Read complete books and articles on: Boxer Rebellion

Boxer Uprising - 1898–1900, antiforeign movement in China, culminating in a desperate uprising against Westerners and Western influence.

By the end of the 19th cent. the Western powers and Japan had established wide interests in China. The Opium War (1839–42), which Great Britain had provoked, forced China to grant commercial concessions (see treaty port) and to recognize the principle of extraterritoriality. The concessions to Great Britain were soon followed by similar ones to France, Germany, and Russia. The Ch'ing regime, already weakened by European encroachments, was more enfeebled by Japan's success in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the subsequent further partitioning of China into foreign spheres of influence. The Ch'ing emperor, Kuang-hsu, attempted to meet the imperialist threat by adopting modern educational and administrative reforms, but he stirred conservative opposition and was frustrated (1898) by the dowager empress, Tz'u Hsi, who, favoring a last effort to expel foreign influence, supported armed resistance.

The dowager empress tacitly encouraged an antiforeign secret society called I Ho Ch'uan [Chinese,=righteous, harmonious fists] or, in English, the Boxers. The Boxers soon grew powerful, and late in 1899 the movement began to assume menacing proportions. Violent attacks on foreigners and on Chinese Christians occurred, particularly in the provinces of Zhili, Shanxi, and Shandong; in Manchuria; and in Inner Mongolia. In those regions, railway building, a visible symbol of the foreigner, was most active; and Chinese Christians, especially Roman Catholics, adherents to the foreigners' religion, were most numerous. Also located there were the majority of territorial leaseholds acquired by the European powers.

In June, 1900, the Boxers (some 140,000 strong and now led by the war party at court), occupied Beijing and for eight weeks besieged the foreigners and the Chinese Christians there. Provincial governors in SE China suppressed the court's declaration of war and assured the powers of protection for foreign interests, thus limiting the area of conflict to N China. The siege was lifted in August by an international force of British, French, Russian, American, German, and Japanese troops, which had fought its way through from Tianjin. The Boxer Uprising thus ended.

The Western powers and Japan agreed—mainly because of U.S. pressure to "preserve Chinese territorial and administrative integrity" and because of mutual jealousies among the powers—not to carry further the partition of China. Nevertheless, China was compelled (1901) to pay an indemnity of $333 million, to amend commercial treaties to the advantage of the foreign nations, and to permit the stationing of foreign troops in Beijing. The United States later (1908) used some of its share of the indemnity for scholarships for Chinese students. China emerged from the Boxer Uprising with a greatly increased debt and was, in effect, a subject nation.

Bibliography

See A. H. Smith, China in Convulsion (1901); G. N. Steiger, China and the Occident (1927); C. C. Tan, The Boxer Catastrophe (1955); P. Fleming, The Siege at Peking (1959); V. W. W. S. Purcell, The Boxer Uprising (1963); R. O'Connor, The Spirit Soldiers (1973).

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13 of the Best Books and Articles on: Boxer Rebellion

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900 » Read Now
by Diana Preston. 436 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

In the final years of the 19th century, China was in grave danger of becoming a colony of the West. While various powers bickered over how to slice the pie, their very presence in China, like their new technologies and Christian missions, undermined the people's traditional ways. A strange...
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In the final years of the 19th century, China was in grave danger of becoming a colony of the West. While various powers bickered over how to slice the pie, their very presence in China, like their new technologies and Christian missions, undermined the people's traditional ways. A strange, reactionary movement—mystical, nationalistic and virulently anti Christian—began to spread like wildfire among the Chinese peasants. The contemptuous foreigners, snickering at their martial-arts routines, nicknamed them "The Boxers." Few could imagine that the Boxers would receive backing from China's Empress Dowager, herself eager for a showdown with the foreigners, and would soon terrorize them and the world. The Boxer Rebellion is a panoramic chronicle of the uprising and ensuing two-month siege of the 11 foreign ministries in Peking (now Beijing), and of the foreign community in Tientsin (now Tianjin) during the summer of 1900—an event whose repercussions have echoed throughout the intervening century. It left tens of thousands of Chinese dead, precipitated the end of dynastic rule in China, and has tainted China’s relationship with the wider world to this day. It is also a richly human story. Relying on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of the defenders, and on her own extensive research from both Chinese and western perspectives, Diana Preston portrays the dramatic human experience of the Boxer rising: in the diplomatic district of Peking, cut off from the outside world during the desperate weeks of the siege; behind the high, byzantine walls of Peking’s Inner City, where decisions were made that forever changed Chinese society; among the allied relief forces struggling to lift the siege; in the aftermath when the great city was savagely looted and despoiled. Here is young Herbert Hoover, then a mining engineer, patrolling the barricades of Tientsin at night on bicycle; British admiral Sir Edward Seymour, whose aborted rescue mission became itself a survival story; Polly Condit Smith, the observant young Boston guest of American first secretary Herbert Squiers, who was besieged in Peking; the French Bishop Auguste Favier, whose successful defense of Peking's Peitang Cathedral was nothing short of a Christian miracle; and Tzu Hsi, the fabled Empress Dowager who had held power for nearly forty years, fighting to preserve her own throne and a dynastic way of life that had lasted for centuries. Placing readers squarely in the middle of events as they unfolded, Diana Preston proves herself a master of narrative history, a writer who brings the past alive with style and freshness. Offering a view through the lens of the rapid changes in society and culture at the time, The Boxer Rebellion broadens our knowledge of the 20th century.
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2.

The Boxer Uprising: A Background Study » Read Now
by Victor Purcell. 370 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
3.

History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth » Read Now
by Paul A. Cohen. 428 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
4.

China and the Allies, Vol. I (1901) (Includes discussion of the Boxer rebellion in multiple chapters) » Read Now
by A. Henry Savage Landor. 382 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...time, protecting and encouraging the Boxer movement? for, if not, what plausible...could there be for not suppressing a rebellions agitation which, besides...
5.

The Political History of China, 1840-1928 ("The Boxer Uprising" begins on p. 173) » Read Now
by Li Chien-Nung, Ssu-Yu Teng, Jeremy Ingalls. 548 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
6.

China under the Empress Dowager: Being the History of the Life and Times of Tzu Hsi (1910) (Chap. XVI "The Genesis of the Boxer Movement" and Chap. XXI "How the Boxer Leaders Died") » Read Now
by J. O. P. Bland, E. Backhouse. 598 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
7.

Death Throes of a Dynasty: Letters and Diaries of Charles and Bessie Ewing, Missionaries to China (Chap. 2 "The Boxer Uprising and Subsequent Manchu Reform Efforts, 1899-1904") » Read Now
by E. G. Ruoff. 292 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library
8.

The Search for Modern China (Discussion of the Boxer rebellion begins on p. 230) » Read Now
by Jonathan D. Spence. 992 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
9.

China Only Yesterday, 1850-1950: A Century of Change (Discussion of the Boxer rebellion begins on p. 253) » Read Now
by Emily Hahn. 434 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
10.

Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1800s to the 1980s ("The Boxer Movement" begins on p. 136) » Read Now
by Jack Gray . 456 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...The Taiping Kingdom 59 The Course of the Rebellion 63 The Foreign Powers and the Taipings...The Reform Movement of 1898 126 The Boxer Movement 136 The End of the Monarchy...
11.

Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier (Chap. 8 "Over-Extension: The Boxer Uprising and the Russian Invasion") » Read Now
by S. C. M. Paine. 448 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
12.

Justice on Behalf of Heaven, in History Today » Read Now
by Henrietta Harrison. 8 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
13.

Chinese Burns Britain in China, 1842-1900, in History Today » Read Now
by Robert Bickers. 8 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...imperialism in China helps explain the ferocious Boxer War of 1900. THE BOXER RISING began in the obscurity of the north-west regions...memoir and narrative to willing...