In the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion's defeat, foreign troops from eight nations occupied Beijing through late 1900, pressing the weakened Qing court toward a punishing settlement finalized the following year as the Boxer Protocol. The indemnity ultimately demanded—450 million taels of silver, payable over 39 years—crippled Chinese finances and deepened the century of humiliation that fueled revolutionary nationalism.
By late November 1900, the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing had been broken for months, and the allied expeditionary force—troops from Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary—occupied the Chinese capital in an uneasy, often brutal joint administration. Looting was widespread and semi-official; foreign soldiers and diplomats alike carried off imperial treasures that still surface in Western museums and private collections today.
Negotiations dragged on for months as the powers argued among themselves over how severely to punish the Qing court, with Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II pushing hardest for vengeance after the murder of his minister, Clemens von Ketteler. The eventual Boxer Protocol, signed in September 1901, imposed an indemnity so large that China was still paying installments into the 1940s.
The humiliation of foreign occupation and the crushing debt radicalized a generation of young Chinese, including students who would go on to found revolutionary and reformist movements. Sun Yat-sen and later Mao Zedong both pointed to this era as proof that the Qing dynasty could no longer defend Chinese sovereignty, feeding directly into the 1911 revolution that ended two thousand years of imperial rule.