Boxer Rebellion
The Boxer Rebellion was an uprising in China from 2 November 1900 to 7 September 1901. It was led by the Boxers, a group of Chinese against the huge amount of western influence in China.
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Foreigners in China
The rebellion happened while many foreign countries (Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia) were scrambling for concessions in the Qing dynasty in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the First Sino-Japanese War. These countries were Japan, Britain, Germany, and Russia.
Boxers
The Boxers were Chinese who were angry about the growing power of foreigners in China. They wanted to fight and drive out all foreigners and even the Chinese who helped the foreigners. The Boxers got many people to help them and drove their fight to Peking (now Beijing).
Two expeditions
The interior inner city of Beijing was known as the Tartar city because it was mostly Manchu and half of all Manchus in China lived there. Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy made an alliance to invade China and defeat the Boxers in Beijing. That made Empress Dowager Cixi declare war on all of them and send the Gansu Army to help the Boxers.
The first foreign expedition to Beijing, the Seymour Expedition, was defeated. The foreign legations in Beijing were surrounded for 55 days before the foreign reinforcements got through in the Gaselee Expedition, which got to the legations in Beijing. The Manchus suffered tremendously as the foreign soldiers went around raping the women and killing the men. The rest of China outside Manchuria and Zhili Province, was not affected since the Han governor generals such as Yuan Shikai, Li Hongzhang, Liu Kunyi and Zhang Zhidong, signed a pact, the Mutual Defense Pact of the Southeastern Provinces, to keep their provinces out of the war and not to help the Qing court. That made the foreigners not attack them.
Aftermath
The foreigners were very angry with the Qing and said that China had to pay them even more money and to execute the officials responsible for supporting the Boxers like the Manchu Bannerman Governor Yuxian, Qixiu, Captain Enhai (En Hai) and Manchu Zaixun, Prince Zhuang and Han General Dong Fuxiang. China agreed to execute all the Manchu officials like Yuxian, Qixiu, Enhai and Zaixun but refused to execute Dong Fuxiang. A few years later in 1911, the Qing dynasty collapsed, and China had a new government, the Republic of China, but the foreigners, especially the Japanese, still influenced the country.
Boxer Rebellion Media
Movement of Boxers and Alliance forces during the rebellion
A French political propaganda cartoon depicting China as a pie about to be carved up by Queen Victoria (United Kingdom), Kaiser Wilhelm II (Germany), Tsar Nicholas II (Russia), Marianne (France) and a samurai (Japan), while the Boxer leader Dong Fuxiang protests
Locations of foreign diplomatic legations and front lines in Beijing during the siege
Representative Allied army and naval personnel
1900, soldiers burned down the Temple, Shanhai Pass – The destruction of a Chinese temple on the bank of the Pei-Ho, by Amédée Forestier
- BoxerSoldiers
Russian officers in Manchuria
Chinese martyrs of the Eastern Orthodox Church as depicted in an icon commissioned in 1990
The Russian Empire occupied Manchuria while the Eight Nation Alliance jointly occupied Zhili province. The rest of China outside of Manchuria and Zhili were unaffected due to the governor generals who participated in the Mutual Protection of Southeast China in 1900.
Related pages
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Harrington (2001), p. 29.
- ↑ "China Relief Expedition (Boxer Rebellion), 1900–1901". Veterans Museum and Memorial Center. Archived from the original on 16 July 2014. Retrieved 20 March 2017.
- ↑ Pronin, Alexander (7 November 2000). Война с Желтороссией (in Russian). Kommersant. Retrieved 6 July 2018.
- ↑ Hsü, Immanuel C. Y. (1978). "Late Ch'ing Foreign Relations, 1866–1905". In Fairbank, John King (ed.). The Cambridge History of China. Cambridge University Press. p. 127. ISBN 978-0-521-22029-3.
- ↑ Xiang (2003), p. 248.