Boxer Rebellion 1900: Spirit Soldiers, Cixi's War and the 55-Day Siege

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Between 1899 and 1901 a movement of teenagers and unemployed farmers in northern China, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, convinced the Empress Dowager Cixi to back them against eight foreign empires. Its roots lay in Shandong province after China's defeat in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, as foreign powers carved out spheres of influence. Cheap imported cotton ruined hand spinners, a foreign railroad idled boatmen on the Grand Canal, Yellow River floods were followed by drought, and missionaries protected by extraterritoriality intervened in lawsuits for their converts. In November 1897 villagers killed two German missionaries in the Juye Incident, and Kaiser Wilhelm II used it to seize a Shandong bay.

Under the slogan support the Qing, destroy the foreigners, the Boxers marched on Beijing in 1900. After the German minister Clemens von Ketteler was assassinated by a Manchu captain and the powers seized the coastal forts, Cixi declared war. Diplomats, missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians held the Legation Quarter for 55 days. Admiral Seymour's 2,000-man relief force was stranded when the tracks were torn up, and 20,000 Eight Nation Alliance troops took Tianjin and broke the siege in August 1900. Cixi fled disguised as a peasant, and the 1901 Boxer Protocol helped bring down the dynasty in 1911.

• Initiates were shot with blank rounds at point blank range to prove that spirit soldiers made them bulletproof.
• Villagers blamed church spires and deep foundations for cutting the dragon veins of the land and causing the drought.
• Defenders built the International Gun from a British barrel, an Italian carriage and Russian shells, crewed by Americans.
• Supreme commander Ronglu withheld artillery from the Gansu Braves and reportedly had troops fire blanks and firecrackers.
• The indemnity of 450 million taels, one for each person in China, grew to nearly a billion with 39 years of interest.