By the 19th Century, the Chinese and the foreigners had grown highly distrustful of each other,
and it was only a matter of time before the powder keg exploded.
And when it did, it was to be the death knell for the Qing Dynasty and Imperial China.
I’m Indy Neidell, welcome to “Battlefields”.
During the 1880s and 1890s, tensions were rising, with increasing individual acts of violence,
particularly against communities of Christian converts.
The 1894 Sino-Japanese War ended in another humiliating defeat for the Chinese,
and China was forced to sign yet more "unequal treaties" in 1895, ceding several territories for foreign occupation.
This naturally increased resentment of foreigners.
That war also led to poor harvests, economic disruptions, and banditry,
which of course only led to more civil unrest.
Now, religious societies had played a central role in uprisings throughout Chinese history,
and during the last decade of the 19th Century, a number of secret organisations emerged in northern China
with a strong emphasis on physical exercise and mysticism, along with anti-foreign and anti-Christian sentiment.
The biggest of these groups would be the "Righteous and Harmonious Fists" or Yihequan,
who held public performances of martial arts and spirit possession and claimed
that their rituals rendered them invulnerable to bullets and shells.
In the West, they soon became known as the Boxers.
With the slogan "Support the Qing, destroy the foreigner",
they caught the imagination of rural Shandong Province and drew many out-of-work young men into their ranks.
The Boxers embarked on a campaign against missionaries and converts to Christianity.
Foreign leaders pressured the Qing government to suppress the sect,
and initial clashes took place in the summer of 1899.
When the governor of Shandong drove the Boxers out of the province in 1900, they headed north,
approaching Tianjin and Beijing and attacking Christian communities along the way.
By May, the Boxer movement, while still armed with simple weapons like swords and polearms,
had become more organised. It was attacking railways and telegraph lines,
and had gained popular support in both the cities and the countryside.
Now, Qing troops continued to engage the Boxers in early 1900,
but Empress Dowager Cixi soon seemed to reverse the government's anti-Boxer position,
decreeing that secret societies should not all be treated as criminals.
Now, she was considered the leader of the conservative faction at the Qing court,
and she may have sought to harness the Boxers as a means of removing foreign influence from China.
She was also aware of the danger that such popular movements posed,
lest they turn the Chinese people against the Qing.
In any case, the foreign legations in Beijing grew so fearful,
that they requested permission to call in foreign soldiers for protection.
The Chinese government reluctantly agreed, and just over 400 marines arrived in Beijing on May 31st,
but on June 6th, Boxers destroyed the Beijing Tianjin railway, cutting off the foreign legations.
Days later, rioters burned down the grandstand of Beijing Race Course,
who had sought refuge within it died. Two days after that, the Japanese chancellor was assassinated.
British minister Claude MacDonald wired for help, and over 2000 international troops
landed at Tianjin and began a march towards Beijing.
If the Chinese army's position in this whole affair had been unclear up to this point,
this act of invasion finally drove them into an alliance with the Boxers.
They drove the relief force back, and in Beijing, the foreign legations were given an ultimatum to leave
within 24 hours, which they refused.
On the afternoon of June 20th, Chinese forces opened fire on the missions,
which had been fortified with makeshift barricades.
This was the last that the outside world heard from Beijing for several weeks.
The siege of the Legation Quarter had begun. The foreign powers decided that a bigger force was needed.
Over 50,000 soldiers and marines from eight different countries -
Japan (whose forces made up over a third of the combined army), Russia, Britain (including many Indian troops),
France, the United States, Germany, Austria -Hungary and Italy landed on the coast,
capturing Tianjin on July 14th with heavy casualties on both sides.
At around the same time, reports started arriving that the foreign diplomats, their families,
the Chinese Christians seeking refuge with them and the marines guarding them had been massacred,
but the leadership of the Eight Nation Alliance could not confirm these reports.
After defeating the Imperial Army at Beicang and Yangcun, the allied troops reached the eastern outskirts of Beijing.
By now, it had become clear that reports of a massacre were false,
and the legations were still holding out in the diplomatic quarter.
The invading army was formed into four columns, each charged with attacking a particular city gate
and section of wall. After a premature attack by the Russians on the night of the
13th of August, the Battle of Beijing began.
It soon became a race to see who could relieve the Legations first.
The Russians were the first to enter the city in the rainy early hours of the morning,
but Japanese troops bore the brunt of the fighting as they assaulted the Chih Hua Gate on the right flank, East of the Imperial City.
American and British troops scaled the walls of the southern half of the city.
After overwhelming the defenders and entering the city, they breached the inner gate
leading to the Tartar City, where the Legation Quarter was.
By the evening of 14th August, the Legations had been relieved.
Beitang Church, where thousands of Christians had sought refuge, was also relieved two days later.
Muslim troops accompanied the Empress Dowager and Emperor as they fled to Xian
while the victorious foreign soldiers pillaged the ruined capital.
Over a hundred thousand civilians were dead, including 30,000 Chinese Christians.
Fighting would continue over the following months, but the main part of the Boxer Rebellion was over.
Tales quickly reached Europe and America of the brave defence of the Legation Quarter during the 55 day siege.
The New York Sun called it "the most exciting episode ever known to civilization".
The reality was somewhat more complicated.
While there had been ongoing sniping and occasional skirmishes during the first weeks of the siege,
by the middle of July the situation had actually calmed.
Truces and lulls in the fighting had allowed the besieged to replenish supplies,
and the Empress Dowager had even ordered several shipments of fruit sent to the Legation Quarter.
In general, restraint on the part of the Chinese government was at least partly responsible
for the legation quarter not being overrun, and there is some evidence
that many high-ranking Imperial officers tried their best to remain moderate amidst the chaos,
holding back their troops, when they could have ordered an all-out attack.
The victorious foreign powers did not see it that way, though.
Allied troops would occupy Beijing for over a year,
and undertook punitive expeditions in the surrounding countryside, with many reports of looting and atrocities.
On September 7th, 1901, the Boxer Protocol was signed.
China was forced to pay 450 million taels in silver over a period of 40 years as indemnity,
anti-foreign societies were banned on pain of death, and the importation of armaments was forbidden.
While the Protocol was seen as the culmination of a long series of "Unequal Treaties",
China was not entirely without bargaining power.
The government was not deposed, and China rejected demands to execute several leading figures in the war.
Cixi embarked on a programme of modernisation during the final years of her life,
following the Japanese model of constitutional monarchy,
but revolutionary republican movements soon sought to oust the Qing entirely.
While they had ruled for two and a half centuries, it now appeared that they too had lost the mandate of heaven,
like the Han, the Tang and the Ming before them.
You can find out all about the rise and fall of the great Ming and Qing dynasties right here,
and if you missed it, find out just what major influence the Opium War had on China
and how it would change Chinese History forever!
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