Soon, all the foreign legations in Beijing were under siege, with the imperial court offering a reward of 50 silver taels for each foreign male captured alive. Sensing that a decisive blow was about to be inflicted on the foreigners, Cixi now declared war on all foreigners and ordered her imperial officers to collaborate openly with the Boxers. The Boxers had all the foreign legations in Beijing under siege.
When they reached Beijing, their first target was the German legation, killing the German minister. En route, they brutally assaulted all visible bearers and symbols of Western influence. On June 13, 1900, a force of over 10,000 Boxers headed for Beijing.
#The boxer rebellion series#
This is a transcript from the video series The Fall and Rise of China. They burned churches and shops that sold foreign goods, and they randomly killed Chinese Christians. In the spring of 1900, the Boxers, now numbering in the tens of thousands, went on a rampage in Tianjin, southeast of Beijing. Spurred into action by the Boxers, the villagers attacked the church. The local villagers became incensed when their ancestral temple was seized by German missionaries for use as a church. The rising tide of anti-foreignism in China broke into the open in 1899, in a north Chinese village near the seaside city of Qingdao, in Shandong Province. Learn more about the birth of Chinese communism. Originally anti-Manchu in orientation, the Boxers soon found themselves being courted by Cixi and her followers, who shared their antipathy to the ‘hairy ones’. The Boxers loathed all foreigners, whom they referred to colloquially as the ‘hairy ones’. One such secret society, known as Yihe Quan, or the society of ‘Righteous and Harmonious Fists’, called ‘Boxers’ for short, had been in existence for almost a century. Boxers: The Secret Societyīy the turn of the new century, a variety of secret societies had become active in China. Xenophobia and nativist superstition now flourished under the reactionary reign of the dowager empress. In the aftermath of Empress Cixi’s coup, the Manchu regime took on an ever-stronger tone of atavism, arrogance, and anti-foreignism. The Boxers loathed all foreigners, and in the late 1890s, they decreed that all foreigners must be exterminated. Read about the Boxer’s rise and fall, and the aftermath of their decline.
They collaborated with Empress Cixi’s imperial officers to launch an attack on foreign legations in Beijing, which came to be known as the Boxer Uprising. By Richard Baum, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles The society of ‘Righteous and Harmonious Fists’, called ‘Boxers’ for short, was a secret society.
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