Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 301 - The Boxer Rebellion Part 1: Unbeatable Army of Ultra Nerds

Episode Date: March 3, 2024

The Imperial powers of Europe and Japan humiliate China until they create an uprising of magical martial artists who are terrified of period blood. SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: David Silby. The Boxer Rebellion and The Great Game in China Diana Preston. The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic History of China’s War Against Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900 Henry Keown-Boyd. The Fists of Righteous Harmony Joseph Esherick. The Origins of the Boxer Uprising

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. What if there was a war raging for a million years, but it was kept a secret? It's a question that Sarkis never considered. He was born as an upper-middle class man living in Prime City during the so-called millennia of peace. As far as he knew, or as far as anybody knew, humanity has no army, no weapons, and no wars. The people of Earth had been expanding into the stars as long as anyone remembered,

free of conflict, while the Techno King and his royal cabal enriched themselves in the backs of their labor. It was as it always had been. Then, Sarkis died. Unbeknownst to him, an app he used every single day of his life hijacks his consciousness and uploads it into a synthetic engine of war known as a sleeve. Along with countless others, he's been conscripted into the Undying Legion, charged with fighting a secret, unending war in the name of humanity. Their minds stolen, uploaded into war machines. They fight a secret war name of humanity. Their minds stolen, uploaded into war machines. They fight a secret war to preserve humanity. My new book, The Invisible War, is now available wherever it is that you consume books. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can get it for free

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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. i'm joe and with me in the velour lined goon cave of the trash future studios is tom joe we started we gotta stop going on about gooning because it's gonna become like our thing i i feel like we have a lot of other things and this is your fault you you've opened the pandora's box of gooning and it cannot be closed this is like is the curse of knowledge you know once you know too much you can never be sane again exactly and also once you pointed out that the studio does in fact have purple curtains behind you which somehow i never noticed before um i can't unsee it i can't unsee it yeah unfortunately um it's you know the velvet lined curtains for um the glue factory shoots uh makes it much easier to white balance a camera shot if there's not like a bare white

wall behind you this is things I don't have to worry about because I don't sit in front of cameras if I can help it also you literally don't do any production not if I can fucking help it man hey listen that's what you have employees for

I remember years ago and I think I've said this before, it was probably like four years ago at this point, Nate was like, you know, I could teach you how to do my job. And I was like, no, I'm good. Listen, it's, you know, technical specifications. It's good that, you know, if you're good at something, don't try and do everything else.

Yeah, I mean, and not to mention the idea of editing this show would require me to listen to an hour of my own voice. Sounds like something the CIA would develop in a black site to get me to talk. I think that is the thing out of everything you have experienced in your life that will make you kill yourself possibly there's only one way to find out the live show doesn't actually exist instead we're gonna like lock you in a room and play every single episode of this show back to you i'm going to run to the American embassy for shelter only for angry podcasters

to surround the embassy much like Manuel Noriega and just blare my own voice at me until I fucking just say I can't handle it anymore I thought you were going to go for a Benghazi joke there

Oh god I ain't going away Tom I thought you were going to go for a Benghazi joke there. Oh, God. I ain't going away. Tom, it's been a while since me and you sat down and talked for hours upon hours about a single thing. That didn't involve drinking. That's true. For work, I should say yes now what do you know about the

boxer rebellion it was between cotton briefs and boxer briefs you know it was a big war between the people who like their you know genitals gently caressed by the touch of cloth that sounds more like a civil war than a rebellion.

And also I feel like we're going to start an argument about people who like boxers or briefs in the comments. And the correct answer is you're both wrong. You just wrap your shit in duct tape. Every time you've got to go to the bathroom, you just rip off a layer of skin. It builds toughness. Yeah, it looks like a molting snake.

In general, when talking about a period of history, or especially a war, people like an easy one. Like an easy, simple explanation as to how and why it could happen, right? There's a reason why the most common historical beats on TV and movies and hell even podcasts are like world war one world war two the american civil war they're easy to explain in a concise matter at least for entertainment people really enjoy x happened so y occurred right yeah yeah it creates it's an easy narrative like of a good versus evil type thing and it's very easy to construct media around that yeah 100 and there are things that you know people already kind of know about i think that's why you know world war ii media is still popular

is yeah you can do it without having to give a ton of backstory also you don't have to deal with like the moral complexity of like warring factions where each each side kind of has a point right so i'm gonna have to ask you to throw all that out for the next five weeks um okay just throw it a big big old dumpster um today's episode at the you know we're starting a five week long series and this is not going to have an easy explanation rather it's a long series of different kinds of explanations that eventually blew up in everybody's face

because we're talking about the Boxer Rebellion the story of when a bunch of dudes who thought they were immune to bullets and allergic to period blood attempted to purge China of its foreign and Christian population, managing to unite Japan, the US, the British, Russia, Imperial Germany, Holland, and France, all on the same side, just about a decade before World War I. So, what's the over-under of this being a direct consequence of hong christ he plays a role

oh for fuck's sake he plays a role uh okay it's hong christ all the way down baby hong christ to eat more grass die even faster because i mean a lot of the people in the the government of china at the time just lived through this rebellion um a lot of the military veterans commanders and stuff fought the taiping rebellion uh rest in peace taiping heavenly kingdom never forget um so always in our hearts forever in our minds i mean you can't say without the Taiping Rebellion, the Box Rebellion wouldn't have happened. But it's a small step in a series of small steps. History being a series of cascading events yet again. Unfortunately. Small domino, big domino.

I feel like the small domino here would be white people inventing or discovering the invention of boats, which is a problem that the world has never recovered from. Worst thing to ever happen in history, why people discovered boats. No, this rebellion did not happen in a vacuum, and as a result of constant, unrelenting pressure from outside of imperial China, combined with a blindly ignorant Chinese aristocracy that cared more about getting drunk

and having unending fuck parties than they did about running their own empire. In the end, the poor peasants got fucked, but not like in those parties, you know. Not in the fun way. Not in the party kind of way. No, the depressing kind of fucked. I guess for some people that would also be,

but whatever you're into. Moving on. There's too many layers here. But first we have to get there. And before we do that, we have to acknowledge our main sources we use on the series. The first was The Boxer Rebellion, The Great Game in China by David Sibley. And the second was The Boxer Rebellion, The Dramatic History of China's War Against Foreigners That Shook the World in Summer of 1900 by Diana Preston. However, this is not an exhaustive list.

Those are just the ones I believe are the most important. For our full bibliography, as always, for every episode, check our show notes. I should point out that Diana Preston book is much more narrative in nature, but it's also too narrative in nature. Like it focuses way too much on the foreigners in this as like a narrative structure to make it more compelling or whatever. It focuses a lot on the Peking legation siege because it's like dramatic and whatever. I'm not saying it's

bad. It's just very different from Sibley's, but they work well together, I think. Now, the seeds of where we will all end up started nearly a hundred years before with the massive influx of opium into China by outside forces. Infamously, the most important

probably, the British. Though the British are not the only ones america was involved too in the opium gang um but of course the british get the most infamy credit whatever because they were the biggest offender um opium was of course used in medicine at the time and it still is in various different derivatives but that's not why it was being shipped into china it was instead obviously to just get people addicted to the drug opium creating a bullproof money-making machine like opium is a money maker man when people get addicted to opium you got them by the fucking soul yeah i mean like look you know purdue pharma are just doing this again so if you

live in like the rust belt or like wisconsin you have more in common with imperial chinese people at the turn of the 20th century hello my childhood um now away from their own imperial cores is the important part here because like obviously, using opium, smoking opium in England at the time was illegal. And it was also illegal in China. But they just ignored that part. They had a massive cultivation base for the crop. And they knew they could make a ton of money on it by getting a huge population addicted to it like China and they just crammed it down their throat. This started the so-called century of

humiliation in imperial China. The imperial Chinese government tried to curb the massive importation of opium into the country as tens of millions of people became addicted. This included destroying literal tons of the stuff that the Chinese government captured at different ports. They tried. China's attempt to stop the British from literally destroying their people led to the Brits demanding compensation for the confiscated and destroyed opium.

Obviously, China refused to fucking do this because it was an illegal drug, and this led to the first opium war china refused to fucking do this because it was an illegal drug and this led to the first opium war in 1839 which the chinese decisively lost yeah and then 150 years later ronald reagan would be looking at his nose and saying hmm that wasn't a bad idea i mean to be fair you probably don't get ronald Ronald Reagan in the same form without what we're going to talk about these five episodes is constantly going to be me

oh shit this has you know historical you know effects 150 years later I think you'll pick up on that as we go along and I feel like most people will without the boxer rebellion you wouldn't have gotten george bush on that boat with the mission accomplished flag we'll leave

that one in the air for now the boxers actually invented aircraft carriers little known fact now um now the brits would take massive concessions from china in their victory, including unfair and exploitative trade agreements, but also territory and ports like Hong Kong. But the Brits were not the only people to get involved in the fuck China game. After the first opium war, other European imperial powers began to flex on China, namely France and Russia, who forced them to sign their own unfair treaties, giving them concessions and trade ports. Now, the French have their own interesting version of imperialism, and it's like a soft power tool they use. And it had been used before. We talked about before in the past about how they impressed on the Ottoman Empire and their soft power methods when it came to

granting them the protector status of christians they did the same thing in china and in doing so they forced the chinese emperor to overturn a 100 year old ban on the practice of christianity in the country and also allow the free flow of missionaries and this is not a good sign where whenever you see priests start showing up you're in for a fucking bad time but also like you had france's like power play in asia in terms of like vietnam lao cambodia you know the golden triangle that's also how france weaseled their way in there as well, uh, is using the church and, um, uh, missionaries and stuff as a slow creep into full power.

Yeah. Behind the scenes, you, for, you can't see it, but there's slowly the ghost of Ho Chi Minh, like floating up behind me as we're talking about this. We've summoned them with vape smoke.

about this we've summoned them with vape smoke i'm blowing smoke rings out of my vape in the shape of hochi man i feel like if you googled like a vape competition which i know is a thing that it used to exist you'd find a guy that could create a decent enough portrait of a human being using a vape and that guy either deserves a prize or universal scorn I'm not sure which one or has just already died of popcorn lung also yes see that's the key be like Bill Clinton don't inhale

laughing puffing on a vape like a cigar you're not even inhaling it you're just like I just do it for the flavor this vape like a cigar you're not like you're not even inhaling it you're just like i just do it for the flavor this uh this vape cartridge is from uh cuba so it's kind of like a cuban cigar yeah listen president g's soft power of flooding the world with disposable vapes great move president g it's it's a it's a a lesser known part of the belt and road initiative most people know it as like horrible debt related

traps for developing countries most people don't realize that it's actually just elf bar yeah but like so tangent but if it wasn't for philip morris uh buying a large share of investment in jewel we wouldn't have gotten elf bars because the reason jewel like got so popular was due to like the marketing push and the retail push by philip morris after they invented it because like towards children yeah yeah yeah you know cigarettes uh doing the same thing like 60 70 years later it's like what if children could smoke what yeah what if we went back to the good old days of kids thinking cigarettes were cool yeah but like if it wasn't for that, Juul would have flown under the radar for long enough

and kind of kept its thing of being an alternative to smoking. And the single-use disposable vapes were a reaction to the market capture of Juul completely falling apart after they couldn't sell them mango-flavored pods. Thank you, Tom. Moving on. completely falling apart after they couldn't sell them you know mango flavored pods thank you tom moving hey listen we're talking about a foreign country flooding an entire nation with a very addictive substance hey it's not addictive i can quit whenever i want yeah listen i have a snooze in my gum right now i'm slowly rotting away my teeth we're both horribly addicted to nicotine now there would

also be the second opium war in 1856 that would end with the british and french troops entering the forbidden city torching the chinese summer palace and the signing of the devastating treaty of peking peking of course being beijing now the gave the British, French, and even the Russians, who were not even a belligerent in the war, vast tracts of land and even more trading rights. For example, Russia would take all of outer Mongolia. Side note here, before

the burning of the Summer Palace to the ground, a British soldier took a dog they found there and gifted it to Queen Victoria, who promptly named it Ludi. Okay. The dog was a Pekingese, dog they found there and gifted it to queen victoria who promptly named it ludy okay the dog was a pekinese uh and it spawned a luxury dog craze in england where anybody with money really need to get their hands on a pekinese dog which lasted until the 1960s like, this is the thing with, like, you know, the British during that, like, I suppose, 60-70 year

period between, like, the mid-19th century to the, like, early 20th century of, like, the obsession with, like, Orientalist art and Orientalist, like, stuff. Like, oh, I have a dog from China. No one else has this.

Yeah, it was, you know posting rare dogs um oh weird weirder thing here ludy was apparently hated by the rest of queen victorious dogs and we and we know why thanks to a news article from 1912 even the dogs were racist, that's exactly what it was. What? So according to a news article from 1912, Lutie's quote, Oriental habits and appearance caused the other dogs to dislike it. It's a fucking dog. So the queen's dogs were racist.

That's officially canon now. Oh God. Now the second stage of this imperial feeding frenzy began with the first sino-japanese war of 1894 japan had long been meddling in chinese affairs wanting to get in on what the europeans were doing and set their sights on korea which was then under chinese domination the opening finally came when the queen of k of Korea asked for help suppressing the rebellion, ending in both China and Japan sending troops trying to win favor. However, by the time they got there, the rebellion was already over, but both sides decided,

we're already here, we might as well go to war instead. Yeah, like, what are you going to do? You're not going to go on holiday and not go to war. I mean, obviously. This is why our tour company cannot get licensed in the eu unfortunately yeah listen like henry kissinger is now dead it's now gauche to go on holiday to go to war you know you can't go on a holiday in cambodia you can't like go and like lay mines and blow children to pieces anymore i feel like that's like a

a hobby uh that someone from like the aristocracy in the 1800s would do, but they just call them eccentric. Yeah, it's kind of some T.E. Lawrence type shit. That's exactly right. That is some T.E. Lawrence shit, except maybe you just don't like being whipped by the Ottomans. Yeah. And of course, China lost that war too.

The Chinese have been desperately attempting to modernize their military and you can hear a little bit about their efforts during our taiping rebellion series but it had still almost entirely failed at this point which was just a symptom of greater institutional failures of the empire meanwhile japan was speed running through the meiji restoration and rapidly becoming one of the strongest countries on earth and especially in the region. And the Chinese once again were dusted and forced at gunpoint to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki. This treaty gave Korea, Taiwan, and Liaodong to Japan, as well as multiple training ports and other concessions, like large monthly payments like it was a mortgage. Nothing more embarrassing than having to pay for your own ass beating.

But this is where you get that weird split, right? We talked about this a little bit a long, long time ago during our Russo-Japanese War series. Japan was, without question, an emerging imperial power, but they were, to everyone else, still subhuman because they were Asian. So despite the fact that Europeans are doing this to China left and right, when Japan forced them to give them Liaodong,

European powers were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're being unfair. So they made them, specifically Russia, japan give liao dong back to the imperial chinese government and then the russians took liao dong from china doesn't sound like the russians at all i mean this is literally a blueprint of why the russo-japanese war start in about oh five years so like yeah they're really uh building their own casket to later be laden to the damage had been done yeah it's just different countries like passing around like small regions like okay who can do the most amount of damage here you have

korea given to the japanese and that that won't be bad at all then you've uh the russians coming in you've the british you know not really great imperial powers to be subjected to yeah there's really no win here america is also involved but they're also not really much of an imperial power yet at least as far as like getting into china but they will show up and for us at one point we will get to. The Dutch are there. Fucking everybody in Europe is there if they have an overseas empire at this point. Gosh, I have all this opium to trade.

I went to Japan and I found this great kabuki makeup. Have you guys here in China heard of kabuki? I will trade you some opium for one of your wonderful cloaks. Let me show you my Kabuki performance I have been working on. Just like loads of dudes laid out on like velvet beds after smoking opium. There's just a Dutch guy doing like My Fair Lady in blackface. God. Now, everyone knew China was teetering, weak, and hardly able to hold on,

which is true. The Chinese government was held together with duct tape and fuck parties at this point. But this defeat, the Chinese to the Japanese, to a much smaller neighbor who the Europeans were not taking seriously. I mean, they really wouldn't until World War II. Even after the Japanese beat Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in such a convincing, catastrophic manner, all the other Western European nations just like, well, it's just because Russia... It was Russia and they're

not really Europeans anyway, they're Slavs. So they considered Japan an Asian backwater. So watching China lose to them made the Europeans even hungrier. Yeah. This only highlighted to the rest of the world just how weak China was, and they wanted more. The British believed at the time that China would become more valuable to them than India in the long run. They owned half of the foreign companies in China already, but that still wasn't enough. Colonel Younghusband, that's actually a name, who led an invasion into Chinese-dominated Tibet, no, not the current day Tibet, Tibet back then, said, quote, the earth is too small. The portion of it they occupy is too big and rich

and the intercourse of nations is now too intimate to permit the chinese to keep china to themselves oh this is terrible fucking vibes going on right now yes everything about this sentence is fucking cursed only a british officer would say something like the intercourse of nations. Bleh. Yeah. I know I'm highlighting the British a lot here and that's because they were leaders in this game but other European nations like Russia had a huge hand

and of course Japan all thought the exact same thing about China. Even countries late to the colonialism game like Imperial Germany began to show up and steal shit. It was late to the colonialism game like Imperial Germany began to show up and steal shit. It was, in fact, the great game, but in China. Once everyone got their hands in the pie, it became more and more of an economic effort, which it was for many of them. But also, once more countries got involved, it turned into imperial geopolitics. Oh, they got this thing,

now I need something. I don't even need this part of china for any administrative or economic purpose but germany just took a bigger piece so i need more of it yeah you'll see the kind of the same thing replicated when you when the scramble for africa starts of course of course and like it was a chinese like china wide self-licking ice cream cone of bickering imperial powers. But it wasn't always this way, and it didn't maybe necessarily have to become this way. Until the 19th century, imperial China wasn't exactly strong, as we've talked about. But it had done a decent job of checking imperial encroachment into their territory. They kept them at arm's length, controlled what little that they were able to take with laws and protection, and kept some

semblance of Chinese government together and functioning. However, that was quickly and violently fading. A lot of this had to do with the ending of peaceful years in China, resulting in a collapse of its already kind of limited tax base, constant unending floods and droughts, which led to crop shortages and a swarm of rebellions like the Taiping and others. We talked about the Taiping rebellion in their series because, let's just say they stick out, right? But like, there's dozens of them constantly. There's always regional rebellions, and it's due to regional realities, drought, unemployment, corruption, whatever.

Like, it's pissing them off. It's causing a regional level rebellion. As the internal infrastructure failed, the government used its rapidly dwindling coffers on anything other than fixing it, pushing money towards its military, which of course would vanish in a cloud of corruption and graft, leading to

further and further internal rot, only made worse by external pressures and internal rebellions caused by all of the previous problems we just talked about. Yeah, like it's kind of being definitely compounded by a crisis in the legitimacy of power of you know the imperial chinese state it's kind of like a obviously like the geographic the geopolitics of china as a country as big as it is leads to

unless you have a very strong united front both administratively and politically it leads to rebellions like you know the taiping rebellion where it's like regionally they have their own realities like you said in their own problems and you have people saying like well the government isn't doing anything so why don't we just do it ourselves because who are they to have power over us when they're not actually doing anything there's like remember when we were talking about the taipings like one of the biggest problems, I mean, it's kind of hard to rate them. There are so many.

But in the region where the Taiping Rebellion began, the government effectively ceased to exist outside of predatory taxation and violence. And in a lot of other regions of China, even years after the rebellion, that was still true. And the few benefits that the state at one point would have given them were mostly gone for most people. Within a few short generations, hundreds of millions of Chinese people went from having a decent future to simply not having anything to look forward to. The land was wrecked and they were poor, meaning they couldn't even buy shit land that they could barely pull crops out of. They were doomed to either become abused, hardly paid sources of manual labor or turn towards

banditry. And by the end of the first Sino-Japanese war and the continued and rapid encroachment of European, Russian, and Japanese imperialism that stripped more and more China away, the Chinese state, by and large, once again, did not exist for the vast majority of people. It had retreated away from everyday life through collapse, but also mismanagement of what little remained. So they began to form their own groups to replace the purpose of a government, namely secret societies. Now, that sounds ominous, but secret societies had awesome fucking names

like the Big Swords, the Society of Heaven and Earth, the Red Spears, the Blue Shirts. Okay, that last one kind of sucks but still it's a they're not doing like eyes wide shut yet no that's what like the imperial government's doing yeah now these secret societies they acted as social groups mutual aid organizations and support groups for both men and women who had literally nothing else to turn to.

They could be political. They could be apolitical. They could be community-based, but they could also have really strange otherworldly mystic religious beliefs and kind of the trappings of a cult led by cult leaders. But they almost always led to unrest, alt-leaders. But they almost always led to unrest, upheaval, and rebellion for obvious reasons. These groups come together from like-minded individuals from within their communities, effectively grassroots organizations, to make up for all the failures of imperial government at a regional level. It's only a matter of time before this group comes together, whether it even maybe not be one of the distinctly political leaning ones and be like yo what the fuck why do we have to do this

why do we have to go through all this and still pay taxes like what do we get out of this I like the mysticism thing is interesting because it's this concept of like the construction of logic so it's like after you get past the justification of action through like

oh well like things are shit we need to do something so in order to sustain something like that you have to create this like overarching like logic and kind of philosophy underneath it and like quite often it's that gap is just filled in by you know uh shit yeah yeah and a lot of it is based on like traditional chinese beliefs um practices and rituals but some of it isn't some of it is also like weird christian offsuit offshoots that it would make the taipings blush um it's literally like a rate it's a it's a rainbow of weird shit um which is unsurprising when you think about it and some of these very rural areas of china they'd effectively live through multiple different apocalypses at this point whether it be floods that would routinely kill a million people

droughts that would kill a million more fucking uh rebellions that would sweep through and burn everything to the ground uh let's just say they weren't not exactly in the greatest frame of mind when it came to whatever they're going to latch on to and who could fucking blame them like literally all the biblical plagues are striking you in a bi-weekly basis yeah it's like when you when you're living through a time in the absence of logic where like none of all this shit is happening and none of it makes sense as to why it makes sense to cling to like ideas like faith in like some bigger meaning of course and then at the end of the day after all of this some dickhead in an imperial robe is going to come down like yo you're late on your taxes uh and like that same guy is also stealing the few crops that you can actually manage to farm out of your destroyed land, stealing your livestock that's also probably starving to death, and occasionally stealing your sons and daughters.

Yep, yep. And the imperial government was not ignorant to these problems. Well, huge swaths of the government was because huge swaths of the government didn't actually have a job. But Emperor Dezong was not. of the government was because huge swaths of the government didn't actually have a job, but Emperor Dezong was not. He saw what was happening to China as pretty much the same thing that had happened to Japan in the past and was now looking at Japan as an example. Well, they start off being picked on and pulled apart by imperial powers, but now look at them. He came to the conclusion, we need our own Meiji restoration. And we talked a bit

before on Taiping, the Taiping series, about how the Chinese emperor was a lot like the Japanese emperor in their own way. Effectively a prisoner in their own palace, held in place by ritual and belief that made it improper or impure for them to either venture outside or really even get involved in the governance of the country they're supposed to be in control of. But Dazong said, fuck that. He had long been surrounded by conservative elements of the Chinese aristocracy who effectively refused to budge from how things had always been, no matter how bad everything was falling apart. That's not ringing a bell to anybody. I don't know. But DeZong reached out to Chinese progressives and thinkers and reformers who had other ideas.

He encouraged them to go abroad, bring new ideas back, so maybe we can look at them, see what could be implemented, see what worked for other countries, maybe it'll work for ours, and we'll work on that he also ordered probably most scandalously tons of foreign texts uh books on political theory

economics things like that to be translated into a language he could read him personally everybody was like oh my god the emperor doesn't know everything well the whole point was like that's supposed to be beneath him like how and not to mention an imperial education at the time was like a classical confucian education it had nothing to do with governance administration military matters nothing yeah like what he really needed to do was do what the Emperor did during Satsuma Rebellion, surround himself with, like, mostly old dudes and learn how to wrestle.

Yeah, he's gonna reach out to Emperor Meiji, who is, like, still in power at this point, and be like, can I borrow some of Saigo Takamori's big, burly dudes to teach me how to work out? Like, Saigo Takamori's big burly dudes that teach me how to work out. Like, Saigo Takamori is just doing

like the fitness club from Mob Psycho 100. He's just sending like big dudes around to teach like weedly men how to be strong. If Saigo Takamori didn't die and also he wasn't a massive fucking racist,

I feel like he could pull that off yeah like obviously saigo takamori known for his diplomacy but also yeah you know uh relations between the japanese and the chinese not great at this time you know you know tom we can actually be really thankful if they don't get worse in the future. Wait, wait, I'm getting a note. I have bad news, Tom. Yeah, we have another four episodes of this series. Now, by the late 1800s, the emperor

was trying to reform just about every rigid old system that still remained. He started universities. He dismantled the old civil exam system, so maybe another person doesn't have their brain broken and turn into Hong Christ again. But he also wanted to fire officials who were previously thought untouchable, like people who literally had no jobs. They just sat around and were ideologically conservative to the idea of like, no, things have been this way for literally a thousand years.

They can't change. And he broke people's minds by being like, well, you're fired. Like, wait, what? Now, the backlash he faced was immediate and fierce. The conservative faction of the imperial court saw changing the traditional systems that had been around since the dawn of the empire to a a kindep heresy even if it was coming from the emperor this included almost almost certainly most importantly the emperor's aunt the emperor's dowager she she who had spent two previous stints as the imperial regents this is one though like she's one of those women that she's not in power, but she is. Yeah, yeah. It's that kind of like soft behind the scenes power.

She was the only thing keeping the imperial government together. Small side note here, but according to a lot of sources, old Empress Dowager Xi Xi was a freak. We be fucking. Oh, dude. She spent her elder years sending her small army of eunuchs out into Peking to find foreigners who she would want to fuck, because that was, I guess, her preference. But only after they'd given strict dick inspections and instructions about how the Empress would like to fuck, namely rubbing her clit against their assholes. Isn't history fun?

Fuck yeah. Queen obviously love her, you know, she knows what she wants, and she's particular about it, but like, just imagine all these eunuch attendants going out with their tape measures measuring girth. Yeah,

that's what they were doing. They were making sure their dicks were large enough to please she-she. Another small side note here since we're on the subject eunuchs um incredibly powerful for people who are a eunuch has their dick and or balls completely cut off and most of the chinese court it was both um and they were not necessarily not all of them this happened when they were younger You could become a eunuch at any time of your life to chase after money and power. And the eunuchs were terrifyingly powerful and rich.

So people would get the old chop chop when they were in their 30s, sometimes their 20s. And it had a small side effect of they always smelled like piss because they would just be dribbling piss all the time yep and like an interesting thing about unix is is I think we've actually

broken Joe I'm just laughing because like people always talk about like the how the unix are very um studious and constantly bathing themselves in perfumes laughing because like uh people always talk about like the how the eunuchs are very um you know studious and constantly bathing themselves in perfumes yeah and smelling very sweetly but it's because they had to cover up a constant unrelenting smell of piss yep um but like the interesting thing about eunuchs is like the kind of the political role of them because like there's an

argument to be made that like the the castration of eunuch it removes the political role of them because like there's an argument to be made that like the the castration of eunuch it removes the political maneuvering through marriage and through sex so like you take away that element from them then they have it's essentially in order to strip them of any desires to our power themselves in terms of like instead it just had to make it made it like in that way it made them even more terrifyingly powerful because then they just had to be really fucking smart yep and the only the only worse and the only way they can get power is through maneuvering both politically and socially because they can't it's not like they can marry into power or like sire a kid right right so instead of like having the normal aristocracy full of people you could sway with sex and marriage all the other things like you created an unbeatable army of ultra nerds

you just created political incels now the empress dowager was known for being the most powerful person in China, even when she wasn't regent, which wasn't that often, honestly. It just kept happening. Virtually nothing happened without her approval. And while she opposed the Emperor's reforms, instead of immediately leaping into action to get rid of him, she kind of wrote it out first. She wanted to make sure before she moved, she wouldn't have too much pushback right and i mean to be fair this is what she had done to her own son um and almost certainly killed him so like it's not like it was empathy uh for her nephew playing out here right um and just as i

suppose a note as well to say in that, like when we're talking particularly about like powerful Chinese and like Asian women in general, there is this concept of the dragon lady, which is a kind of like racist thing about like, Oh, Asian women who are powerful are, you know, scheming conniving that they're like,

you know, very kind of like controlling. It's really cute that they attach that to a monarchy. You're just describing any monarchy ever. Yeah, but what we're saying is that this actually was this woman, and we're not

doing this racist trope of Asian women being like that. This is just an empress who was like that. Yeah, she was the most powerful person in china for a good reason um and you know it was kind of of course it's self-defeating and self-replicating because a lot of european powers respected literally no one in the imperial court other than her and you know her own actions made that a reality. Because no one else... If she

didn't approve of someone, they would not be in power. So by her own actions, she weakened the state to enrich herself, which again, is just describing every monarchy of all time. Now, the Empress was taking account to things to see when he would go too far, right? And he finally did. He got rid of sinecures. Now, for people who are unaware, a sinecure is a high-ranking, very socially important job within the imperial government that actually did nothing it was a jobs program for the empire's vast number of fancy lad aristocrats to secure loyalties it was a drain on the coffers it ballooned the imperial court for no reason they literally did nothing so he got rid of them yeah they're pr managers another group of people who don't do anything think tank employees

soon rumors began to swirl that the empress was going to throw him in prison and the emperor heard that he was like oh fuck oh shit my aunt's gonna kill me so he like tried to jump the gun to outmaneuver her, which was impossible. Everyone in the palace was her eyes and ears. Nobody wanted to be the one to operate behind the Empress Dowager's back. So, and not to mention, like, her eunuchs were a spy army as well. Everyone informed on everyone in the palace to someone, to someone else, someone else, all to backstab one another. But at the end of the day,

everyone was terrified of her. So they all answered to her. And this dumb fucker attempted to, like, cut her off. Nah, he wasn't gonna work out, bro. He was ambushed in his room by an army of eunuchs, arrested and thrown onto an island in the middle

of the Forbidden City. Beaten to death by a group of men who stink of piss. That's how I'm gonna go. Damn, they're sending the piss brigade after me. The piss boys. No, but like, if you weren't

living in like a perfumed palace, you could have easily escaped because you would have smelled the wafting scent of piss coming down the hallway. You're just like sitting there in your office. Your nose perks up like ammonia. They're coming. Smells like piss and jasmine. Lions Led by Donkeys brought to you by piss and jasmine tea. Get it now or ever.

Teas are sold. I'm sure the Berghain piss guy would have loved to be alive at this time. After a long night of piss working, nothing settles you down like a nice cup of jasmine tea. Mixed with piss. Well, that's what makes the water hot, you know? It's just very lukewarm tea. I don't need a kettle. I am the kettle.

If anything, you're not a kettle. You're like a percolator because it's slowly dripping out. This is a debate for a later time. Are human beings a kettle or a percolator? Write into the show, but only to Tom, please. Please don't write into me. The Empress was now back in charge and she quickly began to purge of all the

reformers her nephew had brought in. This attempt, this Chinese restoration lasted only a hundred days. Now, just because she killed the reform did not mean that the Empress liked foreigners. Fuck no. She actually hated them

more than her nephew. Like, her nephew was like, you know, fuck them, everything they're doing to us, but we need to learn from them so we can get rid of them. Because obviously what we've been doing has not worked. Listen, everyone in a place of power has a dumbass nephew.

That is almost certainly true yeah and i mean generally you don't want to like elevate the idiot nephew to be emperor i mean i don't have that problem my nephew will probably never become an emperor from one place or another i'm unaware of anywhere we have a tie to uh but i'm you know exploring possibilities. Yeah, listen, you get your dumbass nephew a job as a mechanic or working at a deli, where you know he can do the job, but it doesn't require too much of him, and you don't make him emperor, you get him slicing cold cuts. Look, you know what they say, slicing cold cuts is the first step to the revolution. Yes, exactly. the empress like

not only hated what the foreigners were doing but she hated the foreigners very existence which is i think the main difference between the two of them he but he seemed to have a much better head for you know real politic or like reality in general uh Like she commented that she, that the foreigners were disgusting to her. Like if they got too close, she said they looked like cats, which is weird, but it's because she really fucking hated cats.

Yeah. She just fucking hated cats. And said that the women's feet were too large. She's a woman of peculiar tastes. Oh, I know too much about Chinese foot binding. This is really depressing. Yeah, that definitely has something to do with it.

You know who outlawed foot binding? Taiping. Oh, Hong Christ. Yeah, sorry. I forgot I edited that episode of that series. But that's where you can see, like, the main difference between the two of them. Dazong was a realist,

and Xixi was like, no, I'm empress, you know, effectively, and things will always remain as they are. We do not need to adopt anything new. Fuck them. Now, while she was securing her power on the throne, she would find a strange, but accidental ally in the north of China, specifically in Shandong, in a peasant movement born from the secret societies that was sweeping through the area because it turns out she was far

from the only person who hated foreigners and Christianity with good reason. All of the things that I had already talked about going wrong in China for everyday people were significantly worse for those in the North, but specifically Shandong. Based along the Yellow River and the Grand Canal, it had once been an absolute economic powerhouse with legions of boatmen that would act as the main transit artery through the country. These guys would guide the boats through, make tons of money, it would then be put back into their communities where farmlands were plentiful. They were doing great. That all got booted directly in the dick and balls by

the expansion of foreign-owned railways. Oh! We need to be anti-train. No more public transport. Bikes only. Yeah only yeah bikes we're going we're going green socialist on this you know everyone's gonna we're returning to a bike

yogurt advertisement centered society I'm okay with that I don't know I don't know if I'm okay with that I hate yogurt advertisements they're all terrible you lived in the Netherlands for what, like five months, and now you're just totally bike-pilled? I'm 100% bike-pilled, yeah.

But the yogurt ad thing is off-putting. Yeah. A yogurt ad has the same casting center as a true crime podcast fan base, and I'm not okay with it. Now, this show is anti-yogurt. You are no longer fermenting milk.

Okay, I'm pro-yogurt, but I'm against the yogurt advertisements that I see from like Activia and Yoplay where people have like yogurt parties and sit around and laugh and eat yogurt.

Nobody does that. Nobody does that. Stop it. It's 2024. We're no longer having yogurt parties and sit around and laugh and eat yogurt. Nobody does that. Nobody does that. Stop it. It's 2024. We're no longer having yogurt parties. I'm a Puritan, but only when it comes to yogurt-based partying. Yeah, no more gooning at the yogurt party. That's right.

That's just confusing. Too many liquids. Now, with this expansion of the railways, millions of people lost their livelihoods, creating generations of hopelessly poor and aimless people. They had no way to enrich themselves, care for themselves, provide for themselves, and neither did their entire communities. This is only reinforced by a seemingly endless stream of Christian missionaries that moved into the area and started building pretty much the only infrastructure.

Because remember, the Chinese government had pretty much just left these people to die. And the missionaries moved in and they were building schools, hospitals, they were distributing food. All these things were completely and totally free. As long as you converted to Christianity. Ah, there's the

catch. I was waiting for it. They were given the soup treatment effectively. To make matters worse, due to all the treaties we talked about earlier, Christians and their missionaries were completely untouchable under Chinese law. This created a secondary

competing power structure that was rapidly becoming more powerful than the state itself and the law that everyone else would have to follow. Chinese Christians, of course, knew this and they used it to their advantage. They used the foreign forces, the missionaries, and all these treaties to elevate themselves into a new social status of their fellow non-Christian Chinese. And a lot of these guys were fucking neighbors and the missionaries also knew this and they did not care yeah wouldn't be like missionaries to seize on this sort of thing i mean some missionaries were like well that seems awfully unchrist-like but they didn't really like object to it because they believed if the

if the other non-christian chinese saw it wouldn't they convert? Like if they're like, it's a means to an end. So like even the good missionaries here kind of suck. Yeah. They weren't exactly opposed to it. No. One missionary said that upon conversion into Christianity, they had quote, gone from the oppressed to the oppressor. This was reinforced by a general shunning that non-converts would give anyone in their own towns and villages when they converted, driving the new

Christian converts into the arms of their missions and these newly adopted families. This led one Chinese man to say, quote, as soon as a man becomes Christian, they cease to be Chinese. Ah, I'm sure that's something that the foreign powers were totally not opposed to no they're

100 on board with it um yeah uh and like again like the missionaries knew that they were creating a parallel power structure the chinese government knew chinese people knew and everybody's like this seems fine this can't possibly go wrong it didn't take long for the people left out in the cold to turn against them. What would become the Militia United in Righteousness, also known as the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, got their start as a different secret society, the Big Swords. Now, you see, northern China had been wracked by lawlessness, famine, and poverty in the aftermath of the first Sino-Japanese War. And the Big Sword Society formed to protect the villages and temples from roving gang of bandits. And there was a lot of them. The Big Swords did not, at least originally, have any kind of feelings towards Christians at all.

But that would change over time. feelings towards Christians at all, but that would change over time. Now, there's a German Catholic order operating in the North called the Society of the Divine Word, and many of their early converts were either reformed or unreformed bandits. And once word got out that the Catholic Society and other missions as well would protect anyone from the law. As long as you started believing in the Trinity or whatever, bandits began flooding these missions. So effectively to the big swords, Christianity and banditry were one in the same because in a lot of places they were.

I would tend to agree with that. i mean the bandits knew that they knew the the church gave them some veneer of protection and not every mission was doing this but a lot of them were hey all i gotta say is no gods no masters so soon the big swords were attacking bandits as well as catholic churches the complete lack of government response to the big swords, namely because the imperial governor was a pretty big fan of their work, led to other secret societies to form and begin doing the same thing. There was no lack of new recruits for these groups in the North. Men were poor and had seen these missions and missionaries desecrate temples and other important Chinese sites

convert them into Catholic churches while other missionaries would only help the desperate people in need if they converted and left their own way of life behind and remember for converting to Christianity also would mean like abandoning your family and community because you'd be

shunned so like people were fucking mad. Cemeteries, houses, and entire villages had been destroyed to make way for German-owned railways and telegram lines. But little remained of the local economy had been destroyed by a foreign monopoly on goods that they couldn't hope to compete against. People had protested against the Germans and had been met with gunfire from soldiers and bombing from the German Navy. People were hungry. They were poor.

They were fucking mad. A number of these groups eventually morphed into the Militias United in Righteousness. But they would get the name Boxers due to martial arts routines. And these had to be a sight to behold. Thousands of people would get together in village and city squares and perform strict exercise regimens, like effectively in unison kata-type martial arts routines as a show. And since local Christian missionaries had no idea about traditional Chinese martial arts,

they called what they were doing boxing. And that is how that name stuck. He said the line, people. He said the line. Though the boxers were more than just anti-Catholic martial arts enthusiasts. They were fucking showmen. They conducted huge ritual dances,

choreographed massive synchronized group exercises, and martial arts. And as weird and as cool as the sounds, it was for a reason. Obviously, the spectacle drew more people to watch and then possibly join them, but they also believed that doing all of these things was a spiritual ritual unto themselves, which would in turn protect them and charge them with spiritual powers, allowing them to become possessed by the power of gods and reinforce their efforts with millions of spiritual soldiers who had rushed to their aid whenever they went into combat, like that scene from Lord of the Rings. Or charging the spirit bomb like Goku. Also, kind of, yeah. They were convinced that a system

of deep breathing exercises combined with swallowing charms would imbue them with magical powers and make them impervious to gunfire and sword attacks. In short, they believed they'd become kung fu wizards in order to defeat the Pope. We're sending Bruce Lee to kill Pope John Paul II.

It might work. It would work. I don't think Pope John Paul II has good ground defense, good striking defense. Is Pope John Paul II in our canon of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

historical figures like is he scooting along the ground with the cardinal hat on I don't think he can man like the Pope robes not good for grappling too much cloth involved he's an Aikido guy it's not a good gi

there is lots of fabric to grab but I think the maneuverability of wearing the Pope's robes is not there. I feel like Bruce Lee gets a collar choke on the Pope within five seconds. He just smashes the Pope's jaw doing Wing Chun. One-inch punch against the Pope. One-inch Pope. That's just a tiny Pope. That doesn't work. It's a very tiny Pope.

Now this mass martial arts, spiritual possession movement spread like goddamn wildfire through the rural villages of the North. Groups of them would march from village to village and conduct their spiritual power show for all to see. Villages would empty out to watch

the show and become enthralled with their watching and join. This harnessing of traditional spiritual belief and also popular culture, because the performances they were giving on were popular Chinese operas at the time, combined with promising to give them literal superpowers from the gods to fight back against the injustice all around them immediately appealed to the poor and the desperate. It would allow them to take back control of their lives and villages when they had long since felt powerless.

This is despite the fact that even the facade of being invincible was ruined at virtually every show because these guys weren't professionals. They were just village guys who were really good at this stuff. They injured themselves all the time

in front of people. People had their hands hacked off with swords in the middle of performances. They knocked each other out, broke limbs, all that shit. But that never slowed anyone down from joining. Hey, listen, you get to do cool martial arts in public. Like, why wouldn't you join?

Yeah, you might lose your hands, but that's a technicality. Yeah, I mean, it's fine. The god that is possessing you will just give you a spirit hand. Yeah, spirit hand. We're doing shining finger shit. Exactly. And if you're saying, thinking, Joe, you haven't said anything about a boxer leader yet.

Who is their Hong Christ? They didn't have one. Yeah, decentralized power, horizontal hierarchy. No hierarchy at all. Fuck yeah. All of these groups, secret societies, criminal groups, and the aforementioned peasants were kind of a loose coalition, all united in this belief system. But sometimes it wasn't even that. Different groups believed in different gods and different

rituals. Boxers had to be men, but there was an allied group of women known as the Red Lanterns who had their own rituals and their own beliefs. Like, for instance, they believed they could fly. I'm assuming they never proved that, but they believed it. Otherwise, the boxers would have an air force. Really, the Boxers would have an Air Force. Really, the only unifying factor, the only uniting thing amongst them was hating the encroaching foreign influence, specifically Christians and the forced industrialization of their regions around them. It's a universal theory of fuck that guy to its core. regions around them. It's a universal theory of fuck that guy to its core. They had local leaders at best, but this was a very rural, very peasant movement. Most of them had no formal education

whatsoever. Most were illiterate, hence leaving very little record of themselves. The individual groups wouldn't even communicate with one another unless it was in person, not because they had some entrenched counter-Intel security network, but because it's the only way they could talk to one another. They couldn't exactly write each other letters. They didn't have a propaganda network other than their own selves. So eventually, paintings and banners with anti-foreign statements and pro-boxer statements would pop up, but in the beginning, their entire movement was these

individual groups of people moving from village to village putting on a sick fucking show and filling the ranks. Yeah, they're doing like Ringling Brothers stuff. Yeah, but if it was way cooler. Yeah. What if the Tiger at Ringling Brothers tried to overthrow the government? That would be fucking sick. Mostly their propaganda would cooler yeah like what if the tiger wrinkling brothers try to overthrow the government that

would be fucking sick mostly their propaganda would be performances and their speeches that they would give in each village and some of them are these guys could spit they would call christian prayers the quote squeak of the celestial hog i'm i'm loving these guys already there's another four episodes I feel like I would regret saying that but these guys rule so far they called trains iron centipedes or fire carts that would spread the plague

they would spread stories about what was really going on on the insides of like the missionaries churches like drug fueled incest parties and explained that europeans smelled differently because they chugged period blood i was wondering when we're going to get to this and this is actually um kind of an interesting part of their belief now the boxers thought that menstrual blood would ruin their god-given magical powers and actually they're not alone in believing

that it's kind of a weird cross-cultural belief in a lot of different places that menstrual blood would weaken or poison men which is like why in a lot of places in the past like women on their period would have to like sleep outside the house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the boxers specifically believed that the Europeans knew this about their magic, and so European soldiers would just chug period blood to keep their magic, and they'd paint their houses with it to keep the boxers away.

You can't get that coat of paint at Home Depot. You know, I'm tempted to retract my earlier statement of that these guys rule. This is really fucking weird. It's a little weird. You know? It's a little bit more than a little bit weird. It's strange.

Of course, they also believe that Christians ritualistically sacrifice children. That's just an old classic. They put an extra spin on it that makes it sound like something straight out of Warhammer 40k. Train engineers specifically use blood

magic to make trains work. According to Boxer Math, second only to Steiner Math, at least 5,000 boys and girls would need to be killed in order to build exactly one new railway. I'd love to see the calculations on that. Like, at least Steiner math you can follow.

You can do the math to understand how it fully works, you know? Yeah, I'm going to need the boxers to show their work, as my teacher often told me. As the boxer movement gained tens of thousands of followers, their motto was born. Support the Qing, that being the Qing dynasty, the imperial government. Destroy the foreigner. Word of the movement got back to the Empress, who originally was fearing another uprising, right?

Like, oh God, we got another one. But she was relieved. She's looking around at these notes on her desk like, support the Qing, huh? These guys are on my side. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah. They didn't hate her. They hated the same people that she did. And despite this sounding like someone co-opting

a movement, well, it kind of was, it also wasn't. She was also a very superstitious person, and when people came to her with stories that the boxers shows, the militiamen racked with spasms, shaking on the ground, claiming to be possessed by gods, she kind of believed them

though according to diana preston another key factor to the empress really liking the boxer movement was unlike her soldiers and the imperial army i don't have to pay these guys that's free labor yeah that's free real estate they were doing it for the love of the game, baby. Yeah, just listen. People who are freaks who just love being freaks, more power to them. Don't let the government steal your movement of whatever it is. So soon she was working with local governors

where they're active, where the boxers are active, forbidding them from doing anything to suppress the boxer movement. In 1899, the boxers would claim their first missionary victim, a British reverend that was making his way back home when 30 Boxers ambushed him with swords. His head was

cut off and thrown into a ditch, and his body was dropped in front of a nearby church, and thus officially started the Boxer Rebellion. And that is where we'll pick up next time. I am both excited and cautious about where this is gonna go i feel comfortable saying it's gonna throw you a few curveballs i mean like we already have like magic martial artists who believe their women can fly and are

afraid of period blood i think this is gonna get really weird like i'm i'm this is the thing that that i'm always like okay but how is like did the red lanterns work on just like the honor code like i totally flied here nobody saw me but i did it and like wow that's so cool i wish you could show me sometime and she's like yeah me too if you look directly at me while I'm flying your dick will fly off and explode like a eunuch yeah it's like the guy in mystery man where he can turn invisible but only when people aren't looking at him exactly

so Tom that is the boxer rebellion part one thank you so much for joining me here on this long journey and you can use this area to plug your show listen to beneath skin show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing we don't have uh people we feature in the show who think they're magicians and are afraid of period blood but if you're interested in history we connect a lot of really interesting stuff through tattooing and how it has like said a lot about our world and our past and our present i mean if if you need a period blood wizard i know a guy in northern china i can get you guys in contact uh this is the only show that i host and thank you so much for listening to it if you think what we do here is worth your time and money you can support us on patreon you can

get five plus years of bonus content every regular episode early e e-books, audio books, all sorts of other stuff for just $5. Thank you again so much for listening, and until next time, chug period blood, escape the wizards.