The Boxer Uprising was the subject of one of my very first columns, back in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. And no surprises there: the movement is fascinating in its own right, with tremendous consequences for China’s history. The Boxer movement was driven by powerful economic and social grievances, sparked by natural catastrophe, and accelerated by religious and cultural practices that, together, made it, in the description of historian Joseph Esherick, “a prairie fire” that swept across the North China plains and into Manchuria, leading to 100,000 deaths.
But as as devastating as the Boxer uprising itself was, it may have been its settlement that accomplished what neither the Opium Wars, nor the Taiping War, nor the Nian Uprising, or Panthay Rebellion, or any of the other 19th-century crises could: bring down the Qing Dynasty. And it wasn’t force of arms, but economic attack that dealt the decisive blow.
China’s relations with the West were shaped by the Boxers in particular ways. Although the overwhelming majority of those killed in the Uprising were Chinese (Chinese Christians were especially targeted), 200 European and American missionaries were also victims. Monuments can be found to those who died at several American campuses with strong missionary presences in China (Oberlin, Yale, and Mt Holyoke are the most prominent examples). In many cases, their deaths were grisly, carried out by mobs who blamed the foreigners for the misfortunes facing China in 1900. At the same time, the press reported false and exaggerated claims that caricatured the violence. While many died, other reports of massacres turned out to be fabrications.
For foreign interests, the Boxer movement culminated with the siege of the Beijing Legation Quarter, popularized in the English-speaking world by the Charlton Heston film “55 Days at Peking” (described by the South China Morning Post as “an Orientalist Alamo, while white actors ‘yellowface’ as the main Chinese characters”). The siege was lifted after nearly two months by an “eight-nation alliance” of Imperialist powers, which fought its way into Beijing and broke through the Boxers’ lines.
The eight nations in the alliance did not participate equally. Japan, for reasons of proximity if nothing else, provided almost 40% of the 55,000 troops that comprised the
