The Fists of Righteous Harmony

A History of the Boxer Uprising in China in the Year 1900

Henry Keown-Boyd

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 1991
• ISBN:
  9781473814288
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Chinesische Geschichte

A British historian recounts the armed, violent Chinese insurrection near the end of the Qing dynasty at the dawn of the 20th century. The Boxers were a fanatical secret organization who were incited by anti-foreign elements in the Chinese Government to commit wide-scale deportations against foreign missionaries and their Chinese converts. The Boxers had the tacit support of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi who maintained all the while that they were beyond her control. The Boxer Rebellion came to a head with the 55-day siege of the Peking Legations and ended in total humiliation for the Chinese.

Contents

Introduction

1 The Barbarian Encroaches

2 The Hundred Days and the Rise of the Boxers

3 Bannermen and Braves

4 A Rude Awakening

5 The Defenders

6 The Diary of a Chinese Summer

7 The Other Siege

8 The Occupation

9 The Negotiations

10 The Return of the Old Buddha

11 The Whys and Wherefores

Appendices

A Some Nominal Rolls of Legation Guards and Volunteers with Casualty Figures

B Some of the Small Arms used by Allied and Chinese Forces during the Boxer Campaign.

C Extracts from The Times ‘Obituaries’ of Sir Claude MacDonald and Dr G. E. Morrison

D The Taipang Rebellion (1850–64)

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

No one has ever arrived at
understanding them [the Chinese]
thoroughly and no one ever will.

Captain A. A. S. Barnes,
1st Chinese Regiment

The Chinese, Europeans have told themselves for centuries, are inscrutable. However, the most cursory glance at the history of the relations between China and what were known in the 19th century as the Powers reveals that the inscrutability was mutual. They fenced blindfolded in a dark room, fearing one another yet regarding each other with contempt and incomprehension. The Chinese were, and still are, great xenophobes although today’s foreign tourist in China is regarded as comic rather than dangerous and mirth has replaced anger. To them, and here one is generalizing as there were many exceptions, the foreigner was a coarse, smelly, greedy barbarian. Even their close genetic kinsmen, the Japanese, were referred to as the ‘ugly dwarfs’.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the Chinese view of the foreigner should have been somewhat jaundiced. Postponing for a moment serious political, commercial and military issues, it must be said that few countries have attracted a more remarkable and generally distasteful array of adventurers, confidence tricksters, soldiers of fortune, crackpots and other assorted undesirables as did China in the 19th and early 20th centuries. To mention but a few of the more spectacular examples, we have General Charles Gordon, sword in one hand, Bible in the other, leading his Ever Victorious Army of European, American and Chinese desperadoes against the Taiping rebels;* the English pirate known, no doubt aptly, as Fuckie Tom, plundering the China coast in his fleet of junks. Later there appeared ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen, gangster confidant of Sun Yat Sen and a brace of the world’s most bare-faced conmen, Sir Edmund Backhouse, Bart., brilliant sinologue, forger, fantasist and obscene diarist, and Trebitsch Lincoln, Hungarian-Jewish Member of Parliament for Doncaster, spy, swindler and Buddhist monk.

And let us not forget the ladies. The bordellos of the Treaty Ports catered for all tastes and pockets. Voluptuous poules de luxe, often Russian and, after the Revolution, invariably of self-proclaimed blue blood, entertained in well-appointed apartments while the water-front bars swarmed with tarts of every race, colour and proclivity. There was much to be learnt and, we are told, among the most successful ‘amateur’ pupils of these skilled professionals was a certain Wallis Spencer, then the wife of an American naval officer, who later used her knowledge of the arts of love to seduce to her bed and from his throne the King and Emperor of the greatest empire in the world.

But to return to more serious matters, to the Powers China was both a milch cow for raw materials and a great profitable maw into which the products of Manchester, Dusseldorf, Lyons, Milan, Osaka and Milwaukee could be stuffed. It was also a chess-board upon which the diplomats accredited to the Imperial Court at Peking, the Consuls-General in the other great cities of China and their political masters at home could manoeuvre and posture in the great game of scoring points over one another and acquiring Concessions.

In the prosecution of these aims, they bullied, harassed and bribed the atrophied and degenerate Imperial Government remorselessly and from all directions. Their velvet gloves were thread-bare and through them distracted Manchu and Chinese officials glimpsed the iron fists of the Royal Navy and the Tsarist, Prussian and Japanese military machines. But to concede to the British was to excite the jealousy of the French and to give in to the Italians was to enrage the Germans and so on. It was a vicious circle. The demands of all had to be satisfied, at least up to a point, or the consequences from one quarter or another might be dire.

To an extent, the Chinese managed to prevaricate behind their creaking, ponderous bureaucracy, immemorial protocol and all-pervading corruption. The ‘squeeze’ or bribe, reigned supreme across the entire political and social spectrum. To move a mule-cart from A to B required a tiny payment to some petty official or policeman; for a provincial viceroy to obtain entry to the Forbidden City called for the distribution of largesse to every kow-towing eunuch who managed politely but firmly to impede his path to the steps of the throne. The squeeze was not simply part of the system, it was the system itself. High mandarins and foreign officials like Sir Robert Hart, the long-serving Inspector-General of the Imperial Customs Service, amassed huge fortunes from peculation and what would today be described as insider dealing. The British industrialist, Lord Rendel, who, from time to time, played a delicate role as an honest broker on behalf of China, put it bluntly. ‘[Manchu] government,’ he wrote, ‘meant chiefly a system by which eighteen separate administrations bled eighteen provinces on the terms of furnishing each their quota to the principal blood-sucker at Peking.’

As distasteful to most Chinese as the diplomatic and commercial demands of the barbarians was their apparently fatuous but intrusive religion, Christianity, which their missionaries preached in vigorous competition with one another and with little regard for Chinese conventions and superstitions. Most disliked were the Roman Catholics whose bishops, through the persistent intervention of the French Government, had succeeded in acquiring for themselves the rights and privileges of the Mandarin class. While in the main the peasantry were disturbed by the possible effect of the missionaries’ activities on the spirits of their ancestors, the official classes were more concerned with the secular aspects of the presence of these foreigners in the provinces. The diplomatic representatives of the Powers were concentrated in, and seldom emerged from, Peking and the Treaty Ports, while the missionaries acted as a kind of intelligence network, albeit frequently ignored, for them throughout the country, a state of affairs as offensive to officialdom then as it would be today.

To the most efficient and progressive administration, the governance of 19th century China would have presented many intractable problems. Its huge size, vast population, multiplicity of languages, extremes of climate giving rise to natural disasters on the grand scale, and lack of communications, posed administrative difficulties compared to which the problem of the rapacious Powers paled into insignificance. However, no such efficient and progressive administration existed. Instead, this enormous and unwieldy conglomerate had been ruled since the mid-17th century by the Manchu, or Ch’ing, dynasty, themselves foreigners to the native Chinese. Once warlike and irresistible, the Imperial family had degenerated over the centuries into effete, vicious and incompetent flabbiness. Hidebound by archaic ceremonial, semi-paralysed by the corrupt ‘eunuch’ system of palace administration, fearing all technological innovation, by the end of the 19th century the Manchus had become worthless as an engine of national government. By comparison with them, the Tsar of Russia was a model of dynamism and progressive thought. The British Minister in Peking at the turn of the century, Sir Claude MacDonald, described the mandarins of the Chinese government as being as ignorant as they were arrogant, epithets which, incidentally, the said mandarins themselves would probably have used in reference to Sir Claude and his colleagues of the other legations.

Only superstitious belief in the divinity of the Emperor and his terrible aunt, the Empress Dowager, and the conservatism of the masses allowed the Manchus, for a few more years and insofar as it could be imposed, to exercise authority over the land.

For the purposes of this book the incumbent Emperor Kuang Hsu, a crushed and feeble cypher, may be largely ignored. Responsibility for the events of the summer of 1900 lay with the Empress Dowager Tsu Hai who had been the de facto ruler of China for nearly forty years since the death of the Emperor Hsien-feng whose favourite concubine she had been.

To describe this extraordinary woman as an enigmatic figure is to understate the case. Although she ruled China for nearly half a century until her death in 1908, we know much less about her than about many insignificant western monarchs of the far more distant past. Much that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents