May 28, 2013 • 28 mins
"It was a culture clash of epic proportions. The Boxer Rebellion, also called the Boxer Uprising, was a gruesome, violent slaughter of Chinese Christians and foreigners - followed by a gruesome, violent slaughter of the Boxers. "
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stock Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy being Wilson, and I'm Holly fry So.
Do you remember when we talked a little bit about
BioShock Infinite Our Loving versus Virginia. We talked about um
(00:23):
race and BioShock Infinite in our listener mail section of
one of the two parts of that podcast, And by
the end of BioShock Infinite, the race is a little
more problematic than at the beginning. Yeah, you had only
played the beginning, Yeah, I had not gotten to the end.
By the end, there are some more nuanced layers of
racial problematicness. But the reason we're talking about it today
(00:47):
is that one of the big milestone events for the
floating City of Columbia in that game is the Boxer Rebellion.
During the Boxer Rebellion, the floating city opens fire on
Chinese citizens and the city of Beijing, which was then
known as Pa King. The US orders the city to
stand down and comstock. The city's leader refuses to do it,
(01:09):
so when the U s sanctions the city and tries
to recall it back home, the city secceeds and cuts
ties with the US and vanishes into the sky. So,
as I'm playing the game, I'm kind of like Boxer Rebellion,
I know, vague sense of what that was all about.
I think we should look further into it, and let's
just go ahead and say in advance that this episode
(01:30):
is going to be pretty gruesome. Yeah, there were lots
of very unkind things done during this particular skirment, extremely so,
and it's one of those things that when we look
at it, but when we look back at it in history,
it's so violent and so gruesome, uh, that we kind
of need some more historical context to wrap our heads
(01:53):
around how we got to that point. So I had
ratchet it up to the point where people were willing
to do some of the things they did to one another. Right,
So the Boxer Rebellion, which is also called the Boxer
Uprising in the West, was a gruesome, violent slaughter of
Chinese Christians and foreigners followed by a gruesome, violent slaughter
(02:13):
of the Boxers. So really, I was gonna make an
image gallery to go with this podcast, similar to what
we did with the the Krnimata Temple and the Hennenberg
of the images that I found were of piles of
decapitated bodies. So there's a pretty violent and horrifying event
(02:35):
in human history. Yeah, and it's been a while since
we delve deep into Chinese history. We did the recent
episode on Empress Dowager Shiji, who figures into this event,
but in terms of um just the history of China
and not just one figure, we haven't done in a bit.
So here's some historical context for this little ditty. So,
(02:55):
China's relationship with the West had been pretty adversarial for
much of the nineteenth century, and the hostility was coming
from both sides. So broadly speaking, China viewed Westerners as
barbarians or foreign devils, and the West viewed China as
a backward nation and viewed Chinese people within their own
borders as a problem to be dealt with or prevented. So,
(03:18):
for example, in the United States, there was the idea
of the year the Yellow Peril, and there were laws
preventing Chinese people from immigrating to the United States, especially
in the Western States, as well as laws preventing marriage
between white people and Chinese people. And at the same time,
Western nations also saw China as an opportunity. Uh some
(03:40):
were looking for territory, others who are looking for trade,
and so parts of China were effectively being divided up
among several Western nations, some leasing land from the Chinese,
but others just went in and seized it. China was
also being pressured into trading relationships that it didn't necessarily want,
and in a series of unequal treaties which is their name,
(04:02):
in the nineteenth century, China had to give concessions to
a number of Western nations, including Great Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Japan,
which isn't Western, and Russia also and as their names,
as the names of the treaty suggests, the Western nations
usually got a disproportionately better deal YEA. And while Japan
(04:23):
is not strictly speaking a Western nation, it was by
this point in its history accepting a lot more westernization
than China was. So Japan in a lot of ways
had more in common with Great Britain in the United
States than China did. It's kind of a bridge between
those cultures. So the Opium Wars soured relationships that were
(04:45):
already tense. The first Opium War was between Britain and China.
It ended in eighteen forty two with treaties that gave
the British access to five Chinese ports, along with other rights. Then,
in the Second Opium War, Britain and France spot together
against China. That war ended in eighteen sixty and China
was forced to allow a diplomatic presence from other nations
(05:09):
in Beijing, which we're just going to call it Beijing
for the sake of simplicity in this episode, along with
other allowances for travel and freedom of movement for foreigners.
And this really is something of an insult to injury
situation since part of what China had been fighting against
was opium trafficking. UH. You can learn more about the
(05:30):
Opium Wars in our previous episode How the Opium Wars worked,
which will explain a little bit more about that particular
conflict and why what the factors were in its um
in that little disagreement. UH. China's defeat in the Second
Sino Japanese War in eighteen four and eight showed the
(05:52):
world that the nation and its military were floundering a
little bit, that military was not strong, and afterwards several
nations and made a gram for territory and trading rights.
In addition to the concessions that it had already made
to Japan, China also made concessions to Britain, France, and Germany,
and Russia was also very eager to claim land adjacent
(06:12):
to its border with China. On top of the difficult
relationships that were going on at the international scale between
the countries, there were also tensions between Chinese people and
foreigners within the country's own borders. The influence of Western
culture was threatening, and while there were clashes of cultures
and religions, that really wasn't the full extent of it.
(06:35):
The modernizations that were being introduced at the time, like
agricultural and transportation technologies, cheap, mass produced goods, those were
all changing the way the world worked and it was
causing people to lose their jobs. So basically, westernization was
bringing new ideas and technologies, and it was also wrecking
the Chinese economy and a lot of its social systems
(06:56):
that had been in place for a very long time.
Some of this conflict was specifically between Chinese converts to
Christianity and everyone else. Missionaries were really quick to defend
Christians if they accused non Christians of discrimination and they
were also pretty quick to get involved with property and
employment disputes as well. This made non Christians feel like
(07:18):
they were being ganged up on by outsiders, and it
spread the perception of Christians as aggressive and demanding bringers
of unwanted Western influence. Empress Dowager Shiji was quoted as
calling Chinese Christians the worst people in China, and communities
that have been close knit, we're starting to crumble as
Christian converts stopped taking part in community activities that were
(07:41):
tied to other religions. Converts were also ostracized and they
were cut off from community support by the rest of
the population. So this was creating schisms that the whole
social fabric really could not withstand. And then within the
Christian communities themselves there was some conflict fracturing there was
between the Protestants and the Catholics. So by the turn
(08:04):
of the century, this is where China was. It was
it was not an easy time in China at all
um either economically or social or socially, and it sort
of seemed like China needed to make a choice to
either get rid of the Westerners and to go back
to the way things used to be or to accept
westerners and western influence into their culture, and that of
(08:26):
course brings us to the Boxers, also called Chuan or
the righteous and Harmonious Fists, and once they got the
support of the government, that name changed to u Twan.
So this the sort of c H sounds changes to
a T and then that meaning is righteous and harmonious militia.
(08:47):
So their nickname of the Boxers came from their martial
arts rituals, which believers claimed they gave them supernatural powers
stemming from possession. This possession gave them a sort of
of holy armor, and the Boxers had roots in two
earlier groups. One was a society of vigilantes that had
arisen after the Sino Japanese War in an attempt to
(09:09):
defend their own property in the absence of law enforcement
or military personnel, and the other was a group of
just ordinary rural people who practice martial arts and spiritual
rituals in groups in public, so it was part of
their community culture. The Boxers were often poor and often
from northern parts of China, and the way of life
(09:30):
in this part of the the world was really difficult. It
had been marked for years by alternating floods and droughts,
really poor harvests, famine, and poverty were widespread, and especially
so through much of the late eighteen hundreds, and like
we said before, the mechanization and modernization that was being
introduced was making things worse for the average person instead
(09:53):
of better. The Boxer movement actually started in Shantung Province,
which is south of Beijing, which at the time, as
we've said, was called picking Uh, and it spread like wildfire,
even though it didn't really have any kind of central
leader or a power structure. But it's anti Western, anti
Christian sensibilities were really appealing to people who were living
(10:14):
in overcrowded, impoverished areas, and it was getting steadily worse
in the aftermath of the Western influence coming into their world.
The Boxers also saw Chinese converts to Christianity as cultural
traders who had turned their backs on China in exchange
for a meal. This earned the converts to Christianity the
(10:34):
nickname Rice Christians. Aggression against Christians in China started off
with the spread of rumor and misinformation about foreigners and Christians,
similar to the vile rumors spread about Jewish people during
the Holocaust. Then it progressed to things like extortion and
protection rackets, and that escalated pretty quickly into actual physical violence,
(10:57):
with riots, gruesome killings, and apes starting after the Second
Opium War ended in eighteen sixty. The target for this
violence was both the Western missionaries and the Chinese converts
to Christianity, and after years of this kind of activity,
things really took a turn in eighteen At that point,
(11:17):
Italy wanted to take control of Salmon Bay and China
said no. Italy backed down, and during all of this
Shiji was effectively ruling as the Empress. She was Empress
dowager at this point, and this little victory made the
Chinese government start to wonder if they could in fact
just get rid of all the Westerners if they just
took a stand. And the Boxers were there. They openly
(11:41):
disliked and distrusted Westerners and Christians, and they essentially provided
a ready resource for the government to use as an
unpaid army, both by ignoring what they were up to
and then later by actively encouraging them and directing them.
And Siji also knew that if she didn't handle them correctly,
the Boxers could turn on her, so before they began
(12:04):
to focus on the Christians. Their goal had been to
overthrow the Ching dynasty, which she was a part of,
and restore the Ming dynasty. The first missionary fatality of
the boxer uprising occurred at the end of December eight
when a band of boxers ambushed British missionary Reverend Sydney Brooks.
They stripped him, naked, led him around for a while,
(12:25):
and then killed and beheaded him when he tried to flee.
Skirmishes and attacks continued to go on throughout the rest
of the winter and into the spring. Western leaders trying
to pressure the Chinese government to stop the attacks and
to investigate Reverend brooks Is death, but there was no
real success in those requests. On January eleven, and respond
(12:48):
to Western demands to reign in the boxers, she refused
to label them as a criminal organization and said that
they were a part of Chinese society. And at this
point the religious leaders in Beijing were receiving pretty regular
reports about the violence and destruction that was happening, and
was also getting closer to them. Uh In hindsight, there
(13:09):
was certainly plenty of notice that China was not safe
for Christians or foreigners, and there were Westerners who left,
but missionaries were often reluctant to leave their missions because
somewhere running as hospitals and they were providing care for
desperately impoverished people. Uh So, even though things were getting
really frightening, a lot of them chose to stay, or
(13:29):
in many cases they just didn't have the means to
pick up and leave. Everything came to a head in
the late spring and early summer of nineteen dred By
this point, the Chinese government had given up even the
appearance of trying to stop the violence against foreigners and
Christians and the Chinese people who worked for them. In
the Shantung, Shansi and Chile provinces, boxers lay siege to missions.
(13:54):
They killed missionaries and converts in really gruesome ways. Uh
Many stories of torture, maiming, and people being burned and
buried alive began to spread on Foreign ministers in Beijing
asked for their governments to send troops to help protect them.
So when international contingent of troops arrived in Beijing on
(14:15):
May thirty one and June fourth, and throughout, these international
forces represented governments that all had their own agendas for China,
some of which contradicted one another, but they were able
to temporarily unite to try to protect and later liberate
the Westerners and Christians that were in China at the time.
By early June, things in Beijing were becoming increasingly grim
(14:39):
and dangerous, and at that point an international relief effort
left the port city of Tanjin headed for Beijing. By then,
the bands of Boxers were roaming the area around Beijing
and in more remote parts of China, destroying missions and
massacring foreigners and Christians. They were also distributing propaganda and
destroying of railroads and telegraph wires, which were too Western
(15:03):
introductions that many Chinese people believed were destructive and possibly evil.
On June eleven, the Japanese chancellor Sujiyama was killed. He
was disemboweled and dismembered outside of the city by Kanzu troops,
which were a Chinese Muslim army that was supporting Shiji
in the Boxers. On June fourteenth, the German minister Clemens
(15:24):
von Kettler executed a Chinese man. This followed a student
shooting of a Chinese person outside of the Beijing race
course five days before at this point, anti foreign and
anti Christian activity within Beijing really surged. The Boxers cut
the telegraph wires leading out of Beijing, and that put
the Westerners that were in Beijing completely out of touch
(15:47):
with their respective governments for a period of weeks, and
this further inflamed the situation, since the governments had no
way of knowing whether their people in Beijing were alive
or dead uh and the Westerners in Beijing had no
way of getting reliable information from the outside world. So
diplomatic efforts on the parts of governments did not have
good information to go on, and neither did the people
(16:07):
that were stuck in Beijing. But just before the lines
were cut, Great Britain Senior Foreign Minister Sir Claude McDonald
managed to send word that they really needed help. A
relief force was mustered of two thousand one men from
the countries that made up an eight nation alliance that
played an active role throughout the rest of this incident.
(16:28):
Those were Great Britain, Germany, Russia, France, the United States, Japan,
Italy and Austria. The US involvement in this whole thing
was really quite historic. The troops had been stationed in Manila,
and President McKinley chose to get them involved in the
conflict on his own. He did not go through Congress,
and that set a precedent for how presidents handled later conflicts.
(16:50):
The troops left on June tent but she g sent
imperial forces to meet them. She also sent imperial troops
to form a blockade around the port, trapping six hundred
foreigners and about four thousand Chinese Christians there. On June seventeen,
chich decreed that all foreigners must leave Beijing, but almost
no one had the means to do so. Missionaries were
(17:13):
reluctant to leave their missions, as we mentioned before, and
most foreigners were convinced that they would be killed as
soon as they left the city. And since the telegraph
lines have been cut, no one within Beijing had a
way to contact their home government to find out what
was going on or to confirm what the conditions were
like outside of Beijing. Within Beijing, boxers began burning churches
and the homes of foreigners and killing suspected Christians on site.
(17:36):
Reports of maiming, torture, and mutilating bodies were common. Residents
of the Diplomatic Quarter started trying to reinforce things, to
fortify the quarter and barricade the entrances, and to keep
the military personnel who had been requested earlier inside with
them to help keep them safe. On June twenty, two,
(17:57):
days before the international relief force was ultimately turned back
from Beijing, the siege of Beijing's Diplomatic Quarter began. The
Diplomatic Quarter was also known as the Legation Quarter. It
was about three quarters of a square mile within the
wall of Beijing's Tarter City. Diplomats from Britain, America, France, Germany, Spain, Japan,
(18:18):
and Russia and Italy lived inside, and the Diplomatic Quarter
wasn't just home to embassies. There were also shops and
banks and other businesses. And the people living there included missionaries, researchers, journalists,
and people who were just visiting China, and they represented
eighteen different nations, so there were a range of different
languages being spoken there. The people in the Diplomatic Quarter
(18:41):
also had their own racial and ethnic tensions among themselves.
They didn't always get along even within the best of times,
and this also went for the different denominations of Christians
who were within the quarter as well. Then, thanks to
overcrowding and the lack of provisions because of the siege.
Disease was really widespread, and among the group were also
(19:04):
about three hundred Chinese Christians, and they almost always fared
the worst. When people divided up food and supplies, those
Chinese Christians usually got the short end of the stick.
The other people in the quarter would keep bigger shares
for themselves, and they would really get kind of the scraps.
There were also refugees from the countryside who had been
(19:25):
driven into Beijing by the Boxer activity, taking refuge in
the Diplomatic Quarter, and at this point most of the
non Christian Chinese people that had been in the Diplomatic
Quarter had already left. They were out of there. The
Diplomatic Quarter wasn't the only place where foreigners and Christians
lived in the city of Beijing. There were other missions,
(19:47):
church related hospitals that sort of thing, scattered all around
the sea. These were under constant threat during the rebellion
as well, and then once the siege began, they didn't
really have anywhere to run, and they couldn't get back
to the where most of the official offices of their
denomination were located. They were sort of cut off from
(20:07):
one another. Another international release force of twenty thousand men
left Tiensen on August five, and that force fought two
major battles with the Chinese, many of whom were armed
only with spears and swords along the way. Uh. The
force arrived to liberate the diplomatic quarter in August fourteenth,
nine dred after capturing Beijing. The siege at that point
(20:31):
had lasted for fifty five days. The Chinese perspective on
this wasn't so much that it was an international force
had gathered to liberate its citizens. Um. The Chinese perspective
was more that eight foreign governments had collectively decided to
finish the job of subjugating and parceling out China to
their own ends, and had just used the besieged city
(20:54):
as a handy excuse to do it. So at that point,
the Empress Dowager and her court had uh. They fled
to jim So at this point the siege, which was horrifying,
has been liberated. Uh. The Empress Dowager and her court
have fled. You sort of get an idea of just
how many people have been killed apart from the military fatalities,
(21:19):
Somewhere between two hundred and three hundred foreigners were killed
during the Boxer rebellion, but tens of thousands of Chinese
Christians were murdered, and in the weeks after the siege
was broken, Western forces continued to grow their numbers. They
occupied Beijing and they spread out into more remote areas
(21:39):
to quell the Boxers, and this time the reports coming
in from the countryside were of massacres and beheadings on
the part of the Western soldiers and suicides of Chinese
citizens who could not flee. While the international response to
this incident stopped just short of sort of subdividing China,
(21:59):
the Western troops were definitely vastly better armed and better
prepared than the Chinese troops, and they beheaded many of
the Boxers that they killed. The foreign forces also looted, rampaged,
and executed people at will. Following the rebellion. On February
one of nineteen o one, the Chinese government agreed to
(22:20):
abolish the Boxer Society. The Peace Protocol of Beijing, also
known as the Boxer Protocol, was signed in September of
nineteen o one, and that officially ended the conflict and
forced China to pay a really large indemnity to the
foreign governments, and the size of that dollar amount effectively
bankrupted the nation. China was also directed to execute the
(22:44):
Boxer leaders and to permit Western nations to keep troops
stationed in China, and China was really weakened and humiliated,
obviously by the entire event. It was damaged from a
financial standpoint, and from a military standpoint, and from a
diplomatic standpoint with the rest of the world. We talked
about that a little bit in our Shiji episode uh
(23:06):
and the nation wound up taking a backseat to Japan,
which really became the major Asian power at the time.
The results of the rebellion also really deepened anti foreign
and even then xenophobic sentiment in China and planted the
seeds of revolutions to come. The Shang dynasty collapsed just
over a decade later, and in the minds of the
(23:28):
American military, this event solidified the need to stay in
control of the Philippines and keep a force there so
that they could maintain a powerful presence in Asia. So
that's sort of an overview of the Boxer rebellion. Because
of the time period when this takes place, and how
methodical many people were, and they're keeping of diaries and letters.
(23:51):
There are many, many, many first person accounts and many
many books on the Boxer rebellion, So there are all
kinds of story that we could go into. Um, this
is sort of an overview of what happened and what
led up to it and why. And as I was
doing research for this, I found an editorial cartoon that
(24:15):
pretty much spelled it out that we had started with
atrocities being committed by Chinese people that were then mirrored
by atrocities committed by the relief forces who came in.
So it's a horrifying event all around. Yes, for sure.
I mean nobody can walk away saying that they were
(24:35):
But no one took the high road, really, not at
least collectively. There were individual people who tried really hard,
and there were Chinese troops who were trying to prevent
violence and trying to protect the people who were being
targeted by the boxers, and so it was not an
entirely one sided thing that was happening within China. But
the savagery was really extreme. Savagery is a pretty accurate
(24:57):
word for what was going on. I don't know if
we would have done this episode had I had a
clear sense of just how much brutality went on before
I started research. But it is important to yeah, study
even the less than delightful parts of history. It's definitely,
it's all important. And I think you also have a
(25:19):
listener mail do. This is from Franklin and it is
about our episode on Sarah Emma Edmunds, who served during
the Civil War. Franklin says, I just listened to the
Civil War podcast that talked about women who served under
the guise of men. In our culture, a woman could
fight with male warriors in the open. Moving Robe woman
(25:41):
was a Hunk Papa warrior who fought at the Battle
of Little Big Horn to avenge her brother. One Hawk
Buffalo calf Road Woman was a Northern Cheyenne woman who
rescued her brother at the Battle of the Rosebud. She
became the hero of the battle on the Cheyenne side
and had the battle named for her actions. Battle where
the girl saved her brother. The Cheyenne credited her for
(26:03):
dismounting Custer at the Battle of the Little Pighorn. Thank
you so much, Franklin. It's really cool. It makes me
want to do research on those. But well, and the
um one of the other notable events in history that
keeps coming up in BioShock Infinite. We'll stop talking about
it one day. One day there will be nothing else
(26:24):
to mine from BioShock Infinite. But is wounded me? Yeah? Um,
so there's lots of territory we could research in the
whole realm of the military history of many Native Americans. Yeah,
which is something I mean, I know, I never really
(26:44):
learned that much about in school, and I think probably
most other people did not. Yeah, you get a kind
of glossy quick version. Yeah. Well, and then most of
the Native American history that I got in school was
like local history. It was sort of in the like
in the North Carolina history year of history class. So yes,
thank you again so much for sending us that, Franklin.
(27:07):
If you would like to write to us on this
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You can find our tumbler at mt in history dot
tumbler dot com, and we are on Pinterest. If you'd
like to learn more, about some of the historical contexts
(27:27):
that lead up to the Boxer rebellion. You can go
to our website and search for Opium Wars and you
will find the article how the East India Company Change
the World. You can do all that and a whole
lot more at our website, which is how stuff Works
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(28:00):
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stock Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy being Wilson, and I'm Holly fry So.
Do you remember when we talked a little bit about
BioShock Infinite Our Loving versus Virginia. We talked about um
(00:23):
race and BioShock Infinite in our listener mail section of
one of the two parts of that podcast, And by
the end of BioShock Infinite, the race is a little
more problematic than at the beginning. Yeah, you had only
played the beginning, Yeah, I had not gotten to the end.
By the end, there are some more nuanced layers of
racial problematicness. But the reason we're talking about it today
(00:47):
is that one of the big milestone events for the
floating City of Columbia in that game is the Boxer Rebellion.
During the Boxer Rebellion, the floating city opens fire on
Chinese citizens and the city of Beijing, which was then
known as Pa King. The US orders the city to
stand down and comstock. The city's leader refuses to do it,
(01:09):
so when the U s sanctions the city and tries
to recall it back home, the city secceeds and cuts
ties with the US and vanishes into the sky. So,
as I'm playing the game, I'm kind of like Boxer Rebellion,
I know, vague sense of what that was all about.
I think we should look further into it, and let's
just go ahead and say in advance that this episode
(01:30):
is going to be pretty gruesome. Yeah, there were lots
of very unkind things done during this particular skirment, extremely so,
and it's one of those things that when we look
at it, but when we look back at it in history,
it's so violent and so gruesome, uh, that we kind
of need some more historical context to wrap our heads
(01:53):
around how we got to that point. So I had
ratchet it up to the point where people were willing
to do some of the things they did to one another. Right,
So the Boxer Rebellion, which is also called the Boxer
Uprising in the West, was a gruesome, violent slaughter of
Chinese Christians and foreigners followed by a gruesome, violent slaughter
(02:13):
of the Boxers. So really, I was gonna make an
image gallery to go with this podcast, similar to what
we did with the the Krnimata Temple and the Hennenberg
of the images that I found were of piles of
decapitated bodies. So there's a pretty violent and horrifying event
(02:35):
in human history. Yeah, and it's been a while since
we delve deep into Chinese history. We did the recent
episode on Empress Dowager Shiji, who figures into this event,
but in terms of um just the history of China
and not just one figure, we haven't done in a bit.
So here's some historical context for this little ditty. So,
(02:55):
China's relationship with the West had been pretty adversarial for
much of the nineteenth century, and the hostility was coming
from both sides. So broadly speaking, China viewed Westerners as
barbarians or foreign devils, and the West viewed China as
a backward nation and viewed Chinese people within their own
borders as a problem to be dealt with or prevented. So,
(03:18):
for example, in the United States, there was the idea
of the year the Yellow Peril, and there were laws
preventing Chinese people from immigrating to the United States, especially
in the Western States, as well as laws preventing marriage
between white people and Chinese people. And at the same time,
Western nations also saw China as an opportunity. Uh some
(03:40):
were looking for territory, others who are looking for trade,
and so parts of China were effectively being divided up
among several Western nations, some leasing land from the Chinese,
but others just went in and seized it. China was
also being pressured into trading relationships that it didn't necessarily want,
and in a series of unequal treaties which is their name,
(04:02):
in the nineteenth century, China had to give concessions to
a number of Western nations, including Great Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Japan,
which isn't Western, and Russia also and as their names,
as the names of the treaty suggests, the Western nations
usually got a disproportionately better deal YEA. And while Japan
(04:23):
is not strictly speaking a Western nation, it was by
this point in its history accepting a lot more westernization
than China was. So Japan in a lot of ways
had more in common with Great Britain in the United
States than China did. It's kind of a bridge between
those cultures. So the Opium Wars soured relationships that were
(04:45):
already tense. The first Opium War was between Britain and China.
It ended in eighteen forty two with treaties that gave
the British access to five Chinese ports, along with other rights. Then,
in the Second Opium War, Britain and France spot together
against China. That war ended in eighteen sixty and China
was forced to allow a diplomatic presence from other nations
(05:09):
in Beijing, which we're just going to call it Beijing
for the sake of simplicity in this episode, along with
other allowances for travel and freedom of movement for foreigners.
And this really is something of an insult to injury
situation since part of what China had been fighting against
was opium trafficking. UH. You can learn more about the
(05:30):
Opium Wars in our previous episode How the Opium Wars worked,
which will explain a little bit more about that particular
conflict and why what the factors were in its um
in that little disagreement. UH. China's defeat in the Second
Sino Japanese War in eighteen four and eight showed the
(05:52):
world that the nation and its military were floundering a
little bit, that military was not strong, and afterwards several
nations and made a gram for territory and trading rights.
In addition to the concessions that it had already made
to Japan, China also made concessions to Britain, France, and Germany,
and Russia was also very eager to claim land adjacent
(06:12):
to its border with China. On top of the difficult
relationships that were going on at the international scale between
the countries, there were also tensions between Chinese people and
foreigners within the country's own borders. The influence of Western
culture was threatening, and while there were clashes of cultures
and religions, that really wasn't the full extent of it.
(06:35):
The modernizations that were being introduced at the time, like
agricultural and transportation technologies, cheap, mass produced goods, those were
all changing the way the world worked and it was
causing people to lose their jobs. So basically, westernization was
bringing new ideas and technologies, and it was also wrecking
the Chinese economy and a lot of its social systems
(06:56):
that had been in place for a very long time.
Some of this conflict was specifically between Chinese converts to
Christianity and everyone else. Missionaries were really quick to defend
Christians if they accused non Christians of discrimination and they
were also pretty quick to get involved with property and
employment disputes as well. This made non Christians feel like
(07:18):
they were being ganged up on by outsiders, and it
spread the perception of Christians as aggressive and demanding bringers
of unwanted Western influence. Empress Dowager Shiji was quoted as
calling Chinese Christians the worst people in China, and communities
that have been close knit, we're starting to crumble as
Christian converts stopped taking part in community activities that were
(07:41):
tied to other religions. Converts were also ostracized and they
were cut off from community support by the rest of
the population. So this was creating schisms that the whole
social fabric really could not withstand. And then within the
Christian communities themselves there was some conflict fracturing there was
between the Protestants and the Catholics. So by the turn
(08:04):
of the century, this is where China was. It was
it was not an easy time in China at all
um either economically or social or socially, and it sort
of seemed like China needed to make a choice to
either get rid of the Westerners and to go back
to the way things used to be or to accept
westerners and western influence into their culture, and that of
(08:26):
course brings us to the Boxers, also called Chuan or
the righteous and Harmonious Fists, and once they got the
support of the government, that name changed to u Twan.
So this the sort of c H sounds changes to
a T and then that meaning is righteous and harmonious militia.
(08:47):
So their nickname of the Boxers came from their martial
arts rituals, which believers claimed they gave them supernatural powers
stemming from possession. This possession gave them a sort of
of holy armor, and the Boxers had roots in two
earlier groups. One was a society of vigilantes that had
arisen after the Sino Japanese War in an attempt to
(09:09):
defend their own property in the absence of law enforcement
or military personnel, and the other was a group of
just ordinary rural people who practice martial arts and spiritual
rituals in groups in public, so it was part of
their community culture. The Boxers were often poor and often
from northern parts of China, and the way of life
(09:30):
in this part of the the world was really difficult. It
had been marked for years by alternating floods and droughts,
really poor harvests, famine, and poverty were widespread, and especially
so through much of the late eighteen hundreds, and like
we said before, the mechanization and modernization that was being
introduced was making things worse for the average person instead
(09:53):
of better. The Boxer movement actually started in Shantung Province,
which is south of Beijing, which at the time, as
we've said, was called picking Uh, and it spread like wildfire,
even though it didn't really have any kind of central
leader or a power structure. But it's anti Western, anti
Christian sensibilities were really appealing to people who were living
(10:14):
in overcrowded, impoverished areas, and it was getting steadily worse
in the aftermath of the Western influence coming into their world.
The Boxers also saw Chinese converts to Christianity as cultural
traders who had turned their backs on China in exchange
for a meal. This earned the converts to Christianity the
(10:34):
nickname Rice Christians. Aggression against Christians in China started off
with the spread of rumor and misinformation about foreigners and Christians,
similar to the vile rumors spread about Jewish people during
the Holocaust. Then it progressed to things like extortion and
protection rackets, and that escalated pretty quickly into actual physical violence,
(10:57):
with riots, gruesome killings, and apes starting after the Second
Opium War ended in eighteen sixty. The target for this
violence was both the Western missionaries and the Chinese converts
to Christianity, and after years of this kind of activity,
things really took a turn in eighteen At that point,
(11:17):
Italy wanted to take control of Salmon Bay and China
said no. Italy backed down, and during all of this
Shiji was effectively ruling as the Empress. She was Empress
dowager at this point, and this little victory made the
Chinese government start to wonder if they could in fact
just get rid of all the Westerners if they just
took a stand. And the Boxers were there. They openly
(11:41):
disliked and distrusted Westerners and Christians, and they essentially provided
a ready resource for the government to use as an
unpaid army, both by ignoring what they were up to
and then later by actively encouraging them and directing them.
And Siji also knew that if she didn't handle them correctly,
the Boxers could turn on her, so before they began
(12:04):
to focus on the Christians. Their goal had been to
overthrow the Ching dynasty, which she was a part of,
and restore the Ming dynasty. The first missionary fatality of
the boxer uprising occurred at the end of December eight
when a band of boxers ambushed British missionary Reverend Sydney Brooks.
They stripped him, naked, led him around for a while,
(12:25):
and then killed and beheaded him when he tried to flee.
Skirmishes and attacks continued to go on throughout the rest
of the winter and into the spring. Western leaders trying
to pressure the Chinese government to stop the attacks and
to investigate Reverend brooks Is death, but there was no
real success in those requests. On January eleven, and respond
(12:48):
to Western demands to reign in the boxers, she refused
to label them as a criminal organization and said that
they were a part of Chinese society. And at this
point the religious leaders in Beijing were receiving pretty regular
reports about the violence and destruction that was happening, and
was also getting closer to them. Uh In hindsight, there
(13:09):
was certainly plenty of notice that China was not safe
for Christians or foreigners, and there were Westerners who left,
but missionaries were often reluctant to leave their missions because
somewhere running as hospitals and they were providing care for
desperately impoverished people. Uh So, even though things were getting
really frightening, a lot of them chose to stay, or
(13:29):
in many cases they just didn't have the means to
pick up and leave. Everything came to a head in
the late spring and early summer of nineteen dred By
this point, the Chinese government had given up even the
appearance of trying to stop the violence against foreigners and
Christians and the Chinese people who worked for them. In
the Shantung, Shansi and Chile provinces, boxers lay siege to missions.
(13:54):
They killed missionaries and converts in really gruesome ways. Uh
Many stories of torture, maiming, and people being burned and
buried alive began to spread on Foreign ministers in Beijing
asked for their governments to send troops to help protect them.
So when international contingent of troops arrived in Beijing on
(14:15):
May thirty one and June fourth, and throughout, these international
forces represented governments that all had their own agendas for China,
some of which contradicted one another, but they were able
to temporarily unite to try to protect and later liberate
the Westerners and Christians that were in China at the time.
By early June, things in Beijing were becoming increasingly grim
(14:39):
and dangerous, and at that point an international relief effort
left the port city of Tanjin headed for Beijing. By then,
the bands of Boxers were roaming the area around Beijing
and in more remote parts of China, destroying missions and
massacring foreigners and Christians. They were also distributing propaganda and
destroying of railroads and telegraph wires, which were too Western
(15:03):
introductions that many Chinese people believed were destructive and possibly evil.
On June eleven, the Japanese chancellor Sujiyama was killed. He
was disemboweled and dismembered outside of the city by Kanzu troops,
which were a Chinese Muslim army that was supporting Shiji
in the Boxers. On June fourteenth, the German minister Clemens
(15:24):
von Kettler executed a Chinese man. This followed a student
shooting of a Chinese person outside of the Beijing race
course five days before at this point, anti foreign and
anti Christian activity within Beijing really surged. The Boxers cut
the telegraph wires leading out of Beijing, and that put
the Westerners that were in Beijing completely out of touch
(15:47):
with their respective governments for a period of weeks, and
this further inflamed the situation, since the governments had no
way of knowing whether their people in Beijing were alive
or dead uh and the Westerners in Beijing had no
way of getting reliable information from the outside world. So
diplomatic efforts on the parts of governments did not have
good information to go on, and neither did the people
(16:07):
that were stuck in Beijing. But just before the lines
were cut, Great Britain Senior Foreign Minister Sir Claude McDonald
managed to send word that they really needed help. A
relief force was mustered of two thousand one men from
the countries that made up an eight nation alliance that
played an active role throughout the rest of this incident.
(16:28):
Those were Great Britain, Germany, Russia, France, the United States, Japan,
Italy and Austria. The US involvement in this whole thing
was really quite historic. The troops had been stationed in Manila,
and President McKinley chose to get them involved in the
conflict on his own. He did not go through Congress,
and that set a precedent for how presidents handled later conflicts.
(16:50):
The troops left on June tent but she g sent
imperial forces to meet them. She also sent imperial troops
to form a blockade around the port, trapping six hundred
foreigners and about four thousand Chinese Christians there. On June seventeen,
chich decreed that all foreigners must leave Beijing, but almost
no one had the means to do so. Missionaries were
(17:13):
reluctant to leave their missions, as we mentioned before, and
most foreigners were convinced that they would be killed as
soon as they left the city. And since the telegraph
lines have been cut, no one within Beijing had a
way to contact their home government to find out what
was going on or to confirm what the conditions were
like outside of Beijing. Within Beijing, boxers began burning churches
and the homes of foreigners and killing suspected Christians on site.
(17:36):
Reports of maiming, torture, and mutilating bodies were common. Residents
of the Diplomatic Quarter started trying to reinforce things, to
fortify the quarter and barricade the entrances, and to keep
the military personnel who had been requested earlier inside with
them to help keep them safe. On June twenty, two,
(17:57):
days before the international relief force was ultimately turned back
from Beijing, the siege of Beijing's Diplomatic Quarter began. The
Diplomatic Quarter was also known as the Legation Quarter. It
was about three quarters of a square mile within the
wall of Beijing's Tarter City. Diplomats from Britain, America, France, Germany, Spain, Japan,
(18:18):
and Russia and Italy lived inside, and the Diplomatic Quarter
wasn't just home to embassies. There were also shops and
banks and other businesses. And the people living there included missionaries, researchers, journalists,
and people who were just visiting China, and they represented
eighteen different nations, so there were a range of different
languages being spoken there. The people in the Diplomatic Quarter
(18:41):
also had their own racial and ethnic tensions among themselves.
They didn't always get along even within the best of times,
and this also went for the different denominations of Christians
who were within the quarter as well. Then, thanks to
overcrowding and the lack of provisions because of the siege.
Disease was really widespread, and among the group were also
(19:04):
about three hundred Chinese Christians, and they almost always fared
the worst. When people divided up food and supplies, those
Chinese Christians usually got the short end of the stick.
The other people in the quarter would keep bigger shares
for themselves, and they would really get kind of the scraps.
There were also refugees from the countryside who had been
(19:25):
driven into Beijing by the Boxer activity, taking refuge in
the Diplomatic Quarter, and at this point most of the
non Christian Chinese people that had been in the Diplomatic
Quarter had already left. They were out of there. The
Diplomatic Quarter wasn't the only place where foreigners and Christians
lived in the city of Beijing. There were other missions,
(19:47):
church related hospitals that sort of thing, scattered all around
the sea. These were under constant threat during the rebellion
as well, and then once the siege began, they didn't
really have anywhere to run, and they couldn't get back
to the where most of the official offices of their
denomination were located. They were sort of cut off from
(20:07):
one another. Another international release force of twenty thousand men
left Tiensen on August five, and that force fought two
major battles with the Chinese, many of whom were armed
only with spears and swords along the way. Uh. The
force arrived to liberate the diplomatic quarter in August fourteenth,
nine dred after capturing Beijing. The siege at that point
(20:31):
had lasted for fifty five days. The Chinese perspective on
this wasn't so much that it was an international force
had gathered to liberate its citizens. Um. The Chinese perspective
was more that eight foreign governments had collectively decided to
finish the job of subjugating and parceling out China to
their own ends, and had just used the besieged city
(20:54):
as a handy excuse to do it. So at that point,
the Empress Dowager and her court had uh. They fled
to jim So at this point the siege, which was horrifying,
has been liberated. Uh. The Empress Dowager and her court
have fled. You sort of get an idea of just
how many people have been killed apart from the military fatalities,
(21:19):
Somewhere between two hundred and three hundred foreigners were killed
during the Boxer rebellion, but tens of thousands of Chinese
Christians were murdered, and in the weeks after the siege
was broken, Western forces continued to grow their numbers. They
occupied Beijing and they spread out into more remote areas
(21:39):
to quell the Boxers, and this time the reports coming
in from the countryside were of massacres and beheadings on
the part of the Western soldiers and suicides of Chinese
citizens who could not flee. While the international response to
this incident stopped just short of sort of subdividing China,
(21:59):
the Western troops were definitely vastly better armed and better
prepared than the Chinese troops, and they beheaded many of
the Boxers that they killed. The foreign forces also looted, rampaged,
and executed people at will. Following the rebellion. On February
one of nineteen o one, the Chinese government agreed to
(22:20):
abolish the Boxer Society. The Peace Protocol of Beijing, also
known as the Boxer Protocol, was signed in September of
nineteen o one, and that officially ended the conflict and
forced China to pay a really large indemnity to the
foreign governments, and the size of that dollar amount effectively
bankrupted the nation. China was also directed to execute the
(22:44):
Boxer leaders and to permit Western nations to keep troops
stationed in China, and China was really weakened and humiliated,
obviously by the entire event. It was damaged from a
financial standpoint, and from a military standpoint, and from a
diplomatic standpoint with the rest of the world. We talked
about that a little bit in our Shiji episode uh
(23:06):
and the nation wound up taking a backseat to Japan,
which really became the major Asian power at the time.
The results of the rebellion also really deepened anti foreign
and even then xenophobic sentiment in China and planted the
seeds of revolutions to come. The Shang dynasty collapsed just
over a decade later, and in the minds of the
(23:28):
American military, this event solidified the need to stay in
control of the Philippines and keep a force there so
that they could maintain a powerful presence in Asia. So
that's sort of an overview of the Boxer rebellion. Because
of the time period when this takes place, and how
methodical many people were, and they're keeping of diaries and letters.
(23:51):
There are many, many, many first person accounts and many
many books on the Boxer rebellion, So there are all
kinds of story that we could go into. Um, this
is sort of an overview of what happened and what
led up to it and why. And as I was
doing research for this, I found an editorial cartoon that
(24:15):
pretty much spelled it out that we had started with
atrocities being committed by Chinese people that were then mirrored
by atrocities committed by the relief forces who came in.
So it's a horrifying event all around. Yes, for sure.
I mean nobody can walk away saying that they were
(24:35):
But no one took the high road, really, not at
least collectively. There were individual people who tried really hard,
and there were Chinese troops who were trying to prevent
violence and trying to protect the people who were being
targeted by the boxers, and so it was not an
entirely one sided thing that was happening within China. But
the savagery was really extreme. Savagery is a pretty accurate
(24:57):
word for what was going on. I don't know if
we would have done this episode had I had a
clear sense of just how much brutality went on before
I started research. But it is important to yeah, study
even the less than delightful parts of history. It's definitely,
it's all important. And I think you also have a
(25:19):
listener mail do. This is from Franklin and it is
about our episode on Sarah Emma Edmunds, who served during
the Civil War. Franklin says, I just listened to the
Civil War podcast that talked about women who served under
the guise of men. In our culture, a woman could
fight with male warriors in the open. Moving Robe woman
(25:41):
was a Hunk Papa warrior who fought at the Battle
of Little Big Horn to avenge her brother. One Hawk
Buffalo calf Road Woman was a Northern Cheyenne woman who
rescued her brother at the Battle of the Rosebud. She
became the hero of the battle on the Cheyenne side
and had the battle named for her actions. Battle where
the girl saved her brother. The Cheyenne credited her for
(26:03):
dismounting Custer at the Battle of the Little Pighorn. Thank
you so much, Franklin. It's really cool. It makes me
want to do research on those. But well, and the
um one of the other notable events in history that
keeps coming up in BioShock Infinite. We'll stop talking about
it one day. One day there will be nothing else
(26:24):
to mine from BioShock Infinite. But is wounded me? Yeah? Um,
so there's lots of territory we could research in the
whole realm of the military history of many Native Americans. Yeah,
which is something I mean, I know, I never really
(26:44):
learned that much about in school, and I think probably
most other people did not. Yeah, you get a kind
of glossy quick version. Yeah. Well, and then most of
the Native American history that I got in school was
like local history. It was sort of in the like
in the North Carolina history year of history class. So yes,
thank you again so much for sending us that, Franklin.
(27:07):
If you would like to write to us on this
or any other topic, you can at History Podcasts at
Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook, Facebook dot com,
slash history class Stuff, and on Twitter at mt in History.
You can find our tumbler at mt in history dot
tumbler dot com, and we are on Pinterest. If you'd
like to learn more, about some of the historical contexts
(27:27):
that lead up to the Boxer rebellion. You can go
to our website and search for Opium Wars and you
will find the article how the East India Company Change
the World. You can do all that and a whole
lot more at our website, which is how stuff Works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Because it has stuff works dot com. Double dot com
(28:00):
is the leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and
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