Boxer Rebellion
The anti-foreign uprising around 1900 that besieged Beijing's foreign legations and drew an eight-nation army to crush it, deepening China's humiliation.
They believed they could not be killed. The young men who rose across the drought-stricken plains of North China in 1899 practiced a regimen of martial arts and trance rituals they were convinced made their bodies impervious to swords and even bullets. Foreigners, watching them shadow-box, called them Boxers. They called themselves the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, and their fury was aimed at the outsiders they blamed for China's misery: foreign missionaries, the railways and telegraph lines cutting across sacred ground, and above all the Chinese who had converted to Christianity.
A peasant fury
The Boxers were a grassroots movement born of desperation. Decades of foreign encroachment had carved China into spheres of influence, and a brutal drought in 1900 left millions hungry and looking for someone to blame. The Boxers offered both an answer and a ritual promise of invulnerability. They spread north from Shandong toward Beijing, burning churches and killing Christians. By the time the violence peaked, they had murdered tens of thousands of Chinese converts and more than 200 foreign missionaries and their families.
The imperial court saw an opportunity. Empress Dowager Cixi, who had spent years resisting foreign demands, chose to ride the movement rather than suppress it. In June 1900 her government effectively declared war on the foreign powers and let the Boxers pour into the capital.
Fifty-five days in Beijing
What followed became one of the most famous sieges of the age. From June 20 to August 14, 1900, Boxers and Qing soldiers surrounded the Legation Quarter in Beijing, where roughly 470 foreign civilians, some 400 soldiers from eight nations, and about 3,000 Chinese Christians had taken refuge behind hasty barricades. For fifty-five days they held out, short of food and water, burying their dead inside the compound. The German minister had already been shot dead in the street.
The rescue was an act of collective empire. An Eight-Nation Alliance of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary assembled a relief force of roughly 20,000 troops that fought its way from the coast to Beijing, breaking the siege on August 14. Cixi and the emperor fled west in disguise. The relief expedition and the occupation that followed brought mass looting and reprisal killings across the region.
The bill for humiliation
The reckoning came in the Boxer Protocol of September 7, 1901. China was forced to execute officials, permit foreign troops to garrison the road from the coast to Beijing, and pay an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver, set at roughly one tael for every subject in the empire. Spread over 39 years with interest, the total ran to nearly a billion taels, a debt that drained the treasury for a generation.
The Boxers had promised to drive the foreigners into the sea. Instead they handed the powers a pretext for deeper control and saddled a dying dynasty with a crushing debt. Ten years later the Qing, humiliated one time too many, was gone.