A Tragic, Chinese Summer

It was a sweltering summer in Beijing, China in 1900.  Not only were the temperatures at record levels, but so were the political tensions.  The previous December, two missionaries were hacked to death in a rural area outside of the Chinese capital.  The culprits were labeled as members of a secret organization called the Boxers.  It was an organization that had begun as an anti-dynastic group but over the last couple of decades, it shifted its focus against the presence of Europeans and other outsiders in China.  

In late June of that year, the Boxers surrounded the foreign legation quarters in the capital and began a siege that would last until August.  The British, a leading power in the world, represented the main leadership of the foreign powers and organized their defense.  The French, the Americans and the Japanese also served in a leadership capacity in their attempts to defend the foreigners in the legations.  In addition to the foreigners in danger, the legation quarters were also sheltering a slew of Chinese converts to Christianity who arrived from various beleaguered missions in the surrounding mountains and fields.   

Through those summer months, a waiting game ensued as the legation defenders and their Chinese “guests” attempted to hold out against an increasingly hostile, emboldened and imperial-sponsored rag-tag group of fanatics while at the same time, waiting for a relief force made up of the world powers coming from Tianjin, a port city to the southeast.  As the allied forces made their way to the capital, the defenders fought day and night, they ate increasingly inedible food and slept very little.  Among the military and diplomatic officials who helped in the defense, missionaries also helped in the fight while the wives of missionaries served as nurses to the injured.  In mid-August, the legations were finally saved, the Boxers were defeated and the Qing Dynasty given a fatal blow. 

Over the course of the siege, westerners were already speaking of the legacy of the event.  Missionary William Martin melodramatically suggested, “this siege in Peking (Beijing) will undoubtedly take rank as one of the most notable in the annals of history.”  Sarah Conger, the wife of the U.S. minister to China, had a more level headed assessment.  In a letter to her nephew, she wrote, “What do you think of the history that is being made?  Only a small portion of it will ever be handed down for future generations to ponder.”  Sadly, history has fallen into favor of the minister’s wife.  There was one film made on the subject called 55 Days in Peking back in the 1950s but in the last decade, new scholarship has been conducted on this forgotten period of Chinese and U.S. history.   

I was first drawn to the uprising because so many knew so little about that Chinese summer.  That is actually what motivates my current research interest.  I hope that my article has stoked a level of interest within the reader – perhaps, one might even do a little research themselves.  History is replete with these types of struggles; the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, the Biafra revolt in Nigeria, the Kampuchean revolution in Cambodia or the Zapatista Revolution in Mexico.  The researcher will learn two things – one, there is much more to history than previously thought and two, history is much more interesting than the same stories told every year.