The Boxer Rebellion

I. North China in 1900

The Boxer Rebellion was a rising in north China between 1899 and 1901 by a popular movement known as the Boxers United in Righteousness, Yihequan, later Yihetuan, the Militia United in Righteousness. The Boxers attacked foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians, whom they blamed for the misfortunes of China, and in June 1900, with the support of a faction of the Qing court, they besieged the foreign legations in Beijing and the Catholic Northern Cathedral. The siege was ended in August 1900 by an international force of eight nations, which occupied Beijing and imposed a heavy indemnity on China in the Boxer Protocol of 1901.

The rising was the last of the great popular movements of the Qing period with a religious dimension, following the White Lotus Rebellion, described in The White Lotus Rebellion, and the Taiping war, described in The Taiping Rebellion and its Bible. Unlike the Taiping, who had adopted a form of the Christian Scriptures, the Boxers were hostile to Christianity, and their violence was directed above all against Christians, foreign and Chinese. The number of Chinese Christians killed in 1900 is estimated at about thirty thousand, the largest number killed in any single persecution in the history of Christianity in China.

This page examines the background of the rising in the expansion of foreign power and missions in China, the origins and beliefs of the Boxers, the role of the Qing court, the killings of 1900, the sieges in Beijing, the intervention of the powers and the consequences of the war, as well as the place of the Chinese Scriptures in the events.

II. The Treaties and the Missions

The Treaties of Tianjin of 1858 and the Conventions of Beijing of 1860, imposed on China after the Second Opium War, granted foreign missionaries the right to travel and preach throughout China and to own property in the interior, and they gave Chinese Christians the protection of the foreign powers in the practice of their religion. France claimed a protectorate over the Catholic missions, and the Catholic bishops were given the rank of officials in 1899, which allowed them to deal directly with the Qing magistrates.

In the following decades the number of missionaries in China increased rapidly. By 1900 there were about two thousand Protestant missionaries and several hundred Catholic missionaries in China, and the number of Chinese Catholics was about seven hundred thousand and of Protestants about one hundred thousand. In north China, the Catholic missions of the Lazarists in Zhili and the Society of the Divine Word in southern Shandong, and the Protestant missions of the American Board, the Presbyterians, the English Baptists and the China Inland Mission, had established many Christian communities.

The missions brought schools, hospitals and orphanages, and translations of the Scriptures, but they were also a source of conflict. Missionaries intervened in lawsuits on behalf of their converts, and some converts were accused of joining the churches to gain the protection of the missionaries in their disputes. Christians refused to contribute to the temple festivals and opera performances of their villages, which were financed by the whole community, and this refusal caused resentment. Rumours spread that the missionaries used the eyes and organs of children in their orphanages to make medicine. Disputes between Christians and their neighbours, known as missionary cases, jiao'an, multiplied in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

III. The Scramble for Concessions

The defeat of China by Japan in the war of 1894 and 1895 revealed the weakness of the Qing state and led to a scramble among the powers for concessions. In November 1897 two German missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word, Richard Henle and Franz Xaver Nies, were killed by armed men at Zhangjia village in Juye county in southwestern Shandong. Germany used the killings as the pretext for the occupation of Jiaozhou Bay, which China leased to Germany in 1898 together with railway and mining rights in Shandong.

Russia then obtained the lease of Port Arthur and Dalian, Britain that of Weihaiwei and the New Territories of Hong Kong, and France that of Guangzhouwan. In 1898 the Guangxu emperor attempted a programme of reforms, the Hundred Days' Reform, which was ended in September by a coup of the empress dowager Cixi, who placed the emperor under house arrest. The court that ruled China in 1899 and 1900 was dominated by conservative officials who were hostile to the foreign powers.

IV. The Origins of the Boxers

The Boxers arose in western Shandong, a region of the north China plain on the borders of Zhili and Henan, which was poor, frequently struck by floods and droughts, and troubled by banditry. In the 1890s the region was also the scene of disputes between Christians and non-Christians. The Big Swords Society, Dadaohui, a society of martial artists who believed in invulnerability, had attacked Christians in southwestern Shandong in 1896.

The Boxers United in Righteousness first appeared in 1898 in the area of Guanxian, where a dispute over a temple site at Liyuantun had set the villagers against the Christians. The Spirit Boxers, Shenquan, who appeared in northwestern Shandong in 1898 and 1899, practised a form of spirit possession, in which the boxer was possessed by a god and became invulnerable to swords and bullets. The gods who possessed them were drawn from popular novels and operas, such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Journey to the West.

The historian Joseph Esherick has shown that the Spirit Boxers differed from the earlier sectarian movements, such as the White Lotus, in that they did not have a fixed organisation, scriptures or a millenarian doctrine, and that their rituals of possession could be practised by any young man after a short training. This openness allowed the movement to spread rapidly among the young men of the villages of the north China plain in 1899 and 1900.

V. Support the Qing, Destroy the Foreign

The slogan of the Boxers was Support the Qing, destroy the foreign, Fu Qing mie yang. The Boxers blamed the foreigners and the Christians for the drought that struck north China in 1899 and 1900, claiming that the gods were angry because of the presence of the foreign religion. Their placards declared that the rain would not fall until the foreigners had been killed, and they called on the people to destroy churches, railways and telegraph lines.

The Boxers regarded Chinese Christians as secondary devils, er maozi, who had betrayed the gods and customs of China. Their violence was directed against the Christians, whose homes they burned and whom they killed in large numbers, as well as against foreign missionaries and engineers. Young women joined the movement in groups called the Red Lanterns, Hongdengzhao, who were believed to have magical powers.

In Shandong the governor Yuxian, who was hostile to the missions, tolerated the Boxers in 1899. In December 1899 he was replaced by Yuan Shikai, who suppressed the Boxers in Shandong. The movement moved north into Zhili. On 31 December 1899 a British missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Sidney Brooks, was killed in Shandong, the first foreign missionary to be killed by the Boxers.

VI. Drought and the Gods

The spread of the Boxer movement in 1899 and 1900 was closely connected with the drought that afflicted the north China plain. The autumn rains of 1899 failed, and the spring of 1900 was dry. The winter wheat could not be sown or did not grow, and the young men of the villages, without work in the fields, had time to gather at the boxing grounds. The villagers prayed for rain in the temples of the Dragon King and other gods, and the Boxers' claim that the foreigners and the Christians had offended the gods gave an explanation for the disaster.

The Boxer placards that circulated in 1900 declared that the Catholics and Protestants had insulted the gods and the sages, that the heavens had withheld the rain as a punishment, and that when the foreigners were killed the rain would fall. Some placards announced that the gods had descended to earth to teach the boxers their arts. The religious world of the Boxers was that of the village temples, the opera stage and the martial arts, rather than the scriptural sects of the White Lotus tradition.

The Biblical record also contains accounts of drought interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure, such as the drought in the days of Elijah, in 1 Kings 17:1 and 1 Kings 18:41-45. The missionaries in north China in 1900 were aware that the drought was being blamed on them, and their letters record the hope that rain would come and end the agitation. The rains came at last in the summer of 1900, after the killings had begun.

VII. Christian Villages in Self-Defence

Not all the Christian communities were defenceless. In southeastern Zhili, in the Jesuit vicariate, several large Catholic villages had been fortified before 1900, and their inhabitants, led by their priests, defended themselves against the Boxers and the Qing troops. Zhangjiazhuang, the seat of the Jesuit vicar apostolic, and other fortified Catholic villages sheltered refugees from the surrounding countryside. Not all held out. At Zhujiahe, where more than three thousand refugees had gathered, the walls were breached on 20 July 1900 and most of the people inside were killed, together with the Jesuit priests Léon-Ignace Mangin and Paul Denn.

The Jesuit missionaries of the region helped to organise the defence of the villages, and the Christians obtained rifles and built walls and ditches. Several Jesuits, among them Rémi Isoré and Modeste Andlauer, were killed in June 1900 in villages that could not be defended, but many of the fortified villages survived until the arrival of the allied troops. Similar defences were organised by Catholic communities in Inner Mongolia and Shandong. The self-defence of the Christian villages has been studied by R. G. Tiedemann, who has shown that it was part of a longer history of armed conflict between communities in the north China plain.

VIII. The Railways and the Telegraph

The Boxers directed their attacks not only against Christians but also against the railways, telegraphs and other foreign technologies, which they regarded as disturbing the harmony of the land and the feng shui of the villages and graves. In May and June 1900 they destroyed stretches of the railway between Beijing and Baoding, burned stations and attacked the Belgian and French engineers working on the line, many of whom escaped to Tianjin. The destruction of the telegraph lines cut Beijing off from the outside world, and the foreign governments received no news from the legations for weeks, during which reports of their destruction were published in the newspapers of Europe and America.

IX. The Court and the Boxers

In the first months of 1900 the Boxers spread through Zhili, the province around Beijing, and approached the capital. The Qing court was divided over how to respond. Some officials urged the suppression of the Boxers, while others, including Prince Duan, Gangyi and Zaixun, argued that the Boxers were loyal subjects who could be used against the foreigners. The empress dowager Cixi hesitated between the two policies.

In May and June 1900 the Boxers attacked the railways between Beijing and Tianjin and Baoding, killed Christians in the villages of Zhili, and entered Beijing and Tianjin. On 10 June an international force of about two thousand men under the British admiral Edward Seymour set out from Tianjin to relieve the legations in Beijing, but it was stopped by the Boxers and Qing troops and forced to retreat. On 11 June the Japanese chancellor Sugiyama Akira was killed by Qing soldiers in Beijing. On 17 June the allied fleets took the Dagu forts at the mouth of the Hai river.

On 20 June the German minister Clemens von Ketteler was killed in the street by a Qing soldier while on his way to the Zongli Yamen. On 21 June the court issued an edict declaring war on the foreign powers. The siege of the legations had begun on 20 June.

X. The Siege of the Legations

The legation quarter of Beijing, south of the imperial city, contained the embassies of the foreign powers, and in June 1900 it was defended by about four hundred and fifty soldiers and marines of eight nations, together with volunteers from among the diplomats, merchants and missionaries. About nine hundred foreigners and about three thousand Chinese Christians, many of whom had fled to the quarter from the Boxer attacks, were besieged in the legations. The British minister, Claude MacDonald, took command of the defence.

The besieged held the legations for fifty-five days against attacks by the Boxers and the Qing troops of Dong Fuxiang and of Ronglu. The defenders fought from barricades and walls, and the Chinese Christians dug trenches and built fortifications. The Qing attacks were not pressed with full force, and there were periods of truce, during which the court sent food to the legations. Historians have explained the hesitation of the attacks by the divisions in the court and by the policy of Ronglu, who did not wish to destroy the legations.

The missionaries in the legations included members of the American Board, the Methodists, the Presbyterians and the London Missionary Society, among them the scholar Arthur Henderson Smith and the Methodist Frank Gamewell, who directed the construction of the fortifications. The besieged held services of worship during the siege, and the psalms of deliverance, such as Psalm 46:1, were read in the British legation.

XI. The Siege of the Beitang

At the same time, the Catholic Northern Cathedral, the Beitang, in the imperial city was besieged by the Boxers and Qing troops. The cathedral was defended by about forty French and Italian sailors, and it sheltered the Lazarist bishop Alphonse Favier, about thirty missionaries and sisters, and about three thousand Chinese Catholics, many of them women and children. The defenders held out for nearly two months, through attacks, mines and hunger.

The besieged at the Beitang suffered severely. The explosion of mines under the walls killed many of the defenders and refugees, among them many children in the orphanage. Food ran out, and the refugees ate leaves and roots. About four hundred of the Chinese Catholics died during the siege, according to the estimates given by Favier. The cathedral was relieved by Japanese and French troops on 16 August 1900, two days after the relief of the legations.

XII. The Killings of Christians

The greatest loss of life in 1900 was suffered by Chinese Christians in the villages of Zhili, Shanxi, Shandong and Inner Mongolia, and in Manchuria. The Boxers attacked Christian villages, burned churches and houses, and killed men, women and children who refused to renounce their faith. In many places the Christians were offered the choice of burning incense to the gods, as a sign of apostasy, or of death. Many recanted, while many others refused and were killed.

The Catholic villages of southern Zhili, in the vicariate of the Jesuits, and the Christian communities around Beijing and Tianjin suffered heavily. At Zhujiahe, in Jingzhou county in southeastern Zhili, about three thousand Catholics who had gathered in the village were killed in July 1900, together with their Jesuit priests, Léon-Ignace Mangin and Paul Denn. The Catholic communities of Inner Mongolia, served by the Scheut missionaries, lost thousands of members, and the bishop Ferdinand Hamer was killed in Inner Mongolia in July 1900.

The Protestant churches also lost many members. In Beijing, the members of the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches who had not reached the legations were killed. In Baoding, missionaries of the American Board and the Presbyterians, among them Horace Pitkin, were killed on 30 June and 1 July 1900, together with Chinese Christians. Total estimates of the Chinese Christians killed in 1900 are about thirty thousand Catholics and about two thousand Protestants, though these figures are approximate.

The accounts of the martyrs, collected by the churches after 1900, recorded the words of many who chose death rather than apostasy, and the churches compared them with the martyrs of the early church. The saying of Jesus, Do not become fearful of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, in Matthew 10:28, and the words of Stephen in Acts 7:59-60, were often quoted in these accounts.

XIII. The Taiyuan Killings

In Shanxi the governor was Yuxian, the former governor of Shandong, who had been transferred to Shanxi in 1900. On 9 July 1900, according to the traditional account, Yuxian had a group of foreign missionaries and their families brought to his yamen in Taiyuan and executed in front of it. Those killed included Protestant missionaries of the English Baptist Missionary Society and the Shouyang Mission, and Catholic missionaries, among them the Franciscan bishops Gregorio Grassi and Francesco Fogolla and seven Franciscan sisters of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. The number of foreigners killed in Taiyuan was about forty-five, together with Chinese Christians.

In the following weeks other missionaries and Christians were killed throughout Shanxi. The missionaries of the China Inland Mission and of the American Board in the province suffered heavily, and the members of the Oberlin Band of the American Board at Taigu and Fenzhou were killed in July and August. Altogether, according to the commonly cited estimates, about one hundred and ninety foreign Protestant missionaries and their children and about fifty Catholic missionaries were killed in 1900, most of them in Shanxi.

The circumstances of the Taiyuan killings have been examined by historians, and some details of the traditional account, including the presence of Yuxian at the execution, have been questioned. The killings nevertheless became the most famous episode of the Boxer persecution in the Protestant world, and they were commemorated in Britain and America as the Shanxi martyrdoms, with memorial services, published letters and plaques in the churches from which the missionaries had come.

XIV. Tianjin

Tianjin, the treaty port at the head of the Hai river, was the base of the foreign powers in north China and the gateway to Beijing. Its foreign concessions were attacked by the Boxers and by Qing troops in June and July 1900, and they were defended by a garrison of several thousand allied soldiers. The Boxers burned the Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Victories, which had already been destroyed once in the Tianjin massacre of 1870, when a crowd had killed ten French sisters, two priests and the French consul after rumours about the mission orphanage.

The Qing general Nie Shicheng, who commanded the most modern of the Qing armies, fought against the allies at Tianjin and was killed in battle on 9 July 1900. The allies stormed the walled Chinese city of Tianjin on 13 and 14 July after heavy fighting, and the city was looted. After its capture, the allies established a provisional government of Tianjin, which ruled the city until 1902.

The memory of the Tianjin massacre of 1870 shows that the hostility to the missions in north China had a long history before the Boxers. The rumours that had caused the massacre, about the fate of children in the mission orphanages, were repeated in 1900.

XV. The Southeast Mutual Protection

Not all of China joined the war against the powers. The governors general of the provinces of the Yangzi valley and the south, Li Hongzhang in Guangzhou, Liu Kunyi in Nanjing and Zhang Zhidong in Wuchang, together with Yuan Shikai in Shandong, refused to obey the edict declaring war. They concluded an agreement with the foreign consuls in Shanghai, known as the Southeast Mutual Protection, under which they undertook to protect foreigners and keep order in their provinces, while the powers undertook not to send troops into them.

The agreement limited the war to the north, and it preserved the south of China from the violence of the Boxers and from foreign intervention. Missionaries in the southern provinces were in most cases protected by the officials, and many of them were evacuated to the treaty ports. The action of the governors also allowed the Qing court, after its defeat, to claim that the war had been the work of rebels and of a few officials.

XVI. The Eight-Nation Alliance

The powers responded to the siege of the legations by assembling an international force. The Eight-Nation Alliance included Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary. The largest contingents were those of Japan and Russia. The allies took Tianjin on 14 July 1900, after heavy fighting, and in early August a force of about twenty thousand men advanced on Beijing.

The allied force reached Beijing on 14 August and relieved the legations. The empress dowager and the emperor fled from the capital to Xi'an, disguised as peasants, and the court remained in Xi'an until its return to Beijing in January 1902. The allied troops occupied Beijing and looted the city, including the imperial palaces and the houses of officials. Many Chinese, Boxers and civilians alike, were killed. Missionaries also took part in the looting and in the seizure of property to compensate their converts, and their conduct was criticised in the press of Europe and America, notably by Mark Twain.

The German emperor Wilhelm II, in his speech at Bremerhaven to the troops departing for China in July 1900, called on them to give no quarter and to make the name of Germany feared in China, like the Huns of Attila. The German commander Alfred von Waldersee, who arrived in China after the relief of Beijing, was appointed commander of the allied forces, and he organised punitive expeditions in Zhili in the autumn and winter of 1900 to 1901, in which many villages were destroyed.

XVII. Manchuria and Blagoveshchensk

In Manchuria, the Boxers and Qing troops attacked the Russian railway, the Chinese Eastern Railway, and the Christians of the region. In July 1900 the Qing forces bombarded the Russian town of Blagoveshchensk on the Amur river. The Russian authorities responded by expelling the Chinese population of the town, several thousand people, across the river, and most of them drowned or were killed. Russia then occupied the whole of Manchuria, and it remained there until the war with Japan in 1904 and 1905.

XVIII. The Boxer Protocol

The war was ended by the Boxer Protocol, signed on 7 September 1901 by China and eleven powers. The protocol required China to pay an indemnity of four hundred and fifty million taels of silver, about one tael for every inhabitant of China, over thirty-nine years with interest, secured on the customs and the salt tax. It required the execution or punishment of the officials held responsible for the war, including Yuxian, who was executed in 1901, and Prince Duan, who was exiled. It allowed the powers to station troops in the legation quarter and along the railway from Beijing to the sea, and it prohibited the import of arms into China for two years. The examinations were suspended for five years in the cities where foreigners had been killed. China was also required to send missions of apology to Germany and Japan for the deaths of von Ketteler and Sugiyama, and to erect a memorial arch to von Ketteler in Beijing at the place where he had been killed.

The indemnity weighed heavily on the finances of the Qing state. In 1908 the United States returned part of its share of the indemnity, which was used to fund scholarships for Chinese students in the United States and the founding of Tsinghua College in Beijing. Other powers later returned parts of their shares for educational purposes.

XIX. The Missions and Compensation

After the war the missions claimed compensation for the destruction of their property and the deaths of their members. The Catholic missions and many Protestant missions received indemnities from the Qing officials, often negotiated locally. Some missionaries, such as William Scott Ament of the American Board, were criticised for the methods they used to collect compensation from the villages.

The China Inland Mission, which had lost fifty-eight missionaries and twenty-one children, declined to claim compensation for the deaths of its members, and its founder James Hudson Taylor urged the missionaries to show forbearance. The mission's decision was cited by its supporters as an example of the teaching on forgiveness in Romans 12:19-21 and Matthew 5:44. In Shanxi, the compensation paid by the province was partly used, at the suggestion of the Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard, to found the Shanxi University in 1902.

XX. The Scriptures in 1900

The Boxers destroyed Bibles and Christian books along with the churches and schools of the missions. In the villages, the possession of Christian books could be enough to identify a person as a Christian, and many copies of the Scriptures were burned. The British and Foreign Bible Society and the American Bible Society lost stocks of Scriptures and depots in north China.

At the time of the rising, the Protestant missions were engaged in the preparation of a new translation of the Bible into Chinese, the Union Version, which had been decided upon by the Missionary Conference in Shanghai in 1890. The translation was made in three forms, in the high classical style, wenli, in the easy classical style, and in Mandarin, the spoken language of north China. Among the translators of the Mandarin version was Calvin Wilson Mateer, of the American Presbyterian mission in Shandong, and Chauncey Goodrich of the American Board, who was among those besieged in the legations in 1900.

The Mandarin Union Version, Guanhua Heheben, was published in 1919. It became the standard Bible of Chinese Protestants and remains so today. Its history, and that of other translations into the languages of China, is discussed in Modern Translations of the Greek Scriptures. The Catholic Chinese Bible was translated later in the twentieth century by the Franciscan Gabriele Allegra and the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Hong Kong, completed in 1968.

XXI. The Martyrs and the Churches

The Chinese churches grew rapidly after 1900. The number of Protestants in China increased from about one hundred thousand in 1900 to more than three hundred thousand in 1920, and the Catholic Church also expanded. The memory of the martyrs of 1900 played an important part in the identity of the Chinese churches, and memorial churches and monuments were built at the places where they had been killed.

In 1946 and 1955 the Catholic Church beatified groups of the martyrs of 1900, and in October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonised one hundred and twenty martyrs of China, eighty-six of whom had been killed during the Boxer rising, including Bishop Grassi, Bishop Fogolla, the Franciscan sisters of Taiyuan, the Jesuits of Zhujiahe and many Chinese lay men, women and children. The government of the People's Republic of China protested against the canonisation, which took place on 1 October, the national day of the People's Republic.

The Protestant churches commemorated the martyrs in books such as Robert Coventry Forsyth's The China Martyrs of 1900, published in 1904, and Archibald Glover's account of his escape from Shanxi, A Thousand Miles of Miracle in China. These works quoted many passages of the Scriptures on persecution, such as John 15:20 and 2 Timothy 3:12.

XXII. Memory and Historiography

The interpretation of the Boxer rising has changed greatly over the twentieth century. In the West at the time the Boxers were portrayed as fanatics and barbarians, and the siege of the legations became the subject of many books and later of films. Chinese reformers and revolutionaries such as Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen at first regarded the Boxers as ignorant and superstitious, while later nationalists and the Communist historians of the People's Republic portrayed them as patriotic resisters against imperialism. During the Cultural Revolution the Boxers, and especially the Red Lanterns, were celebrated as revolutionary heroes.

Western historians such as Joseph Esherick, Paul Cohen and Victor Purcell have examined the social origins of the movement and the ways in which it has been remembered. Paul Cohen, in History in Three Keys, distinguished between the Boxer rising as event, as experience and as myth, and showed how its memory has been shaped by the needs of later generations. Studies of the Chinese Christian communities, such as those of R. G. Tiedemann, have examined the conflicts between Christians and their neighbours in north China that preceded the rising.

The Boxer rising remains a painful subject in the history of China and of Christianity in China. It combined a popular religious movement, the hostility of a part of the Qing court to the foreign powers, the resentment caused by the privileges of the missions, and the violence of the foreign intervention. The counsel of the prophet to seek justice and to love kindness, in Micah 6:8, has been cited by Chinese and Western historians reflecting on the lessons of the events of 1900.

XXIII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.