The Boxer Rebellion: The 1900 Siege of the Legations and the Eight-Nation Alliance

The Boxer Rebellion (义和团运动, 1899–1901) was the violent anti-foreign and anti-Christian uprising that culminated in the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing and the invasion of north China by an eight-nation military force. It marked the most catastrophic foreign intervention in late Qing history and produced the Boxer Protocol, the harshest of the unequal treaties. For the full background, see the [Boxer Rebellion and reform attempts] (index.md) and in the larger story of the fall of imperial China.

The Righteous and Harmonious Fists

The “Boxers” — called Yihetuan (义和团), the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, by their enemies the “Boxers” because of their martial-arts training — emerged in the late 1890s in the poor, drought-stricken rural areas of Shandong and Zhili (modern Hebei). They were a syncretic popular movement: they practiced a ritual martial arts, believed they could become invulnerable to bullets through chanting and postures, drew on popular spirit-worship, and directed their rage against the local disruptions of Christian missionary activity and foreign economic penetration.

The Shandong crisis of 1897–1899 set the stage. In November 1897 two German Catholic missionaries were murdered in the Juye incident. Germany used the killing as a pretext to seize Jiaozhou Bay in March 1898, a direct violation of Chinese sovereignty that the Qing could not resist. The Boxers, who had been fighting the German-supported Catholic community in Shandong, were initially banned by the Qing. After a Chinese attempt to suppress them produced a disastrous defeat at the hands of disciplined German troops, the Boxers fled northward and the policy changed. The wider context of foreign encroachment in the late Qing explains how the European powers had been carving up Chinese territory for the previous three decades.

The Ideology and Practice of the Boxers

The Boxers’ ideology was a mixture of the religious, the millenarian, and the magical. They believed that through ritual practice they could call down divine protection against foreign weapons; that they were agents of cosmic forces in a final battle between the righteous and the demonic; and that Christianity and the foreign presence in China were supernatural evils to be expelled. Their rituals included chanting of incantations, the recitation of charms, and trance states. The philosophical background of popular religion in late imperial China helps to situate the movement.

Their practices also included violence. In the winter of 1899 and the spring of 1900, Boxer bands attacked Christian converts and missionaries, burned churches, and killed Chinese Christians. In Shanxi province alone the Boxer-associated governor Yuxian organized the killing of perhaps 200 Westerners and thousands of Chinese Christians. The movement’s anti-Christian focus gave it a quasi-religious character, while its anti-foreign focus made it a political crisis of the first order.

The Qing Court and the Path to War

The Qing court was divided. The Empress Dowager Cixi, who had crushed the Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898, was determined not to be pushed around by foreigners again. She was also aware that the Boxers, however dangerous, expressed real popular grievances and might be turned against foreign interests. The conservative Manchu prince Duan and his son, who had been made heir apparent partly to strengthen the anti-reform faction, supported the Boxers. Moderates at court argued for suppression.

In May 1900 the Boxers entered Beijing in growing numbers, in defiance of the imperial authorities. The legation quarter, a small walled district in the eastern part of the city where the foreign legations were located, was cut off on 20 June. The British minister Sir Claude MacDonald took charge. About 900 foreigners — diplomats, soldiers, missionaries, and customs officials — and some 2,800 Chinese Christians were inside the legations. The Chinese army, the Boxers, and foreign relief forces fought a chaotic war in and around the city for fifty-five days. The military history of the late Qing crisis describes the campaign.

The Siege of the Legations

The siege of the legations was a small but dramatic event that drew the attention of the world. The defenders, mostly British, French, American, Japanese, Russian, Italian, German, and Austro-Hungarian troops and civilians, fortified the British legation, the nearby customs house, and the French compound. They were supplied by a thin line of communication to the coast, by the Peking Field Force (a small column of foreign marines that broke in from the port of Tianjin on 14 June) and by the hope of a relief column from the coast.

The Boxers and Chinese soldiers attempted to storm the legations several times, partly with fire and partly with mining, in which a tunnel was dug beneath the legation to be filled with explosives. The mining was discovered in time. The Japanese legation was a particular point of contention; about half of the defending force was Japanese. The wider crisis of late Qing legitimacy is impossible to understand without the foreign crisis.

The Eight-Nation Alliance

By mid-June 1900 the powers — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, Japan, Italy, and Austria-Hungary — had organized an international expeditionary force. The British Indian contingent, the French marine infantry, the German marines, the Japanese army, the Russian Siberian troops, the American Ninth Infantry, and smaller Italian and Austro-Hungarian units assembled at Tianjin. The commander was British Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Seymour, who led the Seymour Expedition — a mixed column of about 2,000 men that set out from Tianjin on 10 June to relieve the legations. The expedition was fought to a halt at the Taku forts and at the Xigu Arsenal and was forced to retreat on 22 June, having lost about a third of its strength.

The Boxer Protocol (1901)

The Boxer Protocol, signed on 7 September 1901, was the harshest of the unequal treaties. Its main provisions were:

The execution, exile, or punishment of a long list of Chinese officials judged responsible for the killings, including Yuxian, who was sent to Beijing and publicly beheaded.
The payment of an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver (then about US$333 million, roughly five times the Qing annual revenue) over thirty-nine years, with interest. The sum was set at 50 million taels for each of the nine nations, plus two additional 50-million-tael payments to compensate for the loans and losses. The payments were funded by customs and salt taxes, and they were a permanent drain on the imperial finances for decades.
The stationing of foreign troops along the railway from Beijing to the sea, in violation of Chinese sovereignty.
The destruction of the Taku forts and the permanent foreign right to station troops in Beijing.
The modification of the tribute system, replacing the old audiences at the imperial court with formal diplomatic protocol.
A formal apology by the Qing court and the obligation to erect monuments to the foreign victims at the sites of the killings.

The Boxer Protocol was the death of the old China. The payment of the indemnity was financed by the customs and salt taxes, and customs receipts thereafter went directly to the foreign creditors. The wider context of late Qing humiliation is in the larger story of the fall of imperial China.

The Aftermath

The Boxer Protocol effectively ended the Qing as an independent power. The foreign legations stayed in Beijing, the indemnity was paid, and the dynasty survived only at the sufferance of the powers. Within a year the court began the belated reforms that would become the late Qing constitutional movement. The Empress Dowager Cixi, in a famous remark on her deathbed, is said to have regretted her support for the Boxers. The movement itself was suppressed, but its grievances — the presence of missionaries, the loss of sovereignty, the corruption of the late Qing — would not be. The revolution of 1911 was only a decade away.