As the summer of 1900 wore on, the siege of the diplomatic quarter in Beijing by Boxer fighters and Qing troops continued to draw international forces toward China. The crisis, born of anti-foreign and anti-Christian sentiment amid decades of humiliating unequal treaties, would end with an Eight-Nation Alliance occupying Beijing and imposing crushing indemnities on the weakened Qing state.
The Boxer Rebellion emerged from real grievances: decades of foreign economic penetration, missionary activity that upended village hierarchies, and a series of natural disasters that Chinese peasants blamed on foreign disruption of feng shui and spiritual order. The Boxers, formally the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, practiced martial arts rituals they believed made them impervious to bullets.
By late July 1900, the sixty-day siege of the Legation Quarter in Beijing was approaching its climax, with a few hundred foreign guards and thousands of Chinese Christian refugees holding out against Boxer and imperial forces. The Qing court, under the Empress Dowager Cixi, had thrown its weak support behind the Boxers, a gamble that would prove catastrophic.
When the Eight-Nation Alliance, a coalition including Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, and Germany, finally broke the siege in August, they occupied Beijing and forced the Qing government to accept the Boxer Protocol: enormous indemnities, foreign garrisons, and further erosion of Chinese sovereignty. The episode accelerated the dynasty's collapse eleven years later.
Key people: Cixi