The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900
By Diana Preston
Diana Preston was born in London in 1952. She is an Oxford-trained historian and it was at Oxford that she met her husband and co-writer Michael. She studied modern history, he studied ancient languages. After earning her degree, she worked as a freelance writer, mostly travel articles for UK newspapers and magazines. She would also write book reviews for the wall street journal and Los Angeles Times. Her first nonfiction book was released in 1995 and as of this review, she is still writing. Her most recent book on the Yalta conference was released in 2019. She and her husband Michael also released a historical fiction series on the Mughal Empire under the pen name Alex Rutherford (Neat!). She is also an avid climber, having climbed Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and Mount Roraima in Venezuela. Before we dive into the book proper, however, I kinda want to provide some context.
In the year 1900, China was a nation in deep distress (Still in their Century of Humiliation.). The Qing Empire was seen by many Han Chinese as a foreign occupation... Because in a lot of ways it was (Yes). The Qing dynasty was founded by invading Manchus from Manchuria, who overthrew the native Ming dynasty in the 1600s. Now, the Manchus had had a lot of support from Han Chinese at the time, as the Ming were seen as weak and corrupt. Those supporters were adopted into the Manchus, either through marriage, appointment, or literal adoption into a Manchu family and clan. Perhaps because of this, the Qing were very concerned with maintaining the Manchu people as a separate identity from the Han and often went through periods of banning intermarriage and clearing Han Chinese from government posts and then into more liberal periods of intermixing (And if I remember correctly, this ran counter to how the Han tended to deal with foreign invaders. It wasn’t the first time. They basically assimilated anyone who conquered them.).
The Han also resented the Manchus for things like enforcing the queue haircut which was not a traditional Chinese haircut and trying to suppress Han traditions and cultures from time to time (Which is not a very good way to, you know… stay on the throne. It didn’t help that the Qing dynasty also failed to prevent Western Imperialism.{I feel like the Western Imperialism was the more important of the two}). I have mixed feelings about this because some of those traditions were harmless and others that the Manchu's opposed were things like female foot binding, where an infant girl's foot is literally broken and reformed to make it impossible for her to do things like walk fast (Yes, but trying to impose reforms like that from on high never works.). There were also taxation issues and the eunuchs.
The eunuchs weren't a Manchu innovation but a perennial problem in the Chinese system. Now the idea was simple enough: create a class of educated men who have no familial loyalties because they can't have children and thus will be totally loyal to the state. The problem is this has never worked! Whether it's a class of slave soldiers like the Mameluke and the Janissaries, or men who swear to celibacy like Christian Priests and Monks or Eunuchs. What happens is either they adopt extended family members or they come together and work as a class to dominate and control the government often to the detriment of everyone else! (Or in the case of celebrate priests, they just...aren’t actually celibate. So many popes had kids. So. Many.) We as a species need to accept that you cannot create a group of people who have no conflicting loyalties and will likely create a slow poison that will destroy or take over your civilization if you try! That said, a small part of me does look forward with macabre glee at how new technologies will likely convince people to try again and recreate this failure point in new and exciting ways. But I'm getting off-topic.
By 1900 neither the eunuchs nor the Manchus were the biggest problem on the plate because the Westerners had not only arrived but were digging in. The 1800s had been a series of humiliations for the Chinese. Whether it was the Opium Wars or the series of uneven treaties (“Uneven” does not really describe them. {Yes but the uneven/unequal treaties is what the Chinese named them so I’m deferring to them}) that allowed western powers to snip off enclaves for their own use. There was also the Taiping Rebellion and the fact that the Qing had had to turn to a British officer to train an army good enough to put down the rebellion. On top of that, the western technologies and businesses flooding China were putting thousands upon thousands out of work with no alternatives (This is why I am a principle anti-imperialist. When you use conquest, or for that matter the IMF, to strip a country of its resources without benefit to them, subjugate its people to the yoke of capitalism, install and prop up corrupt elites… You can tell yourself whatever lies you want about helping them “develop”, “civilize” or whatever, it never actually ends well for those people and it is always wrong. Period.{While I’m certainly not going to bat for imperialism, this sounds like an argument for complete nonintervention more than anything else} There are ways of helping a country develop that don’t involve stripping them bare. It’s just that, well… no one does it.). Severe drought in the north meant that the crops were failing and even the rich farmers were facing starvation. The fact that the only real major relief being offered to the average Han was coming from foreign missionaries only ground salt into the wound. This wasn't helped by the fact that Chinese converts would use missionaries to aid in lawsuits and other troubles, increasing the feeling of your average Chinese feeling like a 2nd or even 3rd class citizen in their own homeland (Because they were.). Now some missionaries were well-meaning people who wanted to help, but there were opportunists, hucksters, and worse among their ranks and the missionaries practiced almost zero self-policing
It's here that the book steps in to cover the Boxer Rebellion, the explosion of a xenophobic, traditionalist, and mystical populist movement of men and women who believed that through mastery of martial art rituals they could summon Chinese spirits to throw out the foreigners. The Manchu court found itself in a tense position because the Boxers could just as easily turn into an anti-Manchu movement. So it seems they decided to try and point the Boxers at the Westerners and stay out of the way. Mrs. Preston takes us through the months before the uprising as increasing tensions and confrontations led to anxieties and concerns among the missionaries and converted population of Northern China (The other reason not to do imperialism. The locals might just get fed up and kill you.{I should note this is usually used as an excuse for more imperialism, the Zulus tried to kill us, we need to flood their country with more troops!}). Especially as the Boxers became increasingly aggressive, attacking, robbing, and torturing Chinese converts to Christianity to death. The Boxers would also spread stories of Christian missionaries being the darkest of sorcerers who gained their powers by eating Chinese babies and using the blood of menstruating women. Bishops were promoted to literal devils of hell, with protestants usually having to be content with being mere demons or unclean mortal sorcerers.
Missionaries would bring their warnings to the diplomatic community in Peking, who for the most part ignored it. Although they did request and receive armed reinforcements for their community. By the early summer months, confrontation and harassment became common even in Peking. Everything came to a head around June 18th when German diplomat Clemens Von Ketteler shot and killed a Chinese boy who he suspected of being a Boxer. It's interesting to note that this was considered rather stupid of him even at the time and following events pretty much prove this right. This triggered a military riot and a wave of revenge killings directed on Chinese Christians and led to Manchu Captain En Hai shooting and killing Ketteler in return, something I can't really blame him for. This however triggered a lot of reactions from an international expedition of troops marching towards Peking, that was forced back to a mass siege of the legations that ran from June 20th to August 14th.
It's on this siege and the expedition that relieve that siege that the bulk of the book focuses on, for the most part using first-hand accounts from the Americans and Europeans that were trapped in the legations and to a lesser extent the Catholic cathedral known as the Beitang. Mrs. Preston also uses first-hand accounts of the officers of the international expedition that relieved the siege and took Peking. It's here that I have to note the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Mrs. Preston does a good job of taking these first-hand accounts and weaving them together into a coherent and gripping narrative of people trapped and surrounded by hostile forces trying to survive against brutal odds. Given how the Boxers treated people who surrendered, it was widely accepted that this was going to be a battle to the death. What I was found interesting was that many of these first-hand accounts were actually written by the women of the legation, who were not allowed to take part in the fighting but did run the hospital, manage the food supplies, and performed other tasks like sewing sandbags to use in barricades when walls were sapped or defenses had to be shored up. (Okay that part is interesting because in a lot of historical accounts, women get short shrift. That said, there are enough historical treatments of imperialism from the point of view of the imperialists. Given issues talked about below, this is a special case, but it still irks me.)
However, these sources are massively skewed towards English and American sources. We don't even get a lot of French or Italian viewpoints despite their being present in the siege. There are zero first-hand accounts used of the Japanese troops and officers that defended the legations, although I should note that the Japanese troops were universally praised by the defenders for their discipline, endurance, and fighting ability. Additionally, the Chinese coverts are also on record as praising the Japanese troops for being more willing to take risks to defend them and share food with them. Nor are there much in the way of Russian sources used in this book, even though Russian troops were a massive presence in the relief expedition second only to the Japanese. I could see issues arising in getting a hold of primary Russian sources but there shouldn't have been any issues in finding Japanese sources and there should be some! (Yes, but the Author is English. So we’re not just gonna be Eurocentric, but Anglocentric to boot.{Interestingly enough I can’t find any Japanese books about the Boxer Rebellion, I mean it could be a case of not being translated…})
Mrs. Preston does however explain the lack of first-hand Chinese sources. There don't appear to be any. Despite the Boxer Rebellion being lauded in the last half of the 20th Century as valiant proto communists, there seems to have been no preserving of any sources. Of course, most of the Boxers were illiterate according to popular tradition (To say nothing of going through decades of civil war and foreign invasion that has a tendency to destroy documents.{Started by the Boxers, they burnt down Imperial China’s version of the Library of Alexandra and didn’t take the books out first! Argh!!!}) and the issue is confused by a number of Westerners, including one survivor of the siege, publishing fraudulent accounts claiming to be written Chinese first-hand accounts. This has made using anything claiming to be a Chinese primary source fraught at best. Add in that recently the Chinese government has been slowly but surely moving the Boxers out of the spotlight and into dim forgotten annals of history for various reasons (Basically, the Boxers weren’t actually proto-communists. {Ironically the Taiping have a better claim despite being a very weird cult}) and you end up with a situation where despite Mrs. and Mr. Preston heading off to China to try and research the Boxers, you find stuff that was written at the time to be nearly non-existent. This is still aggravating though and limits the usefulness of the book as a reference.
Still, the book is a well-written and informative look at events in Northern China at the time and wraps up by going over the results of the Boxer Rebellion. Mrs. Preston is to be commended for not shying away from describing western atrocities but going into the same depth and examination as she does with Boxer atrocities. Whether it's discussing the Boxers burning down Hanlin Academy and destroying vast amounts of priceless Chinese literature, or the sheer brutality of the international expedition in its wholesale looting and sacking of Peking as if it was a medieval army. The Prestons are blunt and matter-of-fact in describing what happened and who did what according to the material they have. Reading this book does help one grasp why there was and still is a good amount of resentment towards the West from China both its people and its government, as well as grasping the complex mess that China was at the time. Still, the lack of sources outside of Anglo witnesses is a deep and regrettable weakness. Because of this, I'm giving The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900 By Diana Preston a B-. Give it a look but know you're gonna need to grab other books to do additional research on the topic if this is something you're really interested in.
I hope you enjoyed this review, next week on Oct 1st we’ll be starting our second Fangsgiving, which was voted for by ever wise patrons. Via their selection, we’ll be focusing on vampires so I’ll be reaching back into the romantic/gothic era of English Literature. So we’ll be looking at The Vampire by John Polidori and Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. That’s right we’re opening with a doubleheader. Now, this is all because of votes taken on https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you can join us and vote on future content! All for a dollar a month. Join now and help decide if November will be devoted to Dune or not! Also, vote for what books will be reviewed in December! Hope to see you there, until then, stay safe and Keep Reading!
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