In Our Time - The Boxer Rebellion

Episode Date: March 19, 2009

In the hot summer of 1900, Peking, the capital of China, was under heavy siege. But the surrounding forces were not foreign, they were Chinese. This was the Boxer Rebellion, the moment when the 'Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists', known as the boxers, purged China of foreign merchants and missionaries. The Boxers had came out of the northern provinces, they claimed their fists were stronger than fire and they were invincible to bullets. But they were also desperate and starving and they blamed foreigners for their plight. In the end, the Boxer rebellion failed but it changed China and, more than a hundred years later, the spirit of the Boxer Rebellion lives on. They may have lost their battles but they may have won their war.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the hot summer of 1900, Peking, the capital of China, was under a heavy siege. One resident described the devastation.

The people in Peking, he wrote, were suffering, how the boxers were firing on them from all sides and trying to burn them out, how each man was limited to a small cup of grain a day, while at the same time they were compelled to labour under a burning sun. Peking's besiegers were no foreign army. They were Chinese, a group of rebels called the Boxers, and this was the last act of the Boxer rebellion.

The Boxes came out of the north. They claimed their fists were stronger than fire, and they were invincible to bullets. But whatever their claims, they were also desperate and starving, and they blamed foreigners for their plight. The Boxers lost their battles, But the Boxer Rebellion changed China, and more than 100 years later, the spirit of the Boxer Rebellion lives on.

With me to discuss the Boxer Rebellion are Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford, Francis Wood, curator of Chinese collections at the British Library, and Gary Teedman, lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Christianity in China at King's College London. Francis Wood, in 1898, there was a great drought in China and terrible hardship, particularly in northern provinces. Can you take us into that time and tell us how that was the seedbed for the rise of the boxes?

It was not just a drought, and the drought, it has to be said, followed a terrible flood in which pretty well the whole of the province of Shandong had been devastated. A massive flood followed obviously the consequence was the loss of the harvest, then followed by drought, so that you have a situation in northern China, which is absolutely deadly for the local population, you have an official carder which doesn't respond particularly well. I mean, throughout China's history, there's always been a huge tension between the need to alleviate natural disaster. Officials have to be able to provide food from granaries, make sure that food supplies get through.

And by the 1890s, the Chinese government officials were very hard-pressed indeed. they were also, they found it very difficult, I think, in a way to deal with the boxes, because there's a question of sympathy or not sympathy. Let's get the boxes in a moment. Just this situation. The local and the national is something there. The national emergency plan is there, but the local officials have to expedite it,

and that's not happening, is it? No. One of the reasons the river burst its bank and flooded is said to be, you tell me, is said it be because officials had kept the money for themselves and not banked them up sufficiently strongly. That's true, the Yellow River. The Yellow River was, it had changed its course earlier in 1852, sweeping all the way across Shandong from one side to the other.

It was essential to keep the dikes well maintained. And if you get corrupt local officials, dike maintenance is not continued and you get the danger of these terrible floods. And as I say, the floods then followed by harvest failure, followed by drought and a failure of the local officials to relieve. And I think at the same time, if you're talking about the centre, you've got to think that in 1898, for example, the centre is completely obsessed by foreign invasion. You've got the Germans taking Zhaozhou Bay in 1897, the Russians in Lu Xun in 1897, French troops occupying Guangzhou Bay 1898, plus you have as well, a sort of below that you've got an internal problem in the sense that the Guangzhou Emperor is trying to reform China, trying a desperate sort of last-minute attempt to make China a more modern state,

and he's being opposed by conservative forces. So central government has got its eye off drought relief. Local government officials have got their eyes off drought relief and the maintenance of the dikes of the Yellow River. And this causes massive landlessness. You get bands of young men. They can't eat. They can't work on the fields because the harvest has failed

and there's this terrible drought. And it's a very, very typical story from China's history. You get this endless cycle of dynastic decline, which in a sense create. landlessness, roving bands of young men. Can we just get some idea, Francis, of the size of Xiangong province and how many people are involved here? As I understand it, the Chinese population had gone up from 100 million

in around 1,600 to about, what we talked about is up to 400 million, that in itself was causing problems. But how many people are involved? What size is this province? If we can use the UK, is it the size of Wales or this is the size of Yorkshire, what size is it? What size is it? What strength has it got in terms of population? I'm absolutely hopeless on things like sizes.

I mean, I would have thought, you know, 100 Yorkshire's possibly. And, I mean, at least 2 million people were directly affected by the flood of the Yellow River. So, I mean, when you talk about China and people suffering, it always is in millions. And it's true that there is a kind of drift of the landless towards the north, which is quite significant. Shandong province is the province that kind of sticks out into the sea just below the province in which we find Beijing and Tianjin. So it's quite crucial because in a sense the boxes originate in Shandong, but the movement is northwards towards Peking and Tianjin. So when you say these young men, they begin to congregate it,

it's desperation, it's the uprising, it's starvation almost. It's where are we going to get something to eat it, what are we going to do about it, and they turn their forces outwards, and they go on a path of destruction. That's right. I mean, I think saying a path of destruction, it's grouping together, I suppose,

it's finding kind of light-minded people, and also the hope of salvation. The idea that through boxing, through martial arts, and through gaining special spiritual powers, you'll be able to overcome the natural disasters. Can you run amitter, can you just tell us a little bit more about how they came to be as a group, the boxers, people can imagine on restaurants.

But why did they cluster together? Why did they cohere into, not so much a unit, but this movement, which had this name, and then brought... great deal of havoc around the place. The thing to bear in mind is that when we use the term boxer in English, we of course have in mind people with boxing gloves in a ring. And that's not at all what's going on in China in the late 19th century.

What the term boxer translates is a term which in Chinese has translated something a little bit more like righteous and harmonious fists, but it's the fists of the traditional Chinese martial arts, movements of the arms and the limbs through the air. And this is part of a much longer religious tradition. That's really the way in which we need to understand who the box. boxes are. Over the centuries, as Francis was saying, there has been over and over again, at times of crisis, a religious impulse in Chinese society to try and band together and find

some sort of supernatural way through the crisis. Just 100 years or so, perhaps a little more than that, before the boxer uprising, you have an uprising called the White Lotus, for instance, in central China, which has a Buddhist inspiration. Now, there isn't necessarily a direct link between that uprising and the boxers, but that tradition of religious uprising is very much there in the minds of these young people carried on through folk tradition. And so in a sense it's a way of trying to find a sort of supernatural religious solution to a real-life immediate crisis. But they became a force.

I'm just wanting our listeners to know how they became a force, who organized them, what sort of force they were. They don't seem to have had any specific political leaders, and that's one distinguishing factor. Did they have a policy? Did they meet in certain places? they made certain decisions. Can you tell us about how these young, starving young men

became the boxers that we know about? One of the things that does indeed make the boxers unusual is that there is never any one single leader who you can identify as being the guy who leads the boxers. Instead, what happens is that they rally around a cause. What they see is the natural disasters around them. And one of the reasons that they find for this, at least in their own minds,

is the increasing encroachment of Christianity. I know we'll probably talk about that later, so I won't go into details on that. But you have to be aware that there is this clash occurring in the countryside between the spread of Christianity and the more indigenous traditional relief, religious beliefs. And that means these young men, many of whom who hear rumors, ideas that are spread through market towns and so forth, when they're going up to buy things or trade and it's increasingly desperate situation, hear all sorts of, often untrue, but very powerful rumors about what the foreigners,

what the Christians are doing, that enable them to come back to their home villages and say, look, there's this political crisis out there. There are these strange foreign forces, and the only way in which we can fight back is by using these traditional religious martial art techniques and gathering ourselves together to say no and fight back. So in a sense, it's coming from the bottom up,

and that's why you don't see any one particular leader. But in reading for the programme, it's the last major war in which magic was used. Now, can you develop that? What does that mean? I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think that it's hard to think after this occasion, the boxer uprising 1898-1900,

of a major campaign, a major war in China, and there are many after this, of course, in which one side seriously believes in the supernatural in magic as a powerful weapon against the enemy. And it's clear that this was central to the boxer message. Can you be more specific? Yeah, what they did was to turn up in these villages. And let's be aware these are people who look very distinctive.

They're wearing bright red, bright yellow, urban sashes. I mean, there's a lot of showmanship going on here. And what they say is that if you follow the spells, the enchantments that we are advocating, then you can do several things. First of all, you can be invulnerable to bullets, to weapons, to anything that anyone may use to attack you. And also you'll become possessed by the supernatural spirits, the otherworldly spirits, which will give you this infinite power that we offer to you. So essentially... My ancestors and ghosts. Ancestors and ghosts, absolutely. I mean, it's drawn very much for. from traditional Chinese religion, but being used, as I say, in a sense, for the last time as at least a message of potency against this very new sinister threat of foreign influence. So it's, you know, the modern world comes up against magic,

as I say, almost for the first and last time in Chinese history. Is the magic all trickery? We hear of them proving that they're invulnerable to bullets by firing would turn out to be blanks at their people and saying, look, they don't get mowed down by these bullets and so on. Is there a lot of fairground trickery going on with the magic? It's a combination of things. It's not fair, I think, just to call it fairground trickery.

Obviously, some of what's going on is a slight of hand, as you mentioned. But there's a genuine confidence. The kind of, I mean, the millions of people that you get who are coming behind this movement couldn't be called up if there wasn't some greater message that really struck a chord. And of course, the boxers had a ready-made excuse for when it didn't work, as it often did, which was that they said, well, there's ritual pollution going on. I mean, menstruating women is just one example of the phenomena, which the boxer leaders at the local level would say must have occurred

if the bullets did in fact hit their target. Or eating garlic. Or eating garlic, for example. Gary Teedman, Christianity has been mentioned, and it was a big factor. Missionaries had moved in and they were spreading out of China. In the villages, they had quite a lot of power. They made decisions.

They decided who won in law cases. And increasingly the Christians, if the Christians were making the decisions, and they would not fit in. The Christian religion wouldn't fit in. The other Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism tended to meld, but Christianity said, no, we are the only ones, and you must reject all the others.

So there was an intellectual frisson there. Can you tell us how this played in the Shandong province, how this became the object of attack? First of all, I would like to say that it was not maybe primarily a Shandong problem, the way Christianity developed, it goes back at least 300 years, filtering down from Beijing into Juryli province, the metropolitan province, next to Shandong. And I see it more as a border problem between these two provinces.

So at the beginning of the 18th century, we see the emergence of Catholic communities, these are Catholics. There were later on towards the end of the 19th century a few Protestants in the boxer area as well. but it's mainly a Catholic problem. And they had created their own Catholic villages, you could say, here and there scattered in the remote part of the country.

What changes this approach are the so-called unequal treaties of the mid-19th century, especially the one of 1860, the Beijing Convention, the French version of the Beijing Convention, where a missionary and a French government translator insert fraudulently some additional clauses in the Beijing Convention of 1860, which give these clauses give missionaries additional rights. They can buy property wherever they want to.

They can preach. Their converts can practice their religion, all that had been banned before. And perhaps most crucially of all, the French government establishes a religious protectorate over all Catholics, regardless of nationality, including Chinese Catholics. And that gives Christians as well as the missionaries additional powers. And if we look at the environment on the North China Plain,

rather than Shandong Province as a whole, but just the North China Plain, where provincial boundaries divide up the space and therefore you create margins in which all kinds of forces can operate, including heterodox ideas, can flourish there as well. This North China plain, as we have already heard from France, is densely populated but extremely vulnerable and impoverished. So people had developed a tradition of violence

trying to acquire scarce resources by whatever means. You can become a bandit. You can engage in feuding with neighboring villages or you engage in salt smuggling operations, which also can be rather violent. And so we see an environment in which violence is quite common. But in the 1890s, which is what we're gathering together for the Boxer Rebellion to take wing about 1898,

and it's very short. We're talking about two or three years. So is Christianity, is it a convenient enemy to gather the boxes together as a force before they move on, as they do move on, as we're going to get to be king towards the end, where they're great assault on the capital and very damningly successful as well?

And so is Christianity their first useful great enemy? Yes, I think that's a good point. Clearly, as Christianity spreads into this violent environment, they become themselves involved in incidents, local struggles over land and so on, and missionaries can intervene on the grounds of religious persecution and so on. So that has been building up.

What becomes a crucial event in this story is the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. It denudes the countryside of the forces of repression, let's call them. Soldiers are sent to the front and therefore lawlessness, increases in this area. And we see at this time

the first formation of these self-defense forces that employ invulnerability as part of their repertoire of defense. Initially they fight against bandits but it becomes

clear fairly quickly that those Christians, those Catholics, they don't want to participate in any of these village level activities so they become enemies. and then that combines with a drought and other what I call the conjuncture of circumstances, the drought, the coup in Beijing in September 1898,

the scramble for concessions by the foreign powers, all this sort of creates a wave of rumours which filled us into this hinterland on the North China Plain. And they're quite outrageous rumors in a way that these foreigners are half-beasts and half-men, Francis, because we're talking about people very cut off. And so that not so much supernatural and not so much magical but mythical things come into this.

But we've got it well laid out. We've got the Sino-Japanese War. We've got the drought. We've got the floods. You've got the loosening of the centre. You've got the repressive forces going away. We've got the tradition of banditry and little border disputes in and around Shandong province.

So there it is. How does it get together, Francis, when are we talking, I we talking about 1898, when does it, do they begin to move? We talk about an uprising. When do they start to uprise? Well, I still think that it's so very non-cahensive. I mean, it is miraculous that the boxers do, as it were, cohere from these little local bandit groups. I think it's still fairly mysterious. I mean, you get groups attacking, you know, a particular Catholic church, killing the Czech Catholics there and so on.

But they're very, they're very spread out. I mean, they didn't, they, there were savage persons these boxes. We mustn't, because they, we talk about martial arts being a sort of rather gentle thing. The missionaries are dealt with brutally. Well, and of course we must remember that above all it's Chinese Christians who die in their thousands. I mean, in the whole boxer uprising, it's only a few hundred. Well, I suppose one should regret a few hundred. But, I mean, the proportion is ridiculous, whereas tens of thousands of Chinese Christians are killed.

And so it's a disproportionate view of the horror, really. If we were a Chinese Christian, it's far worse. I mean, you get the beginning of things like, I think it's quite interesting if you look at things like slogans that you get in 1898 that boxers begin to produce slogans, which are sorts of rallying points, which are ones of things like one is restore the Qing or sort of revitalise the Qing dynasty,

the failing Qing dynasty, and destroy Miyang, which is destroy not necessarily foreigners, but what is foreign. Because you have other things that they're very against. For example, the railways, which are foreign built in China, also telegraphs. I mean, they look at telegraph poles and they can see that they're sort of, it's a bit like us and pylons. You know, this sort of crackling electricity, which is obviously... Well, it's those who think that pylons are bringing ill health.

I mean, for the boxes, a telegraph pole was a very kind of frightening sort of thing and a symbol of foreign encroachment. And the railways, I mean, not only are they pretty terrifying, but they also take jobs away again. Can we just So they're brooding around a movement miraculously Francis said It's very interesting that my questions about coherence are quite rightly getting nowhere Because the point was there wasn't the sort of coherence

that uprisings usually have A leader with a few chaps or chappes is very rarely Lead something and away it goes And a real ideology A real ideology What about the centre, Rona? Back in Peking They're preoccupied with the foreign concessions

the pressure from the foreign countries who want to get into China and trade and they want concessions to trade. They want very big concessions like East India companies got in India and so forth. So what's, how are they, are they beginning to say there's something to worry about Dan in Shangdong?

Yeah, the central government, the Qing dynasty that we've been talking about here, this rather shaky, rather failing, last in period. It's been there for about 250 years. It's been about 250 years and as we now know isn't going to be there for that much longer. But at that point, you know, it still seem viable but shaky.

They were in a quandary as to what to do because they're caught between these two very different forces. The foreign powers we've been hearing about who want more and more concessions, they want the rights to trade. They want the right, for instance, which they gain, that foreign citizens under treaty rights should not be subject to Chinese law, for instance, on Chinese territory. So that's a way of encroaching Chinese sovereignty

without actually having to have formal colonisation. On the other hand, you have all these rumours coming up from the countryside about these strange guys in red and yellow turbans turning up burning Christian villages or doing these strange new religious rituals. And between these two very different sorts of forces, the central government, the imperial court, is trying to work out what to do.

And by the way, that's part of the answer to your previous point, Melvin, about why we don't have a more comprehensive answer to where they came from. Unlike some other rebellions we can think of, such as the Taiping's of about 30 years previously, there are no records, there are no written records by anyone who was participating in the boxer uprising because they were illiterate.

So everything we know about them comes essentially from enemies or observers, and that makes it difficult to come back. Gary Teedman. Yes. The way I see it, there were three forces involved, the now rather militant conservative court in Beijing, the boxes, a rural movement of, or a gathering of country bumpkins.

And then you have, in the coastal areas, in the economically advanced areas, you have an innovative elite emerging. And they respond differently. to the foreign influences that are now creeping into China. And Francis mentioned the so-called boxer slogans. I am inclined to see them more as slogans of the innovative elites who are opposed to foreign companies being awarded concessions

in mining, in railway construction, that sort of thing. They would like to do those things themselves. So we see the emergence of these slogans first in eastern Shandong, away from the boxer area, but also in central China, Jujang, and in Sichuan province, this is where the pro-cheng, anti-foreign slogans first emerge.

And eventually they absorbed, I don't know how, but they're absorbed by the boxes as well. It sort of becomes a boxer slogan. Why were they so against the railways? They took... Yeah, I should also say that, of course, the boxes first are noted

first in late 1898. But initially it's a fairly sort of vague movement. But I want the rowers, because we've got to move on here. Was it because a lot of them, the peasants, made their living by working in the canals and by taking wheelbarras, literally wheelbarras across the Great Plains,

carrying goods, and the railways were going to eliminate all that work? Was that it? Yeah, I think that's largely a myth because, of course, no really. had actually been built. What people were opposed to were engineers, sort of mapping out where the railway would run. And that began to worry people. What is going to happen here? What is a railway? You know, what is a train? It had no idea. It was rather frightening. So initially, it was that sort of fear of the unknown. Eventually, by the summer or spring of 1900, when the first railway has been built from Beijing southwards, yes, then they attack the... those 50 miles of railway.

But before that, it was merely based on rumors and strange happenings. I was trying to get to that. They attacked the railway. And it's about that time, Francis, in the spring of 1900, that they move on Peking. Now, how did they move on Peking? How did they get it together? I'm desperate search for coherence in this.

How did they get it together to move as a mass on Peking? Well, you have, I think, it is a fairly incoherent movement. I mean, the way people describe it is that boxers appear on the street. in Peking. The point mainly is that they're unchallenged. I mean, this does go back to the fact of local officials, many of whom were quite supportive of the boxers and did not therefore decide that they should be put down or anything.

They let them happen, and they let them go into Peking. It would have been quite possible for the central government to have forbidden them any entry and to have dispersed the whole movement. But there is this ambivalence. They're rather keen on this anti-foreign group. So by that time the boxers are anti- serving the purpose of being anti-foreign because they didn't start like that.

They didn't know about foreign in Shandong, did they? They knew about drought. They knew about starvation. They knew about... But the foreignness wasn't a big factor, as I understand it. It becomes, by 18... But they were manipulated in that sense, weren't they? I think it's possible to say that they were.

I mean, there were certain officials who definitely, I mean, though they would decapitate the people they perceived as leaders of local bandits groups, they would, at the same time, they would let the boxers then dispersed back into the community. So there was tremendous ambivalence on the part of the official. I think that is one of the key factors in trying to understand why they can hear and come together in the summer of 1900. The attitude of the governors of each of the big Chinese provinces, each of which I think as was observed is possibly the size of one or two European countries. I mean, there's a huge areas of land. The attitude of each of these governors was quite important.

I mean, there's this official Yuxien who's in charge of Shandong. And he ends up pretty clearly being, not necessarily actively in favour of the boxers, but certainly sympathetic towards them. It would be clear, even to people from this background of the villages, that the way was open to them to come together and make a gesture, as opposed to another prominent official at the time, Yuan Shukai, who made it clear in his province there was no way the boxers would be tolerated, and in his area there really wasn't that kind of coalescing of the boxers in the villages.

Just a few quick question, right? Have you any idea of the numbers involved as they're moving into Peking? there's a difficulty in putting forward a very exact number for exactly the reason that's been mentioned. Certainly we have reports of tens of thousands. That is what foreign observers seem to have seen. And certainly... And what was their objective in going to Peking?

There's a very long-standing tradition of understanding that the centre, the imperial capital, is where power resides. We've kept saying, and I think it's not entirely true that people who live way down in the villages in China at this time are cut off. Actually, there's a very sophisticated, set of relationships between the local, the provincial and the central government in China at this time

and has been for centuries. Because even if you live in the villages, you go to your local market town to sell your grain. That's where you go to the alehouse or the wine house. You hear rumours that are coming down from the big city. This is where all these stories about foreigners with animal heads and so forth are coming from. It's not simply isolated out in the villages. And in the same sort of way, the perception that there is a shared Chinese culture, you know, with the emperor at the centre and the government in various points around, is understood. by people at all levels of society. So it's natural when there's a huge crisis to think about going to that centre and demonstrating. Gary, Gary Teedman, can you tell us how the boxes would

have appeared to the Western diplomats in the legations in Peking who were about to be seriously threatened? What would they, what would they have looked at? We've talked about them as being unarmed, invulnerable and unarmed, but they did also, quite a lot of them had arms. Can you just give us some idea of what sort of men, anyway, the question's been asked. Yes, I suppose the standard arms they would carry would be spears, red-tasseled spears. But especially through their association with Chinese regular armed forces, they also acquired guns. So from that perspective, they were not entirely unarmed.

They appeared like phantoms in a way, dressed in this sort of red turbans and, and frightening in a way the way they made noises, do their incantations and so on. But on the other hand, they were not initially taken very seriously. There was a famous Times correspondent, George Morrison, an Australian, who went out to rescue some Christians in the suburbs of Beijing.

And they didn't really take the boxes very seriously. It only became threatening when the legation, were surrounded and fighting started, then the boxes were seen as more menacing than there had been before. The allegations being the embassies and the people around the embassies and little fortresses supposedly immune inside Peking, but not proving to be so. At that point, there was a palace coup. Now, we've got the foreigners on the coast wanting more land, more trade, more access,

and bringing pressure on and having a lot of pressure. And after the opium wars in the middle, they had a lot of leverage. We have a failing royal household and we have the politicians in and around the royal households and then we have the boxes becoming a coherent force. They're in Peking that got in. They're beginning to move towards the legations, very serious. The Western world is beginning to allow...

All sorts of horror fiction is appearing all over the west about these horrible boxes, a paper bag, Lurid stuff's going. So, what about the palace? What about the palace coup? Would you like to address that, Francis? Well, the palace coup is in a sense definitely over, by 1900 and the Conservatives are in charge, the poor Guangzhou emperor who had tried to modernise China

and unfortunately of course to bring in quite a lot of foreign technology as it were and learn foreign things. He had been imprisoned by his aunt, the Dowager Empress, Tsisi. And so effectively the Conservatives were in control. But there is actually one date and one event which is very important at this point. I think you may be thinking of June 21st when the Qing court finally declares its hand. It's been ambivalent at this point. Are we going to support the boxes? Are we going to oppose them?

We're kind of keeping our options open. Finally, the Dowager Empress and the Court say, no. We are going to support the boxers. They officially return them Imin, which means righteous people. In other words, giving them the seal of approval. And this is the opening of what you could call a war. I think that's fair to say. The Qing Court declares war on the foreigners on June 21st,

and that is a definite change, an important one in policy. And to the Darja, some person, the mistress of the emperor, who ruled and ruled and made very big decisions in this as one of them. Which would like to say a few words about the Dajah? That's it? The Dajah Empress. The Dajah Empress. Yes.

I mean, I find her a very fascinating character. I suppose I've looked at other aspects of her rather than her sort of warlike persona. I mean, I think she was a master of public relations. She was the first to bring sort of cameras into the forbidden city. She brought, she invited all the wives of the diplomats in to have tea with her, carefully setting the scene. She set the scene so that they all came away saying things like,

oh, she does love pink. It's her favourite colour, whereas in fact she loathed it. She was a fascinating character, I think, and very feminine in many ways. So I find it quite hard to think of her as the kind of, you know, the leader of the troops. But of course, she's surrounded by other relatives. Pretty well everyone involved is called Prince, this or the other.

Everyone is related to her. And she takes very much, I think, the advice that she is given. I mean, after all, she does, in fact, take their advice and flee at the end of the boxer rebellion. She backs the boxes, really. So the court, with her great authority, even though it's a failing court, she's still in charge.

She is the emperors. Yes. She backs there, and that puts a different complexion on it altogether. And it brings the boxes in. I mean, they become a kind of militia within the Chinese army, so that you get the foreigners are being attacked jointly by the Chinese army plus the boxes working together. So that's, that is very different from just a rebel band.

Now, Garay, I mean, because of the outside world, is about to intervene in an unprecedented way, a coalition is just heaving up. Can you give us some idea of how the rest of the world is hearing this? The Christian network is massive and so the massacres of Christianity

but there's also they're moving on the legations in Peking. There's going to be fighting there for several weeks and it's touch and go. Can you just develop that and that? Yes, of course it's an ambivalent situation

for the outside world, particularly in Europe. On the one hand, you have imperialist competition over colonial possessions and other parts of the world. Alliances are being forged between France and Russia, Britain, sort of contemplating, working more closely with Germany, but that doesn't materialize.

So there's this sort of flux. People or various nations are wary of the other. At the same time, of course they have to work together because of the crisis in China. Now we have to keep in mind that the boxer uprising coincides with the Boer War in South Africa. So attention is divided between that conflict and the boxers. And the boxers have the attention of the world for a relatively brief period. It is assumed that all the foreigners have been killed in Beijing.

And of course we know the Times published obituaries of some of the leading personalities involved in Beijing and so on. And who is still alive? And they're still alive. Or most of them anyway. So the outside world, the attention of the outside world is drawn briefly to events in Beijing,

but interest has lost fairly quickly again. Raina, can you just give us some idea? They're besieging the legations. Can you give us some idea of how it's proceeding, what the odds are, what the balance is between victory and defeat, if you can fill it in. At this point in June, when all of this breaks out, June 1900,

this all breaks out very suddenly, it seems to the Chinese court that they have got a winning hand. They've obviously got very large numbers of troops. They've got these mysterious boxers. Who knows where they've come from, but they're there, and they're clearly supporting the dynasty. I mean, this is a very odd thing. It's a rebellion which is supporting the government,

which is not something you find very often. And all of these foreigners pretty much hold up in this one very limited area. of Beijing. So for a few weeks it does seem as if basically the foreigners are doomed. And this is why the international... So the allegations are attacked. I mean, they're besieged. They're besieged. Yes, they don't actually manage to get in.

They're pretty well protected. But they're firing at them. They're firing at them. Bombarding them and... And they're starving them into submission. The record... The cup of grain, which I mentioned at the beginning. Absolutely, yes. There's not enough food and women and children are there too. And this is something that's brought up very much in foreign reports. The idea that these people are unspeakably cruel

because they're keeping women and children in there. And the atrocity reports grow as a result of this. But essentially it looks as if the foreigners are going to be doomed. And this is why the decision is taken by the foreign powers acting together as a multilateral force, you might say, for the first time, that they're going to have to make an intervention. Can you, that's an extraordinary coalition, really, Francis Ward, isn't it? We're talking about Russia, Japan, Germany, the USA, UK, Austria, Italy,

coming together as a unit, sending a force in a big force, which, well-armed, which eventually tried. How did they get that together? Well, with immense difficulty, I mean, if you think of the poor people in the legations, this force does not get itself together actually until August 4th, and it takes 10 days to reach Peking. There had been a previous attempt led by Admiral Seymour, which was also a mixed army, a small army,

but Admiral Seymour on the 18th of June set out from Tiern-N-Jemort, set out from Tianjin to try and bolster the forces in Peking. He unfortunately chose to travel by railway, and by this time the boxers were attacking the railway and ripping up the lines. So it takes him ages, and then, in fact, he is defeated by a combined boxer Chinese army force and has to retreat to Tianjin.

And then it's obviously needed, they need to get together a much larger force and eventually, as I say, so it takes from sort of the end of June. Who puts it together? I mean, can we find any, we've got no coherence with the boxes. So who puts these eight other nations together? No, it's not Walderzeb.

He arrives too late and takes over command of the Allied forces after Beijing has been relieved. It's Claude McDonald, in a way, in the legations who holds things together in Beijing. From outside, the forces from outside, I don't see any overall command. One very important factor that is often forgotten is that of the 20,000 troops who were sent in this multilateral force, 10,000 were Japanese. And this is one of the very first occasions where Japan acts as an empire in its own right as part of an international force. So it's important to remember this is not just a European force trying to relieve the allegations.

It's also Japan acting as an imperial power as well, and they're involved in that discussion. I was going to add, the Japanese, of course, arrived first on the. the scene, and the Russians were second. The European forces came rather late. Troops from India were brought in, but also from continental Europe. So they arrived later than the Russians and the Japanese. So, and they prevailed. And there was something, the boxes drifted away,

when they went caught and punished and so on. Then there was the boxer protocol in 2001, which imposed by the foreign powers, which is considered to be one of China's great humiliations, one of its ten great humiliations, as I understand it. Can you just describe that little? You're looking towards each other, passing the buck here. Rana, right.

Well, the first thing that was demanded was a tremendous amount of money, $333 million to be paid over a period of slightly under 40 years, and there was going to be a 4% interest rate charged on any outstanding capital. This was essentially China's GNP about that amount year by year was essentially going to have to be paid in indemnities. So this is a massive, whacking amount. In addition, there were also human reprisals. The fact that, as we mentioned before in June,

the court had come out openly in favour of the boxers meant that the officials most associated with that decision were to be punished. Several high princes of the sort that Francis were mentioned were either told, in one case, one was told he was to be executed, the governor Yusien. In other cases, they were told that they had to commit suicide by their own hands, but they were given orders essentially by the foreigners that they must do that.

The Dowager Empress had disappeared at the end of the Boxer uprising to the town of Chungda sort of summer retreat and had to be sort of brought back to deal with the aftermath having fled. But I think this is wonderful quote that Gary will give us from, was it the Kaiser who said the quote about a Chinese may never look at a German askance again? Perhaps you have the exact words. Yeah, I can't remember them precisely, but of course that's what he said when the German troops left Wilhelmshafen in August, July of

1900. I think the quote is that just as Attila the Hun put fear into Europeans of a previous generation, so we must now act after this event to make sure that no Chinese ever looks askance at a German again. The box started out being against modernisation,

being in any way, but there were a catalyst for modernisation. As I understood, very soon after this uprising, China went fast forward into a modernizing world. Do we still see the effects of the Boxer uprising now as it rippled right through, did it ripple right through the 20th century? As you mentioned, of course, the Boxer uprising is regarded as one of the ten great humiliations that China has suffered in modern times.

Initially, Chinese, we see the emergence of a Chinese national conscience, Chinese nationalists are opposed to the boxes. They're backward, superstitious and so on. But gradually, by the 1920s, we find people who have more positive things to say about them. But it's really not until the Mao's face in the 1950s and so on that much more attention is paid to the boxer uprising or the boxer rebellion, they called it. because at that time, Maoist ideology held that one should learn from the peasants. And these were peasant rebels who had dared to fight against the foreigners, had upheld Chinese sovereignty and so on. So they're seen in a very different light in the 1950s, 60s, 70s,

then it begins to change again in the 1980s and 90s. and they're no longer regarded in such a positive light by scholars, by the government, yes, but not by the scholars. Because, of course, it was very difficult. I mean, I remember the learning Chinese history under those circumstances, and the big problem with the boxers, you know, that they were Maoist heroes being peasants. But there was this business that they did uphold the Qing dynasty, and this was difficult for Chinese teachers to grapple with. Well, thank you very much.

Sorry, I'm afraid we please, excuse me. Thank you very much, Francis Wood, Ron, Amitter and Gary Teedman. Next week we'll be discussing the School of Athens, the fresco painted by Raphael for Pope Julius II's private library. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research.

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