Chapter 5: The Boxer Summer

Martyrdom and Its Uses

Paotingfu, July 1, 1900

Horace Tracy Pitkin had five weeks left when the railway and the telegraph went dead. He was thirty, a Yale man who had signed the Student Volunteer pledge and come to China to make good on it. He had reached the American Board station in Paotingfu,¹ a hundred miles south-west of Beijing, in 1897, with his wife Letitia; their son Horace was born at the station the following spring. In April 1900 he took them down to Shanghai and saw them off for America; Letitia’s health needed some months of rest in Ohio, and she promised to be back in October. The compound—a chapel, a girls’ boarding school and a boys’, two residences—lay in the south suburb of the walled city. A mile to the north, across the city, a separate Presbyterian station housed eight more Americans: two missionary couples, three children, and a bachelor physician. Outside the walls the Chihli plain ran flat to the horizon, the color of dust in the drought summer. By the end of May the Boxers had torn up a section of the rail line and cut the wire to Tianjin. Pitkin was alone with two unmarried women of the American Board, Mary Morrill and Annie Gould, who ran the station’s girls’ boarding school. Their twenty-two pupils had examinations set for June 18, and with the railway gone there was no safe way to send the children home. On May 30, Morrill wrote home: “Miss Gould and I cannot leave, if we would, and would not if we could.”²

The first Christian killed at Paotingfu was not any of the three Americans. On the afternoon of June 28, an American Board pastor named Meng Chang-chun was packing books at the street chapel within the city when Boxers seized him, bound him, dragged him to a temple they had occupied, and beheaded him. He had been ordained at the compound in 1889, as the first native pastor in the American Board’s North China mission, and held a circuit across the surrounding villages.³ A day or two before his arrest, his son Titus, a boy of twelve or thirteen, had refused to go into hiding; he wanted, he said, to stay and share his father’s fate. “Titus, if you do not seek a place of safety,” his father told him, “there will be none of our name left to tell the story of Jesus.”⁴ The boy was prevailed upon, and survived.

Two days later, on the afternoon of June 30, the Boxers attacked the Presbyterian compound at the north suburb. The eight Americans there perished in the flames. The news reached Pitkin at the south suburb that evening. He spent the night burying letters to his wife, to the mission, and to whatever foreign soldiers might arrive, wrapping each in waterproof covers and digging them into the floor of an outhouse, the faithful letter-carrier Lao Man at his side. Near midnight he gave Lao Man his last message: “Tell Horace’s mother to tell my boy Horace, that his father’s last wish is that when he is twenty-five years of age, he may come to China as a missionary.” Then he told Lao Man to climb the wall and go into hiding before the dawn.⁵

At dawn on July 1, in pouring rain, the Boxers attacked the south suburb compound from both ends. Pitkin went out on the chapel steps with a revolver and held them at bay, then retreated inside and fired through the windows until his ammunition was exhausted. He and the two women leaped from a window into the schoolyard and took refuge in a small room. They were found there. Pitkin was shot and then beheaded.⁶ Morrill and Gould were taken to the Boxer temple and held until the afternoon, when they were led outside the city wall to the south-east corner and beheaded. Morrill, by the accounts that reached the outside world, exhorted the crowd as she walked.⁷ William Cooper,⁸ a senior leader of Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission caught at Paotingfu on an inspection tour, had fled with the neighboring CIM household to an imperial army camp for protection; the colonel there robbed them and handed them over to the Boxers, and Cooper was beheaded that afternoon at the same corner of the wall as Morrill and Gould.

When the killing was over and the city quieter, Chinese Christians from Meng’s circuit disinterred his body from the ditch behind the temple. His hands were still bound behind his back. They released them, replaced the severed head, and buried the pastor in a coffin.⁹ At the compound where Pitkin died, the Boxers had thrown nine Chinese bodies into the pit with his; Morrill and Gould were buried where they fell, outside the south-east corner of the wall. Seven of the nine were children of the Meng brothers and of their sister; the eighth was the sister herself; the ninth was a pupil from a Shanxi mission school. Across Paotingfu and its out-stations the killing reached the country converts too.¹⁰ Many of the dead had chosen it. The station’s preachers and Bible-readers had helped the church members scatter to safety, then stayed at their own posts; everyone who fled survived. They said: “Our missionaries have remained with us; we will stand by them and live or die together.”¹¹ One Bible-woman, sending her son to safety, told him: “I shall stay and die with Miss Morrill.”¹² They had seen the end more clearly than the foreigners had. The memorials that would reach America over the next three years listed the foreign dead on their title pages. The Chinese dead, when named at all, would be named in illustrations and appendices. These accounts, too, survive only in missionary archives: the converts’ own testimony, passed through the hands of men who wrote in English for American readers.

Pitkin’s death was one among many no missionary society had ever had to count before. By the end of what would be called the Boxer Summer, one hundred and thirty-six Protestant missionaries and fifty-three of their children, and forty-seven Catholic missionaries, from bishops to lay brothers, were dead. The Chinese Christians killed alongside them numbered somewhere between thirty and thirty-two thousand, of whom the great majority were Catholics. For every foreign life taken, more than a hundred Chinese converts died. It was the summer of killing on a scale the Christian mission had never experienced.

Three years later, Robert E. Speer, secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, published A Memorial of Horace Tracy Pitkin. The book joined a memorial already at work. Pitkin had organized Yale’s first Student Volunteer Band as an undergraduate; in February 1901, two younger Student Volunteers of the class of 1898, Warren Seabury and Arthur Williams, laid the plan for a Yale mission of their own before this same Speer, and chose China as its field in part because of the man Yale had lost there: Pitkin’s sacrifice, the founders resolved, would be “atoned for somehow by us as Yale men”. Their Yale Foreign Missionary Society still operated a century later, by then renamed the Yale-China Association. Its field was chosen by the death at Paotingfu.

The Rising

On the morning of October 18, 1899, between a thousand and fifteen hundred Boxers massed at the Senluo Temple, an old shrine raised on a river dike within sight of the walls of Pingyuan, in northwest Shandong. They had come under a banner that read 興清滅洋 (xīng Qīng miè yáng, “revive the Qing, destroy the foreign”). They followed a pockmarked village healer named Zhu Hongdeng (朱紅燈, Zhū Hóngdēng), who after his first victories had taken to traveling in a red sedan chair. When an imperial officer rode up with cavalry and a company of infantry and opened fire, the Boxers charged with swords, spears, and a few hunting rifles, trusting the invulnerability their rituals had promised. The rifles cut them down. Twenty-seven died in the field; the rest scattered. To the peasants who counted the bodies, the lesson seemed plain: the magic did not work, and the movement around Pingyuan collapsed. But Zhu had escaped, and the story that traveled was not the slaughter but the rout that came before it: the morning a few hundred imperial soldiers broke and ran before the spears of men who believed no blade could touch them.¹³

The movement that killed Pitkin had begun not in the capital but in the inland counties of Shandong, among peasants, martial artists, and the poorly-employed ritual specialists who had been a feature of North Chinese village life for centuries.

They called themselves the 義和團 (Yìhétuán), the “Militia United in Righteousness”. Even the name was a maneuver. They had fought as the 義和拳 (Yìhéquán), the “Boxers United in Righteousness”, and only in the weeks around Senluo did they begin to style themselves a militia—the orthodox word, the respectable word, the word Governor Zhang Rumei (張汝梅, Zhāng Rǔméi) had reached for in June 1898 when he proposed to the throne that the boxing braves be made over into people’s militia. The practices beneath the names were older than either, though not equally old. Young men in the villages of western Shandong had drilled for generations in the forms of local boxing; the possession rituals that called the gods and heroes of the popular opera down onto the public boxing grounds, in the open, before any villager who cared to watch, had spread only in the mid-1890s; and the rites that promised a body impenetrable to sword and spear were the newest graft of all, carried through the region by itinerant healers and boxing teachers. What made them a movement rather than a county amusement, in the final years of the nineteenth century, was a confluence of pressures that had left rural Shandong in a condition approaching collapse.

The Yellow River had flooded catastrophically in 1898. By the autumn of 1899 the rain had stopped and scarcely returned. The summer of 1900 was one of the driest in living memory: no winter wheat had gone into the ground anywhere in the north, the soil baked too hard to plow, and the price of wheat and rice shot up. Displaced peasants moved along the roads. Villages that had lost their harvest turned their anger on whatever offered itself. What offered itself, in Shandong, was the Christian mission.

For forty years, under the treaty settlement that ended the Second Opium War—the Treaties of Tientsin, whose toleration article Samuel Wells Williams had helped to draft, and the Peking Convention that followed—missionaries had possessed the right to live in the Chinese interior and to claim the protection of their consulates against Chinese jurisdiction. Over those forty years, they had built a network of chapels, schools, and dispensaries across the north, staffed by foreign personnel and local converts. The converts, in turn, had acquired a peculiar legal standing. Disputes between a Christian and a non-Christian over a boundary, a debt, or a marriage contract no longer terminated in the county magistrate’s court alone; they could be appealed, through the missionary, to the foreign consul, and through the consul to the provincial governor, and thence back down the magisterial chain with pressure applied from above. The system did not always work in the Christian’s favor; it worked often enough that the pattern was clear. A Chinese Christian was not merely a man of a foreign religion. He was a man with a foreign protector.

The Boxers had a term for such men. They called them 二毛子 (èrmáozi, “secondary hairy ones”); the foreigners themselves were the 毛子 (máozi, “hairy ones”), and the converts were their Chinese seconds. The term was not coined for the occasion. It drew on a longer vocabulary of Chinese suspicion of collaboration, of the client who takes on the manners and interests of a patron. But in 1899 and 1900, as the posters began to go up in the villages of Shandong and as local Christians began to report fines and ransoms, looted homes and burned chapels, èrmáozi acquired a specific and dangerous meaning. It named a class of Chinese who, by their religion, had placed themselves outside the protection of the Chinese order—and who could therefore, by the logic of the Boxers, be killed without violating it.

The posters set out the grievances in rhyming verse.¹⁴ The foreigners had offended the gods and forgotten the ancestors. The churches had bottled up the sky: heaven sent no rain, the earth was scorched dry. The rumors that traveled with the placards went further: the foreigners had stolen Chinese eyes to make their medicines; the locomotives pressed upon the head of the dragon whose repose kept the land in balance. The drought was the gods’ response. The Boxers, aided by the gods and armed with invulnerability, would tear up the tracks, pull down the wires, kill the foreign devils, and the rain would come.

It was a cosmology in miniature. It was also, beneath the incantation, a catalogue of things that had actually happened.

The Court

On the morning of June 20, 1900, the German Minister, Clemens von Ketteler, set out in his sedan chair for the Zongli Yamen, the Qing foreign office, to protest the order that the legations leave Beijing within the day. He never reached it. At the mouth of the lane called Xizongbu Hutong, a block short, the banner soldiers posted at the corner opened fire on the chairs—the first shot, by his own later testimony, fired as a signal by a Manchu sergeant named En Hai—and the minister died in his chair. His interpreter, shot through the leg, dragged himself to the American Methodist compound; the news reached the legations with a Chinese outrider, galloping down Legation Street and shouting that the master was dead.¹⁵ Behind the barricades they threw up that day, the diplomats waited.

Through the winter of 1899–1900 the Boxers moved north from Shandong into Chihli, the province that surrounded Beijing. Foreign legations in the capital complained; the Qing court equivocated. In its edicts the Boxers hung between two names: 拳匪 (quánfěi, “the Boxer bandits”), whom a magistrate was bound to suppress, and 義民 (yìmín, “the righteous people”), a militia the throne might shield. A January edict inclined to the second; an order two weeks later, to the first. By spring, Boxer bands were entering the outskirts of Beijing itself, burning churches and Chinese Christian homes in sight of the city walls. By June, they were in the capital.

Cixi’s decision to back the Boxers, when it came, was the act of a ruler who had run out of other options. Western and Japanese troops had landed at Tianjin. A multinational relief force under the British Vice-Admiral Edward Seymour had set out for Beijing on June 10 and been stopped short of the capital, cut off along the wrecked railway. On June 17, allied naval forces seized the Dagu forts at the mouth of the Hai River—an act of war conducted on Chinese territory without a declaration. What reached Beijing on the nineteenth was not word of the forts’ fall but the allied ultimatum that had preceded it; the court ordered the legations out of the capital that day, and von Ketteler was dead the next morning. On June 21, 1900, Cixi issued an imperial decree in the name of the Guangxu Emperor, declaring war on eleven foreign powers at once.

The decree was a strange instrument: more manifesto than formal declaration. It named no foreign power and was addressed inward, to “all subjects under heaven”, a summons to the empire rather than a notice to its enemies; in the event, as Li Hongzhang¹⁶ observed, it was never even telegraphed to the provinces or to the foreign governments.¹⁷ The shooting had not waited for it: on the afternoon of June 20, Qing regular troops had joined the Boxers in opening fire on the legations. The decree made the siege a policy. Across the north, the signal was understood as permission. Provincial governors who had resisted the Boxers now either joined them or stood aside. Governors who had been inclined toward violence, Yuxian¹⁸ in Shanxi above all, took the decree as license.

The Killing

The geography of the Boxer killing was specific. It ran along the corridors of North China: down the new railway from Beijing to Paotingfu and onward by the cart road into Shanxi in the west; along the rail line from Beijing to Tianjin in the east; along the routes that tied the mission stations to the treaty ports. The China Inland Mission, which had placed its workers deepest into the interior, suffered worst: 58 adult missionaries and 21 of their children killed, more than any other Protestant society lost in 1900.

The most infamous single event was the Taiyuan Massacre¹⁹ of July 9, 1900. The governor of Shanxi province, Yuxian, who had been transferred there from Shandong after his protection of the Boxers became a diplomatic embarrassment, summoned the remaining foreign missionaries in his capital to the yamen²⁰ under a promise of protection. Forty-five were gathered there: Protestant and Catholic, men and women and children, two Italian Franciscan bishops and seven Franciscan Missionaries of Mary among them. All forty-five were killed that afternoon in the open ground before the governor’s gate. The seven Sisters, by the Franciscan accounts that later reached Rome, died singing. The Chinese Christian servants who had accompanied the missionaries were killed alongside them.

The smaller killings were more numerous, and more representative. At Taigu in Shanxi, the Oberlin Band, six American missionaries whose Ohio predecessors had gone out together under the American Board in the 1880s, died on July 31: the men fired from a flat mission roof until their ammunition gave out, and all six were beheaded, eight Chinese Christians with them, their heads sent in a basket to the governor at Taiyuan. At Fenchow, ten more died on August 15. The English Baptist Missionary Society lost every missionary it had on the ground in Shanxi, and a hundred and twenty of its Chinese converts. Across Chihli and Shanxi, province after province, chapel after chapel: the pattern repeated itself. A station would hear rumors, send its women and children toward the treaty ports, wait too long, be overtaken. The China Inland Mission stations in the Shanxi interior kept falling through August and into September, the last of them weeks after foreign troops had entered Beijing. The distance between the capital and the inland stations was measured not in miles but in weeks of news; the relief that saved the legations on August 14 did not reach Shanxi for months.

The Chinese dead were not incidental to the pattern; they were its center. In the Catholic cathedral towns of Chihli and Shanxi, entire congregations were massacred together; across China, not less than thirty thousand Catholic converts were destroyed, by Bishop Favier’s estimate.²¹ The Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing lost at least two hundred and twenty-two of its several hundred Chinese faithful, the number its Holy Synod would enroll for veneration two years later. The Chinese Protestant dead, some two thousand from Chihli to Canton, included whole families, village schoolmasters, women’s Bible-study groups, young men who had spent a year or two in a mission school and acquired, with their literacy, a fatal visibility. When the accounts were published in the United States, the emphasis fell, inevitably, on the foreign dead, because the foreign dead had names the American public could pronounce. But the bulk of the suffering was Chinese, and the bulk of the dead had, in their lifetimes, bet everything on an association with the missionaries that their neighbors now held against them to the point of death.

The Siege

The barricades that turned the Legation Quarter into a fortress were the work of a missionary engineer: Francis Gamewell,²² a Methodist who had trained at Rensselaer and Cornell before he turned to the mission field. With a crew of fellow missionaries known as “the fighting parsons”,²³ he walled the streets with sandbags, loopholed the houses, and the perimeter held. The sandbags themselves were sewn by the women of the legations from silk, satin, damask, and brocade—even Lady MacDonald’s curtains went into the bags.²⁴ Behind that improvised rampart, from June 20 to August 14, fifty-five days, about four hundred and seventy foreign civilians, four hundred soldiers from eight nations, and roughly three thousand Chinese Christians held an irregular pocket of some fifty acres in the heart of the Chinese capital against the combined forces of the Boxers and the imperial Wuwei Corps. The British Minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, commanded the defense with a kind of donnish exasperation; the Americans and Germans held the Tartar Wall. The Chinese Christians, brought from the burned churches of Beijing and the surrounding countryside, were housed in the Fu, Prince Su’s palace compound, on the quarter’s northern perimeter. They dug trenches, carried water, and absorbed the heaviest shelling. They received smaller rations than the foreigners. Their names, unlike the foreigners’, were not printed in the siege rolls.

The siege became a literature. From the first shot it was telegraphed abroad, dramatized, illustrated in the London Graphic and the New York Harper’s Weekly, and eventually remembered in a dozen memoirs and a 1963 Hollywood film, 55 Days at Peking. The image, a tiny band of Westerners holding out against the Asian horde, structured Western narrative of the whole event, crowding out nearly every other element. It flattered an older image: the Christian remnant amid the heathen multitude, the Maccabees in the Temple, the disciples in the upper room. What it obscured was the rest of the dead.

The relief came at last. An Eight-Nation Alliance—Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary—took the walled city of Tianjin in mid-July, assembled a column of some twenty thousand men, and marched it up the wrecked railway line to the capital in ten days of August heat, entering Beijing on August 14. Among the Marines who fought from Tianjin to Beijing was an eighteen-year-old named Smedley Butler,²⁵ twice wounded in the campaign. The Empress Dowager, disguised in peasant’s clothes, fled the next morning with the Emperor and her personal entourage, a flight that ended ten weeks later in Xi’an; the plenipotentiaries she named made terms with the foreigners in the imperial capital she had abandoned. The legations were relieved. The troops who relieved them, over the next weeks and months, looted Beijing so comprehensively that the auction of plunder on the British Legation lawn became a daily fixture, silks and furs and blackwood furniture going under the hammer, and dealers came up from Shanghai and Hong Kong to buy on commission for the auction houses of Europe.

The looting was the part that traveled; the killing stayed where it was done. Through the autumn and winter the allied command sent punitive columns out from the capital across the Chihli plain, burning village after village wherever it was thought to have sheltered Boxers—sorties the British war correspondent George Lynch called “punitive picnics”, for the looting, arson, and rape they licensed. At Cangzhou a German raid killed forty-three; at Yongqing, nearly a hundred and fifty, without a loss of its own.²⁶ In late October a British column reached Paotingfu, where the summer’s killing had begun; an allied commission followed with a trial. On November 6, with Waldersee’s approval, three officials were beheaded—the provincial treasurer, who had been the judge that July; the city’s Manchu commandant; and the colonel who had given Cooper’s party up to the Boxers—and the column dynamited the gate-towers and a length of the wall, leveled the Boxer temple, and fined the gentry a hundred thousand taels.²⁷ Arthur Henderson Smith, thirty years an American Board missionary and no enemy of the mission, called that trial the most righteous act of the whole occupation—and the rest of the campaign, the promiscuous killing of non-combatants, a wholesale repeal of the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments.²⁸

The Uses of Martyrdom

The Boxer deaths reached the American public in waves, from midsummer 1900 onward. The telegraph carried the siege dispatches through Chefoo and Shanghai; the casualty lists followed by steamer. The first reports, fragmentary and sensational, ran in every major newspaper for weeks: the relief expedition, the siege, the rescue. The second wave came with the published memorials: Speer’s A Memorial of Horace Tracy Pitkin in 1903; Luella Miner’s China’s Book of Martyrs in 1903; Robert Coventry Forsyth’s The China Martyrs of 1900 in 1904; the dozen denominational biographies that appeared between 1901 and 1905 and that together constituted a small literature of Protestant martyrology.

The shape of the martyrology was old. It was the shape of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs refitted for North China—the shape of Roman Christians fed to the lions, of Marian Protestants burned at Smithfield. The missionaries were identified with the Apostolic age; their deaths were read as confirmation, not refutation, of the cause. Speer wrote of Pitkin as a man who had “set His service above all else, even life” and closed his preface with a question aimed at the reader: “And if he, why not we?”²⁹ Miner, in her account of the Shanxi dead, reached for Tertullian: the blood of the martyrs was “the seed of the church”.³⁰ And the American students to whom these books were addressed, in college chapels and SVM recruiting halls and Sunday-school classrooms, responded as the martyrology intended. A death in China, printed in the right pamphlet and read at the right hour, could move a young man from the pew to the pier. SVM enrollments surged; the call for laborers was answered in full; the Yale Foreign Missionary Society chose China as its field in part as Pitkin’s memorial.

A few missionary voices cautioned that the Chinese violence had arisen from specific grievances and that the enterprise should take those grievances seriously. Timothy Richard³¹ argued for a restrained indemnity and for educational reform as the long-term response. Smith, whose years had been spent mostly in the villages of Shandong, pressed in China in Convulsion (1901) the harder question beneath its martyrological surface: whether the missions had been behaving, on the ground, as evangelists or as consular clients. But the dominant note of the literature was not reflective. It was agonistic. The Chinese had killed the missionaries; the missionaries had died for the Gospel; the Gospel had been vindicated, and would now advance. The formulation was circular, and it held.

The martyrs were not the only use the enterprise made of the summer. When the killing stopped, some survivors set about collecting the bill. William Scott Ament, of the same American Board that had lost Pitkin at Paotingfu, had come through the fifty-five-day siege in the British Legation; he now led expeditions through the villages south of the capital to exact indemnities for the mission and its converts.³² On Christmas Eve the New York Sun reported that he had taken thirteen times the actual damages, to be spent “for the propagation of the Gospel.” Mark Twain, newly home from Europe and a vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League, answered the dispatch in the North American Review: Ament’s feat, he wrote in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” was “a blasphemy so hideous and so colossal” that its mate was “not findable in the history of this or of any other age.”³³ The number was a cable clerk’s error—a “1/3” read as “13”—and Ament had in fact taken a third more than the losses, not thirteen times, and spent it on widows and orphans. Twain, corrected, gave no ground. A third in excess was theft as surely as thirteenfold; the only escape, he wrote, was to revise the commandment “for use in pagan lands”: “Thou shall not steal—except when it is the custom of the country.”³⁴

The Village Account

Zhang Zhidong (張之洞, Zhāng Zhīdòng) and Liu Kunyi (劉坤一, Liú Kūnyī), the reformers and governors-general of the Yangzi provinces, refused to implement Cixi’s declaration of war at all; they signed local agreements with the foreign consuls and kept their territories out of the conflict. Liang Qichao, raising funds in Hawaii for a royalist uprising of his own, would denounce the Boxers as superstitious fanatics and the court that had armed them as worse. The Qing dynasty itself would never recover from the humiliation of 1900; the New Policies³⁵ that followed, and the revolution of 1911 that ended the imperial system altogether, had their roots in the court’s final discrediting by the Boxer catastrophe. The Boxers were, to most educated Chinese, a disaster—a Chinese catastrophe understood and mourned by Chinese.

But among the villagers of Chihli and Shanxi, another account persisted, and would continue to persist through the twentieth century. In that account, the Boxer violence had a cause that the educated narrative overlooked. The foreign churches really had taken land that Chinese families claimed: at Liyuantun, on the Shandong–Zhili border, a temple to the Jade Emperor had been signed over to the Catholic mission and its worshippers shut out, in a quarrel that ran for years and gave the rising one of its first causes.³⁶ The local converts really had used foreign protection to prevail in local disputes—and the villages that had lost those disputes remembered the names. The railways really had taken the livelihoods of the boatmen and carters whose routes they replaced. The drought was not the Boxers’ cause but it was a real drought, and the grain was not arriving. The system that the missionaries occupied was a system of unequal treaties, imposed after two wars, that made foreigners the privileged class in a country not their own. The Boxers’ theology of invulnerability was fantasy; the system they were attacking was not.

The Boxers were to have a long afterlife. The historian Paul Cohen, a century on, would sort it into three keys: the event, as historians reconstruct it; the experience, as those who lived it carried it; and the myth, as each later present refits it to its own uses.³⁷ The martyrologies had been the myth in its American key. China composed its own. The village account would resurface in the 1920s, in the Anti-Christian Movement that swept China’s campuses and missions. It would resurface after 1949, when the People’s Republic fixed the movement’s official name as the Yihetuan Movement (義和團運動, Yìhétuán Yùndòng) and canonized it as a popular rising against imperialism. It would resurface again in 2018, when Xinhua marked a trade war with Washington by republishing the Boxers as a parable of national resistance—反帝愛國, “anti-imperialist and patriotic”, the agency’s headline read—while quietly declining to mention its Chinese Christian dead.³⁸ The thirty thousand were absent from the headline as they had been absent from the American memorials—erased by both sides, each for its own reasons. Of all the accounts of the Boxer Summer that were constructed in the hundred and eighteen years since, none was more persistent, and none more difficult for the missionary enterprise to answer, than the one that had been circulating, by posters and by mouth, in the villages of the North China plain in the spring of 1900.

The Protocol

The final accounting of the Boxer Summer was rendered not by the missionaries but by the foreign powers that had relieved the legations. On September 7, 1901, in the Spanish Legation in Beijing, the representatives of eleven nations and the Qing court signed the Boxer Protocol.³⁹ The two names on the Chinese side were those of Prince Qing (慶親王, Qìng Qīnwáng) and Li Hongzhang, the seventy-eight-year-old viceroy who had refused to enforce the court’s declaration of war and was now recalled from the south to sign its reckoning. He affixed his signature and was dead within two months. Its terms were crushing. China was to pay an indemnity of four hundred and fifty million taels of silver—roughly a tael per Chinese subject, a number designed as symbolic retribution—across thirty-nine years, at four percent interest, against the security of its customs receipts and its salt monopoly. The total, with interest, would approach a billion taels. Foreign troops were to be permanently stationed in the Beijing Legation Quarter and along the rail corridor from Beijing to the sea, ensuring that no future Chinese government could ever besiege a foreign embassy again. Execution or exile was decreed for the senior officials who had supported the Boxers, including Yuxian, who was executed in February 1901. The Zongli Yamen, the office the court had itself improvised under treaty pressure in 1861, was abolished and replaced by a Foreign Ministry on the Western model, ranked above the six boards. The examination system, through which the imperial bureaucracy had been selected for over a thousand years, would be formally abolished four years later.

The Protocol was, in effect, the final entry in a treaty system that had begun with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. It ended the practical independence of the late Qing state. It also, as the indemnity began to be collected, set in motion a smaller and stranger process: the redirection of a portion of the American share back to China, through a scholarship program that would carry more than a thousand Chinese students to American universities over the decades that followed. From the blood of 1900, the missionary enterprise would derive its greatest institutional triumph.

Two Readings

Two incompatible accounts of what the Boxer Summer had meant were offered in the years that followed, and each was offered with conviction.

To the missionaries, and to the American constituencies they spoke to, the lesson was that the work must continue and expand. The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. Pitkin’s death produced the Yale Foreign Missionary Society; the CIM’s losses produced a recruitment surge that would carry the mission past a thousand workers within a dozen years; the publicity of 1900 brought American Protestantism’s attention to China as no event before it had. The proper response to the Boxers’ violence was more hospitals, more schools, more churches. The Chinese who had done the killing were to be forgiven and re-approached; the Chinese who had died for the faith were to be honored and imitated. The enterprise was vindicated by having been attacked.

To the Chinese who had survived the summer, the lesson was nearly the opposite. The Boxers had been destroyed; so had the Qing court’s capacity to resist foreign pressure; so had the fiction that Chinese civilization could meet the West on its own terms. What would follow would have to be something new—a reformed China, a republican China, eventually a revolutionary China—that did not make the old mistakes of either the Boxers or the court. The missionary enterprise, which had been the pretext for the violence, would be something to watch rather than welcome. Chinese Christianity, which had suffered worst and testified most, would have to find its own footing or be extinguished.

One Westerner put his name to the second reading. Robert Hart—the Ulsterman who had run the Qing’s Imperial Maritime Customs since 1863, and who had just spent the fifty-five days behind the same barricades—began writing his own account of the summer within weeks of the relief, the first essay dated Peking, August 1900.⁴⁰ The movement he had survived was, he told his Western readers, “patriotic in origin, justifiable in its fundamental idea”; it was, “in short, a purely patriotic volunteer movement, and its object is to strengthen China—and for a Chinese programme.”⁴¹ He gathered the essays the following year under a title he never bothered to explain: These from the Land of Sinim.

Both sides had passed through the same furnace, and their verdicts, opposed in everything else, agreed in one thing: the old order was finished. The Boxers had been the last argument that China could refuse the railway, the telegraph, and the mission school, and the argument had lost. Within months the court, from its refuge in Xi’an, was decreeing reforms it had beheaded men for urging. The missionary enterprise, whatever its memorials said, read the verdict the same way. American Protestantism took two heroes from the summer: the martyr and the engineer. The memorials belonged to Pitkin, but the future belonged to Gamewell—to the colleges, the hospitals, and the scholarships of a remitted indemnity.

The enterprise did expand; its numbers would peak in the 1920s. Chinese Christianity did find its own footing; the independent church movements, the True Jesus Church⁴² and the Little Flock among them, had their origins in the decade or two that followed the Boxer Summer, and grew from soil that had been watered not with foreign funds but with Chinese blood. The Three-Self Patriotic Movement that a Communist state would assemble in the 1950s did not continue these churches; where they would not join it, it broke them. What the two sides could not share was the dead, and the two accounts of them would diverge across the twentieth century, each developing within its own community, each encountering the other’s assumptions as a kind of foreign country.

The Boxer Summer had been the first great confrontation between the American missionary enterprise and the civilization it had gone to change. It was not the last. But it established, in one brief season, the emotional register in which every subsequent confrontation would be conducted. The missionaries had died. Their blood was sacred. The people who had killed them were, depending on which account one believed, agents of darkness to be overcome by more light, or agents of a coherent grievance whose account would have to be reckoned with before anything else could happen.

Of the two readings, the one that prevailed was the second: not more Gospel, but a new system. The quarrel that remained, and it would consume the century, was over who would build the new China, and to what end.

One account went home for collections and funds. The other stayed in the villages of North China.

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1. 保定 (Paoting, Bǎodìng), a prefectural city in Chihli (直隸, Zhílì) province, now Hebei. The missionary spelling “Paotingfu” preserves the Qing-era fu suffix (府, fǔ) that designated a prefectural seat.

2. Isaac C. Ketler (1902), The Tragedy of Paotingfu, p. 336.

3. Ibid., pp. 101–105. The ordination service on August 17, 1889, was the first held by the Congregational Church in North China.

4. Ibid., p. 333.

5. Ibid., pp. 382–386: Lao Man’s own account as Ketler records it, followed by the letter of January 19, 1901 from Rev. J. Walter Lowrie, a Presbyterian missionary who accompanied the relief expedition to Paotingfu in October 1900.

6. Ibid., pp. 389–390. The detail here follows the report of Captain Grote Hutcheson, 6th U.S. Cavalry, who inspected the compounds and graves with the relief expedition: “In the mêlée Mr. Pitkin was shot and then beheaded”. The report is dated Paotingfu, October 25, 1900. Lowrie’s account (p. 386) reports only that he “was slain, but without prolonged suffering”; Robert C. Forsyth (1904), The China Martyrs of 1900, has him beheaded “by a sword stroke” (p. 24).

7. Forsyth (1904), The China Martyrs of 1900, pp. 24–25.

8. William Cooper (1858–1900), CIM Assistant Deputy Director, who had come to the mission from the secretaryship of the Y.M.C.A. at Gourock, on the Clyde. He was passing through Paotingfu on an inspection tour of the northern stations when the crisis closed the roads.

9. Ketler (1902), The Tragedy of Paotingfu, pp. 384, 386–387. Lowrie’s letter: “The hands which were still bound behind the back were released, and the severed head tenderly replaced.”

10. Forsyth (1904), The China Martyrs of 1900, pp. 26–28. The named martyrdoms clustered between June 28 and July 1. The Presbyterian mission’s roughly thirty Chinese dead, many killed at a distance from the city, perished “about the same time”; the district stayed under Boxer control until the allied punitive force reached Paotingfu some three and a half months later.

11. Arthur H. Smith (1901), China in Convulsion, vol. 2, p. 681; Smith’s “Personal Narratives” carry the Paotingfu martyrs through pp. 680–683.

12. Ibid., p. 683.

13. Joseph Esherick (1987), The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, pp. 250–253. The Shandong governor Yuxian, who would preside over the Taiyuan massacre the following summer, ordered Zhu Hongdeng’s arrest within the month; Zhu was executed in December 1899. Official accounts put the Boxer dead at twenty-seven, local accounts at thirty to forty; the banner’s 興 (xīng, “revive”) later gave way to the standard form 扶清滅洋 (fú Qīng miè yáng, “support the Qing, destroy the foreign”).

14. The best-known placard, which Zhang Shouchang (张守常) collated from seven recorded versions, opens: 神助拳，義和團，只因鬼子鬧中原……天無雨，地焦乾，全是教堂遮住天 (“The gods aid the fists; the Militia United in Righteousness—all because the foreign devils have plagued the Central Plain… Heaven sends no rain, the earth is scorched dry—it is all because the churches block the sky”). Esherick (1987), pp. 282, 299–301; Zhang Shouchang, “说《神助拳，义和团》揭帖” (“On the ‘Gods Aid the Fists, the Militia United in Righteousness’ Placard”), 历史研究 (Historical Research), no. 3 (1997), pp. 124–135, esp. p. 128.

15. Lanxin Xiang (2003), The Origins of the Boxer War, pp. 331–339. The interpreter was Heinrich Cordes, whose account of a premeditated, point-blank murder Xiang weighs against the outrider Liu Yucheng’s testimony of several shots and En Hai’s own interrogation record—a signal shot, his men firing after, and a revolver found in the minister’s chair with one round spent. En Hai was executed at the site on December 31, 1900, a date recorded on a contemporary German photo-print of the execution (Adolf Obst and Reinhold Breßler, 1900) and consistent with Field Marshal Waldersee’s diary of the following day.

16. 李鴻章 (Lǐ Hóngzhāng, 1823–1901), viceroy and the foremost architect of the Qing Self-Strengthening Movement; he had built the Beiyang Fleet that Japan destroyed in 1895 and signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ended that war. He died in Beijing on November 7, 1901, two months after putting his name to the Protocol.

17. The edict of 光緒二十六年五月二十五日 (June 21, 1900), issued in the Guangxu Emperor’s name, named no foreign state; it called the Boxers 義勇 (yìyǒng, “the righteous and brave”), recalled a recent edict declaring Boxers and Christians alike the sovereign’s 赤子 (chìzǐ, “children”), and closed by summoning “all you subjects under heaven” (爾普天臣庶) to arms. Li Hongzhang, refusing to treat it as binding, telegraphed to Minister Lü Haihuan in Berlin that the court, “though it has issued a declaration-of-war edict, has not transmitted it to the provinces or to the foreign governments” (朝廷雖有宣戰旨，並未行各省及各國政府電)—the ground on which the southern governors-general kept their provinces out of the war. The “eleven powers” is the conventional count of the states China was thereby at war with.

18. 毓賢 (Yùxián, 1842–1901), a Manchu official who served as governor of Shandong before being transferred to Shanxi in March 1900, where he became the most enthusiastic provincial backer of the Boxers.

19. 太原教案 (Tàiyuán Jiào’àn, “Taiyuan Religion Case”). Forsyth’s tally of forty-six—thirty-four Protestants, twelve Roman Catholics—includes Edith Coombs, killed on June 27; the yamen dead of July 9 number forty-five, the figure Smith’s Chinese eyewitness gives (thirty-three and twelve), with Esherick and Cohen counting forty-four. The twelve included the Franciscan bishops Gregory Grassi and Francis Fogolla and the seven Missionaries of Mary, all canonized among the 120 Martyrs of China by John Paul II in 2000; whether Yuxian personally ordered the executions or, as the scholar Roger Thompson has argued, mob violence overtook the scene cannot be resolved from the sources—the result was the same.

20. 衙門 (yámén), the administrative office and residence of a Qing official, combining court, jail, home, and government seat under a single compound.

21. W.A.P. Martin (1900), The Siege in Peking, p. 66.

22. Francis Dunlap Gamewell (1857–1950), American Methodist Episcopal missionary in Beijing; he studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Cornell, graduated from Dickinson College, and joined the mission in 1881. During the siege he served as chief of the Committee for Fortifications, its members all missionaries. The siege made him a celebrity in America; Syracuse made him an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1908. He died on August 14, 1950—fifty years to the day after the relief.

23. The committee’s sobriquet survives as the caption of a plate in Arthur H. Smith’s China in Convulsion (1901): “The Six ‘Fighting Parsons’ and Sergeant Murphy at Fort Cockburn” (facing vol. 2, p. 474).

24. The sandbag cloth, down to the ministers’ wives’ portieres, is described by Mrs. J. Inglis in Ada Haven Mateer’s Siege Days (1903), p. 177: “damask, silks, satins, brocades, bed linen, Mrs. Conger’s and Lady MacDonald’s beautiful portieres, all were made into bags.”

25. Smedley Darlington Butler (1881–1940), U.S. Marine Corps major general, wounded at Tianjin and again during the relief of Beijing. His 1935 polemic War Is a Racket would become the most publicly anti-imperialist statement by any senior American officer of his era.

26. Joseph Esherick (1987), The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, pp. 308–311, on the village-burning advance and the “punitive picnics” of looting, arson, and rape—the phrase is from Lynch (1901), The War of the Civilisations, p. 208. The Cangzhou and Yongqing figures are in Arthur H. Smith (1901), China in Convulsion, vol. 2, p. 717.

27. The three were Tingyong (廷雍), the provincial treasurer who had been judge during the July killings; Kuiheng (奎恆), the city’s Manchu commandant; and Lieutenant-Colonel Wang Zhankui (王占魁). Conger’s despatch of November 16, 1900 records the allied court of inquiry, Waldersee’s approval of the sentences, and the executions of November 6; the sitting provincial judge, Shen Jiaben (沈家本)—later the dynasty’s great law reformer—was spared. FRUS 1900, doc. 219; Forsyth (1904), The China Martyrs of 1900, p. 26 (the demolitions and the fine); Ketler (1902), The Tragedy of Paotingfu, p. 396 (Gaselee’s column, late October).

28. Smith (1901), China in Convulsion, vol. 2, pp. 714–716, singled out the Paotingfu trial as “the one most righteous in itself” of the occupation’s acts, while indicting the wider campaign as a wholesale breach of “the sixth, the seventh, and the eighth Commandments”.

29. Robert E. Speer (1903), A Memorial of Horace Tracy Pitkin, Preface, pp. 5–6.

30. Miner (1903), China’s Book of Martyrs, p. 462. The Latin original, from Tertullian’s Apologeticus (c. 197 AD), is semen est sanguis Christianorum—“the blood of the Christians is the seed [of the church].” It was a commonplace of Protestant martyrology from the Reformation onward; on Miner’s own page the tag belongs to a doubting survivor of the Taigu church, who “had read in history that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” and felt the light in his heart begin to fade.

31. Timothy Richard (1845–1919), Welsh Baptist missionary who led the Christian Literature Society for China from 1891 to 1915. Among the foreign institutions the Boxers did not reach, Richard’s press in Shanghai kept publishing through the crisis and became a principal voice for post-Boxer educational reform.

32. William Scott Ament (1851–1909), an American Board missionary in North China from 1877; he came through the fifty-five-day siege in the British Legation. The arc from his siege relief-work to the indemnity expeditions is the subject of Larry Clinton Thompson (2009), William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion; the memorial life is Henry D. Porter (1911), William Scott Ament, Missionary of the American Board to China.

33. The New York Sun of December 24, 1900 (its Peking correspondent Wilbur J. Chamberlin) carried the “thirteen times” report; Twain reprinted and answered it in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”, North American Review 172 (February 1901), pp. 161–176, the Ament passage at pp. 163–164.

34. The figure was a cable garble—a transmitted “1/3” read as “13”; Twain’s own footnote reads “Cable error. For ‘thirteen times’ read ‘one-third.’” The true collection was a third in excess of the assessed losses, applied to church expenses and the support of widows and orphans. In “To My Missionary Critics”, North American Review 172 (April 1901), pp. 520–534; the correction is at pp. 520–521 and 525, the revised commandment at p. 529.

35. The reform edict of January 29, 1901, issued from the court’s refuge in Xi’an, opened the decade of the 新政 (xīnzhèng, “New Policies”); much of its program had been urged by the Hundred Days reformers of 1898, six of whom were beheaded when Cixi crushed that movement.

36. At Liyuantun, in the Guan county exclave, the temple to the Jade Emperor (玉皇廟, Yùhuáng miào) was divided between the village’s Christian and non-Christian residents by an agreement of 1869; in January 1892, French diplomatic pressure forced the contested site to the Catholic church. Joseph Esherick (1987), The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, pp. 143–146.

37. Paul A. Cohen (1997), History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. Cohen’s third key follows the Boxers through their conscriptions: damned by New Culture intellectuals as superstition, praised by the anti-imperialists of the 1920s as patriots, canonized by the People’s Republic as 反帝愛國 (fǎndì àiguó, “anti-imperialist and patriotic”).

38. “民族意识觉醒——义和团反帝爱国运动” (“National Consciousness Awakening: The Boxer Anti-Imperialist Patriotic Movement”), Xinhua, November 13, 2018, republished by CPC News (cpc.people.com.cn). Published during the US–China trade war, weeks before the Trump–Xi meeting at the G20 in Buenos Aires. The 120th anniversary academic conference, scheduled for 2020, was postponed to October 2021 at Shandong University.

39. The Chinese name 辛丑條約 (Xīnchǒu Tiáoyuē) takes its first two characters from the sexagenary-cycle designation of the year 1901. Chinese historiography refers to the treaty by this cyclical name rather than as the “Boxer Protocol”.

40. Robert Hart (1835–1911), born at Portadown, County Armagh; in China from 1854, and Inspector-General of the Imperial Maritime Customs from 1863 to 1911. For the Qing he was the indispensable foreigner—collector of the customs revenue on which the empire’s foreign debts were secured, including, in time, the indemnity itself.

41. Robert Hart (1901), “These from the Land of Sinim”: Essays on the Chinese Question, pp. 4 and 52. The siege is narrated from inside: “By 5 o’clock we were all quartered in the British Legation and the siege began” (p. 20). His book includes five essays written in Peking between August and December 1900. The appendices reach back to his 1876 memorandum on commercial relations; a second impression in 1903 added a sixth essay, “China, Reform, and the Powers”.

42. True Jesus Church (真耶穌教會, Zhēn Yēsū Jiàohuì), an independent Chinese Christian movement founded in 1917 by Paul Wei, a former London Missionary Society convert. It is one of the largest indigenous Christian movements in China today.