted to reform, it was too late to reverse the pressure for revolution, and reparations for damage done and lives lost were huge.
Eight months of haggling led to the Boxer Protocol of 7 September 1901. Signed by China and 11 foreign powers, this accommodated expressions of regret, the punishing of 96 officials, including the execution of those deemed to have supported the Boxers, and reparations over a 39-year period to the eight invading foreign powers of 450 million taels (about 18,000 tonnes) of fine silver, plus interest. This was more than the Chinese government’s annual tax revenue, and would sow the seeds of deep resentment. But assured of her continuing reign without any loss of Chinese territory, Cixi acquiesced.
An enlarged Legation Quarter was fortified, with all local forts razed, foreign troops stationed in Peking, and foreign garrisons established along the rail line to the coast. The Dowager Empress, along with the Emperor, did not return to Peking until January 1902. The failed revolt weakened the Qing dynasty’s hold over China, and the educational, economic and military reforms that had partly led to the revolt were now undertaken in the late-Qing programme known as the New Policies. Only part of China was occupied, with the south-eastern areas exempt because of their refusal to support the rebellion. Peking, Tientsin, and Zhili were occupied for more than a year, with revenge attacks against even the innocent, and a reported ‘orgy of looting’.
There were reprisals elsewhere, too – including, in July 1900, at Blagoveshchensk, on China’s border with Russia, where Russians retaliating after Chinese bombardment across the Amur drove thousands of civilians to death in the river. There would be further massacres in the following months, as Russia’s military men used the pretext of the Boxer insurrection to occupy Manchuria, putting 100,000 troops in there, in a move symptomatic of the country’s forward policy in the Far East. Meanwhile, it should be noted that German troops, arriving late at Peking, nevertheless performed 35 out of 46 punitive missions, in which thousands of civilians were slain between 12 December 1900 and 30 April 1901 in the countryside around the city.
The reparations due under the Boxer Protocol would be burdensome for years. In August 1917, when China declared war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, and labour battalions were sent to France, Africa, and Mesopotamia, it secured the termination of its German and Austrian Boxer indemnity payments, as well as the return of their concessions at Tientsin and Hankow. Meanwhile, the Allies rewarded China by postponing their Boxer payments for five years. It would be May 1924 before Russia and America both effectively gave up, or remitted, their Boxer indemnity balances in return for investment in China – for example, in its education system. When the Hankow–Canton Railway was finished in 1937, it was completed with help from British Boxer indemnity funds. The indemnity was never completely paid, and was finally written off during World War II.
In China, support for the Qing regime decreased as support for revolution increased – with anti-Qing groups later morphing into the Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, which would rule mainland China until 1949. The Qing dynasty itself was overthrown in 1911. More recently, foreign involvement in suppressing the rebellion has become a lasting subject of debate – some of it centred on the decision of US President McKinley to send 5,000 American troops to China without Congressional approval, an early sign that the country was transitioning away from its traditional isolationism to become a more active global power. The Boxer Rebellion may only have lasted a relatively short time, but its legacy stretches far.
Stephen Roberts is a historian who has written many times for MHM, including recent cover stories on Charlemagne and the Battle of the Somme.
All images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated
