Boxer Rebellion
A peasant movement in northern China besieged the foreign legations in Beijing for fifty-five days in 1900, and eight foreign armies sacked the capital. The Yihequan, the militia of righteous harmony, came out of the drought-stricken and flood-ruined plains of Shandong. Their grievances were the ones of rural China at the end of the century: foreign railways and telegraphs that were held to disturb the ancestors, missionary courts that shielded Chinese converts from local law, disbanded soldiers, and famine. They practised martial arts and spirit possession rituals believed to make them immune to bullets, which is where the name Boxers comes from. They killed missionaries and, in far greater numbers, Chinese Christians — some 30,000 by later estimates. The court was divided and the empress dowager Cixi eventually chose to use them, declaring war on all the treaty powers in June 1900, while several southern viceroys simply ignored the declaration and kept their provinces out of it. The legation quarter held out with a few hundred defenders and several thousand Chinese Christian refugees inside it. The relief expedition of some 20,000 troops from eight countries fought its way from Tianjin and took Beijing in August, after which the city and the surrounding country were looted and burned systematically, with punitive columns sent into the villages. The Boxer Protocol imposed an indemnity of 450 million taels payable over thirty-nine years, roughly twice the annual revenue of the state. The dynasty fell eleven years later. The American share of the indemnity was partly returned to fund scholarships for Chinese students, which is the origin of Tsinghua University. Cixi's court, having declared war on the world and lost, then attempted the constitutional reforms it had crushed in 1898.
- Year: 1899 CE
- Category: Rebellion
