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China, 1895 to 1916, episode 4

Spirit Boxers

Out of drought struck Shandong come young men who say their rituals make them immune to bullets. Yuan Shikai, governor of the province, refuses Cixi's order to tolerate them and drives them north, and within months they are in Beijing and Cixi has declared war on the world. The episode follows her choice and the governors who refused it, asking who the Boxers were and why the court backed them. It leans on scholars and foreign observers; the Boxers themselves left almost no words in these sources.

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  1. North China
  2. Tianjin
  3. Taku Forts
  4. Beijing
  5. Yangtze River
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai. Photo by Rio V. De Sieux, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, the emperor's plot against his aunt passed through the hands of one soldier, Yuan Shikai, and by the end of a single week in September 1898 it was in Ronglu's hands instead. The Empress Dowager Cixi took the government back, shut the emperor away on an island in the palace lake, beheaded six reformers and swept away nearly all of the reforms. Then she set out to replace him. In January 1900 she named an heir, the fourteen year old son of Prince Duan, and a storm of protest made her pause, though she never gave the idea up. That same January, a decree told her officials that loyal villagers who drilled for their own protection were only doing their duty. This episode is about what happened when those drilling villagers met that court, and about Yuan Shikai, the man who ended up standing between them. Start out in the countryside, in the villages. It was fragile land, farmed in small plots, and it had been getting poorer for decades: the government had stopped shipping its tribute grain up the Grand Canal, and foreign cotton cloth had undercut the cotton the region grew. Then, in 1898, the Yellow River flooded. And after the flood, the rain stopped. Unlike the rest of China, the north was caught in a long drought. As it devastated the countryside in the late 1890s, thousands of farm boys with no crops to take care of had time on their hands. And they learned the Boxer rituals, which they believed would make them invulnerable to swords and bullets. The rituals were ways to call on the gods to take possession of your body, turning it into an indestructible fighting machine. Normally, being possessed by a god was work for a few professional healers, fortune tellers and mystics, and ordinary people could be as sceptical of a charlatan as anyone. But nobody doubted that the gods could take a hand in human lives. The groups began as village defence militias, looking inward, protecting their own. And they said they were loyal to the Qing. Out of nearly a thousand small local clashes with foreigners in Shandong, a loose movement of Spirit Boxers took shape. In time they called themselves the Yihequan, the Fists of Righteousness and Harmony. They practised boxing and gymnastics, at least on the surface, and that gave them the name the rest of the world would know them by: the Boxers. Their flags carried a motto of four characters: "Cherish the Dynasty, exterminate the Foreigners". A new member passed through stages of secret initiation and mystic rites, and the highest class of initiates were made invulnerable "by sword, spear, or bullet", shielded by the spirits of the dead hovering over them. Red was their colour. A red sash was the Boxer's badge. There was no Boxer army and no Boxer headquarters. The movement grew out of the everyday religion of north China, and it produced hundreds of separate local bands, each with its own masters and its own followers. Their preaching had been going on for months, if not years, before any foreigner heard of it. Why the foreigners? Part of the answer you already know. Remember the German Catholic missions in western Shandong. After Germany seized Jiaozhou in 1897, the order behind them, the Society of the Divine Word, became more aggressive still, and the anger it stirred burned hotter than the hunger. And the drought made it worse. Christians had their own prayers for rain, but people said the prayers to the old gods were going unanswered because the Christians had polluted the villages. Many Chinese Christians refused to join their neighbours in the rituals the whole village had always shared. The crops went on withering. Rumours said the Christians were poisoning the village wells, and that the missionaries were devils who tore out the eyes and organs of Chinese for their evil magic. A rhyme went round: "No rain comes from Heaven. The earth is parched and dry. And all because the churches Have bottled up the sky." Through the autumn of 1899, the Boxers raided. These were organised raids. One summons came from the Imperial Association of Justice and Harmony, and it read: "you are summoned to meet on the 7th day of the 9th moon. Cherish the dynasty, exterminate the foreigners. Whoever declines to obey this summons is in danger of his head." Chinese Christians were forced to burn incense and bow down before the altars of the temples. Whether they did or not, they were stripped of everything they could carry, down to the grain meant to feed them through the winter, in a year when the harvest had failed from the Great Wall to far beyond the Yellow River. Every night some Christian village was raided. Some converts gave up their faith, some paid blackmail, and some held firm. The local gentry shielded the raiders, and the officials looked sympathetic, or negligent, or helpless. The first time the Boxers appeared in print was in a correspondent's letter written that September, and it struck a hopeful note: "like other uprisings in China, this promises to die out." A year earlier, the Big Sword Society had risen in north western Shandong, destroyed some missions, and been put down. In early October, a brigade general in the south west of the province was assassinated, with six of his bodyguard, for the crime of arresting Big Sword men. One clash went the other way. Troops ran into a band of Boxers, killed a hundred of them and took several prisoners. The province's governor answered by demoting the two local officials responsible, pulling the troops back, and sending the head constable who had made the arrests to the provincial capital, Jinan, in chains. After that, the troops had orders not to fire without the governor's express instructions. The Boxers drew the obvious conclusion: the governor was on their side. His name was Yuxian. He was a Manchu, an imperial clansman, and a special favourite of the Empress Dowager, and he believed the best way to deal with the foreigner was to make his life uncomfortable. He had been governor since March 1899, and three times that year the court had ordered its officials to resist foreign aggression, with the Germans in Shandong very much in mind. All through the summer and autumn, American missionaries writing to the Shanghai papers said the same thing. It was Yuxian, and he alone, who made it impossible to restore order. He backed the gentry against the foreigners, reined in the local officials who wanted to protect people, held back the troops, and let Boxer chiefs go free on technicalities. Chinese opinion said so too. Not everyone held back. In northern Shandong in October, troops sent down from Zhili scattered a Boxer band, killing sixty, and the officer commanding them was Yuan Shikai's own brother. But by the end of the year, the movement had spread far into Zhili. In village after village there were running battles between Boxers and converts, while the troops looked on and did nothing, and the cruelties done to the Chinese Christians were called "most atrocious". Then, in December 1899, Yuan Shikai arrived as Shandong's new governor, his reward for his part in the coup, and he brought all his troops with him. Yuxian was called back to Beijing, under heavy pressure from the foreign envoys. Yuan had a priceless chance to study the Boxers at close range, and he soon made up his mind about them. In Beijing, people were making up their minds too. After her coup, Cixi had swung the court hard against the foreigners, raising men like Prince Duan, Ronglu and Gangyi to the highest posts. Her anger had been stoked further by the threatening way the foreign envoys reacted to rumours that she meant to replace the emperor with Prince Duan's son. The men around her blamed the reforms of 1898 on foreign influence. And the Boxers seemed, just possibly, the answer to that problem. Some of them, and probably Cixi herself, wondered whether there might be something to the Boxers' magic, or at least to their spirit. Any Chinese government would normally crush a mass movement that called up the gods without permission. But the court's best troops had been mauled by Japan in 1895, and the early Boxer bands looked like villages defending themselves, which the empire had always allowed. And the court knew an old trick. For nearly three centuries the Qing had done well by taking popular movements, and their leaders, and turning them to its own ends. How did the Boxers take that January decree about drilling villagers? Reports from Shandong and southern Zhili said the Boxers and the Big Swords took it as being in their favour, that it gave them much encouragement, and that "their numbers are daily increasing". The envoys of the five powers most concerned asked for a new decree naming the Boxers and the Big Swords, and making it a crime to belong to either. The court was busy settling the succession and celebrating the New Year, and took a month to answer. When a decree did order the governors of Zhili and Shandong to suppress the societies, the court refused to print it in its official gazette, saying that would be contrary to precedent. The American envoy decided the Chinese government had "flagrantly trifled with this matter from the beginning", and all five envoys advised their governments to send warships to the gulf off the coast. As the Boxers grew more violent in the early months of 1900, Cixi sent out decree after decree telling her officials to tolerate them rather than suppress them. The governor general of Zhili, Yulu, did as he was told. Yuan Shikai emphatically did not. He struck at them fiercely, and drove them headlong out of Shandong into Zhili, the province around the capital. So the centre of the movement moved north, toward Beijing. Through the winter, the bands began to move. By spring they were burning churches, looting convents, and collecting money and grain from local elites who either supported them or feared them. They tore up railway tracks and cut telegraph wires, and they attacked foreigners and Chinese Christians alike. Thousands of peasants joined them, men and not a few women. Angry and frightened, the bands spread out of Shandong and Zhili into Henan, Shanxi, and even Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. The Boxers had troubles of their own that had nothing to do with court politics. They mattered to the whole world for one reason only: the court let them. And here are the stakes, so you know them now. Before the movement was put down, some 231 foreigners and several thousand Chinese Christians would be dead. Keep those Chinese Christians in mind when the foreign envoys take centre stage.

Now step back a few weeks, to the last day of the old year. Last time I mentioned a missionary of the Church of England murdered in Shandong. This is how he died. On the thirty first of December he was on his way back from the town of Taian to his own station at Pingyin. For five days, a band of Big Sword men had been stirring up the countryside against foreigners. On the sixth day, they saw Brooks coming down the road. They hastily tied on red head cloths, rushed out and attacked him, and he was wounded. They stripped him to his underclothes and left him tied up outside, in the bitter cold. At night they took him to a village about fifty miles south west of Jinan. By the time he got there he was exhausted, from the cold and from his wounds. There he broke away. He was soon caught, and they cut off his head. His murder was only the climax of more than a year of war on the province's Christians, but it was condemned by everyone in authority. The answer came from the very top. In a decree from Cixi's own pen, the imperial government declared that it was "most deeply grieved". It reminded everyone of its repeated declarations that "all nations may propagate their religions in China", and it commanded that "the murderers should be caught and brought to justice". The murderers were caught. On the twenty eighth of February, seven men were tried before the provincial judge at Jinan, with a British consular officer in the room. By then Shandong's governor was Yuan Shikai, and the trial was held in his capital. Two were sentenced to death, and three to prison, for life, for ten years and for two. The innkeeper was let go, because he had given Brooks food and water and loosened the ropes that bound him. And the village constable was let go too. The court held that he had been overawed by the Big Sword Society, not by the half dozen members in front of him, but by the hundreds unseen in the background. The hundreds unseen in the background. That was the problem in one phrase. China paid nine thousand five hundred taels for memorials to Brooks, though no blood money, and the district magistrate was denounced to the throne. But the British envoy wanted a bigger name. Yuxian, he said, was the real culprit, and there was no point punishing the minor officials who had acted under his orders unless Yuxian was punished first. Cixi saw Yuxian differently. On the sixteenth of January, less than two weeks after she had been most deeply grieved, the court circular recorded that Yuxian had arrived in Beijing, been received in audience, and been presented by the Empress Dowager with a tablet bearing the character fu, happiness. The Zongli Yamen explained that this was only a customary thank you for his service. The American envoy protested that the imperial praise for Yuxian gave people every reason to think the worst. And what people thought was that Cixi had decided Dong Fuxiang should carry out his plan of driving all the foreigners into the sea, and that she saw the Boxers as useful allies for the job. Dong Fuxiang was the man whose Muslim cavalry had ridden hard across a formidable piece of Asia at her command and into Beijing, in great clouds of dust, at the time of her coup. That spring, Yuxian was given a new province to govern. It was Shanxi. So which did the court really mean, the grief or the gift?

The attack on the train at Langfang, sketched by W. G. Littlejohns, 1900
The attack on the train at Langfang, sketched by W. G. Littlejohns, 1900. Henry Charles Seppings Wright, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Through the spring the Boxers moved north, and by June a good many of them were in Beijing and Tianjin. In both cities they were virtually in control of the streets. On the fourth of June the foreign envoys telegraphed their governments that "we may at any time be besieged here, with the railway and telegraph lines cut", and asked for their navies to come to their relief. At court, early in June, the argument was being made openly that the Boxers were loyal to the dynasty, and that, properly armed, they would make useful auxiliaries. Only two voices were raised against it: Ronglu's, and that of a prince from one of the great princely houses. Another senior minister sat silent, and "the empress dowager kept her own counsel." On the seventh of June an imperial decree on the Boxers came out. It seemed to be a compromise between the factions at court, and to the envoys its tone was most unsatisfactory. They asked for a personal audience with Cixi and the emperor, to tell them plainly that if the court did not put down the Boxers, the powers would do it themselves. They asked for permission to bring in more legation guards. Both requests were flatly refused. The envoys were only ministers, not full ambassadors, and they could not insist on an audience without express orders from home. The orders were sent, and arrived too late to be of any use. They sent for the extra guards anyway, on the ninth. On the ninth of June, Cixi and the emperor came back from the Summer Palace to the Forbidden City. That day and the next, the Boxers burned the grandstand of the racecourse outside the city, attacked a party of young men from the legations out riding, and burned the British legation's summer houses in the Western Hills. At Tongzhou, thirteen miles south east of the capital, they burned the American mission and massacred many of its converts. The last trains ran on the ninth. The last telegrams went out on the tenth. A courier sent overland on the fifteenth never reached Tianjin, and the last letter to get through from Tianjin was dated the sixteenth. After that, Beijing was on its own. On the tenth, Prince Duan, the most energetically anti foreign of all the Manchus, was put at the head of the Zongli Yamen. And on the eleventh, Boxers and their soldier allies murdered the chancellor of the Japanese legation. Now meet the man who set out to save them. Admiral Seymour was the commander of Britain's warships in Chinese waters, and he had spent nearly fifty years in the navy. On the ninth of June he was lying off Dagu with the other foreign admirals when a telegram came in, sent at half past eight that evening by the British envoy, Sir Claude MacDonald. It began "Situation extremely grave", and it said that unless an immediate advance on Beijing was arranged, it would be too late. Seymour lost no time. Within two hours he had left his flagship with a landing force. At Tianjin some people objected to giving him a train. They were overruled, and at half past nine on the morning of the tenth of June he set off up the railway for Beijing. The next day, at Yangcun, more detachments joined him, and his force came to 2066 men: 915 British, 540 Germans, 312 Russians, and smaller parties of French, Americans, Japanese, Italians and Austrians. Seymour was in command because he was the senior officer present. In practice, leading sailors of eight nations, he had influence rather than command. The court knew he was coming. At a palace council on the tenth of June, the Manchus there were solidly in favour of fighting the foreigners at once. The compromise was to send two ministers down the line to persuade Seymour to go back to Tianjin. At Yangcun the bridge over the river was still standing, and General Nie Shicheng's troops were there, some four thousand strong. Nie commanded one of the court's foreign drilled armies, and in the weeks before, his men had been fighting the Boxers along this very railway. Seymour remembered that day: "we exchanged friendly greetings, crossed the river, and went on till that afternoon, when we had to stop and repair the line which the Boxers had torn up." From then on it was repair the line, rebuild the bridge, move forward, and repair the line again. On the twelfth of June he reached Langfang, forty miles from Tianjin, halfway to Beijing. For several days there were constant brushes with the Boxers. The invulnerables came on with clubs, swords and spears, and they were cut down in large numbers, while Seymour's casualties were small. But in front of them, Seymour wrote, "the line was too badly damaged for us to repair it", and the advance stopped. "We were now isolated, with no transport or means to advance, and cut off from our base behind." Could he have walked it? Seymour himself later admitted that "an immediate dash to save the legations was the only course to pursue". In Beijing, the American envoy, who had been an officer in the American Civil War, wrote: "We cannot understand why, if they find it impossible to readily repair the railway, they do not, with the larger part of their command, march directly here." Sir Robert Hart thought the same. Hart was the Irishman who had run China's customs service for the emperor for nearly forty years, and he was inside the city, waiting. Had Seymour's force left the train and marched straight across country, he wrote, it could have been with them on the thirteenth or fourteenth, "and so changed history". Maybe. But Seymour was a sailor commanding on land, with no means of forcing his way into a city ringed with massive walls and guarded by unknown thousands of troops. On the sixteenth of June, at Langfang, it was decided to repair the line backwards, return to Tianjin, and try again by the river. Leave Seymour there for a moment. We need to go back down the line.

The foreign attack on the Dagu forts, in a Chinese New Year print of 1901
The foreign attack on the Dagu forts, in a Chinese New Year print of 1901. Anonymous, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

At Tianjin, the foreign settlements were in danger. Seventeen hundred Russian troops had come in from Port Arthur, just too late to join Seymour, and with marines and volunteers there were about twenty four hundred men to defend the foreign quarter. On the nights of the fourteenth and fifteenth of June, the crowds burned the city's mission chapels and its French cathedral, which had already been destroyed once, thirty years before. In 1870 a Tianjin crowd, convinced that the nuns of a French mission were killing Chinese children, had killed nuns, priests and the French consul. And the river through Tianjin was full of the bodies of Chinese the Boxers had killed for being friends of the foreigners. On the fifteenth, the admirals met in council. Chinese troops were on the move, there had been attempts to tear up the railway down to the coast, and mines had been laid at the mouth of the Hai River. The Dagu forts guarded that river mouth, and so the way in to Tianjin. A few days before, a consul had told a meeting at Tianjin: "If you take the forts, you will be signing the death warrant of every foreigner in the interior." The admirals decided anyway. On the sixteenth they sent an ultimatum: hand over the Dagu forts before two in the morning of the seventeenth of June. That afternoon, landing parties of 935 men from six nations went ashore. After dark, nine shallow draught gunboats slipped inside the forts, while the big ships waited out of range beyond the sandbar. At a quarter to one in the morning, an hour and a quarter before the ultimatum ran out, the Chinese garrison opened fire. The gunboats fired back. At dawn the storming parties went in, and by half past six the last of the forts was taken. It cost the allies 64 killed and 89 wounded. And with that, whatever anyone chose to call it, China and the powers were at war. The consul's warning came true. Missionaries out in the countryside were murdered in large numbers that summer. But nearly all of the mass killings came close to the court itself, or in Shanxi, where Yuxian was now governor. Look at who the admirals were facing. Inside the palace, the officials were anti foreign to a man, except for the outspoken Ronglu and Prince Qing, who wavered. Prince Qing was the man Prince Duan had just replaced at the head of the Zongli Yamen. And Yulu at Tianjin, the governor general the foreigners had counted as a friend, turned out to have joined the Boxers, which they took as proof he was acting on orders from above. In Beijing, news of the ultimatum must have arrived that night, and the fall of the forts by the next morning. The seventeenth passed quietly. At three that afternoon, heavy guns opened fire on the foreign quarter at Tianjin, and still the court said nothing to the envoys. At Tianjin the foreigners were now under fire from at least sixty heavy guns and many thousand soldiers. In the foreign quarter, the Chinese servants fled. Fires were set, and there was looting and murder all around. The community gathered all its women and children together in the municipal hall, and its defenders beat off the attacks while the shelling and sniping went on day after day. The next afternoon, Dong Fuxiang's troops from Gansu, five thousand of them, who had been in Beijing the day before, were sent against Seymour's column. They were the first imperial troops anywhere outside Tianjin to engage in open hostilities. For seventy two hours after the ultimatum, and sixty hours after the forts fell, with the telegraph still open for Chinese messages, the government told the legations nothing and made no protest. And in Beijing it had already started. At two in the morning of the seventeenth, before the forts fell, Chinese soldiers had crept up and fired on the American guards' outposts on three streets, and in front of them the guards found a new Mauser rifle and a scrap of a Chinese soldier's uniform. So the forts did not start the war. But the anti foreign party at court grabbed them as the argument to silence everyone still arguing for peace, and to push the government into open war. As for Seymour, from the eighteenth to the twenty third, the attacks on his column never stopped. At Yangcun the bridge had been destroyed. His men seized river boats to carry the wounded and the guns, and fought their way down the river. On the twenty first of June they stormed an arsenal at Xiku, three miles from Tianjin, and found it full of food and of munitions worth an estimated three million pounds sterling. They held it against a heavy attack, and on the twenty fifth a column of mostly Russian troops reached them. Tianjin had come close to being abandoned. The commanders there had decided that unless relief came soon, they would have to fall back to the coast, and that would have ended any hope for Beijing. On the night of the eighteenth, a harbour pilot with eight English sailors and a French officer slipped down the river in a steam launch, were forced ashore at dawn, and still got their despatches to the coast on the twentieth. The next night, a young Englishman rode through the darkness with three Cossacks to carry word to the coast, and a relief column fought its way up, drinking water from streams poisoned with floating corpses, and broke in on the twenty third. On the twenty sixth of June, after blowing up the arsenal, Seymour's force came back into Tianjin. Of the whole force, 62 were dead and 238 wounded. Among the badly wounded was a British captain named John Jellicoe. Sixteen years later, Jellicoe would command Britain's main battle fleet at Jutland.

Baron von Ketteler, the German minister, in a picture dated 1910
Baron von Ketteler, the German minister, in a picture dated 1910. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On the afternoon of the nineteenth of June, the Zongli Yamen sent every legation a note. The envoys and their people were to leave Beijing, under escort, within twenty four hours. That would be four o'clock the next afternoon. Think about that offer for a moment. Who, exactly, was going to protect them on the road, and from whom? The envoys asked for a meeting at the Zongli Yamen the next morning at nine. On the morning of the twentieth they met, and by nine, the hour they had asked for, no answer had come. They decided there was no use going to the Yamen, where they would probably find nobody to receive them. All but one. Baron von Ketteler was Germany's envoy in Beijing. He told his colleagues he had already given notice of a visit of his own, to point out to the Chinese ministers the enormity of their offence against the law of nations, and what must follow from an attack on the sacred standing of ambassadors. And he meant to go. His colleagues, every one of them, protested and pointed out the danger. He brushed the arguments aside and set off. With him were only his interpreter, Heinrich Cordes, and a ceremonial escort of unarmed Chinese. They went in two sedan chairs, closed seats carried on poles on the shoulders of bearers, the way officials travelled in Beijing. The chairs had just passed a small police station on the main street when Cordes glanced to his left. He saw a Chinese soldier in uniform, rifle at his shoulder, following the movement of the envoy's chair and aiming at his head. Cordes shouted a warning. At the same moment the soldier fired, and Ketteler was killed instantly. The frightened bearers dropped the chairs. Cordes started upright, and a shot hit him in the thighs, which were now where his head had just been. He ran through the side streets, with shots following him, but nobody chased him, and he got through to the Americans at the Methodist mission, who dressed his wounds. A quarter of an hour after Ketteler set out, one of his mounted Chinese attendants came galloping back to the legations with the news. Another rode on to tell the Zongli Yamen. Ketteler's body was carried into the Yamen, put in a coffin, and hastily buried. It would lie there for two months, until the siege was over and it could be dug up and buried properly in the German legation. The killer was Enhai, a Manchu bannerman, who reported what he had done himself and asked for a special promotion for it. At his trial he said: "I received orders from my sergeant to kill every foreigner that came up the street". And: "I am a soldier and I only know it is my duty to obey orders." After the siege, he was arrested by the Japanese, tried by the Germans and executed. There is one strange footnote to that morning. On the fourteenth of June, six days before it happened, a report went round Tianjin that a foreign envoy had been killed in Beijing, and two days later the London evening papers announced that the German envoy had been murdered. When the murder became real, the outside world could not confirm it until the first of July. That is how tightly Beijing had been sealed. For the few men in the Chinese government still pleading for peace, the murder was a crushing blow. It silenced them, and it pushed the party of war on to finish what it had started. In the legations, it struck with horror. Nobody now thought of leaving Beijing under any kind of Chinese escort. Every thought turned to defence, and every man and woman meant to hold out to the end. The Americans at the Methodist mission were brought in: 20 marines, 70 American men, women and children, 126 Chinese girls from the mission school, some hundreds of Chinese Christians, and Heinrich Cordes on a stretcher. They were given twenty minutes to pack. In Germany, the Kaiser wanted vengeance for his murdered envoy. The Huns under Attila, he recalled, had won a name a thousand years before that still lived in memory. That speech was given at Bremerhaven, at the end of July. Germany, he said, should make its name in China the same way, so that "no Chinese will ever again even dare to look askance at a German".

Now go back one day, to the nineteenth of June, and into the palace. That morning, the leading newspaper in Shanghai ran an editorial. "China is at war with all the great powers at once," it said, "and she is at war by the choice of the empress dowager and her gang." "Whatever happens, this gang, if it does not go of its own accord, must be driven out" of the capital, it went on, and it hoped the emperor could be put back on his throne. The foreign envoys in Beijing could no longer use the telegraph. Chinese officials still could. That same day, Cixi met her Grand Council and said she would put off until the next day her decision on what to do about the Dagu forts. Then a document was put in front of her, said to come from the foreign envoys, demanding that she give up power. It was most likely a forgery: a summary of that Shanghai editorial, telegraphed to Beijing and worked up there into a despatch that seemed to come from the envoys themselves. After much indecision, the court decided to back the Boxers. On the twentieth, a decree ordered the viceroys and governors to protect their provinces "against the aggressive designs of foreign powers", and to send troops to Beijing. On the twenty first, as more foreign troops landed near Tianjin, Cixi's court declared war on all the foreign nations at once, and ordered every provincial official to support the Boxers and drive the foreigners out. The declaration listed sixty years of foreign aggression, and of China's patient efforts to keep the peace. And it said the seizure of the Dagu forts showed that the foreigners' spirit of aggression was as strong as ever. China had always been considerate toward them, it said, "but they, while styling themselves civilised states, have acted without regard for right, relying solely on armed force." Now, "our ancestors have come to our aid, the gods have answered our call", and the country had never been so united in loyalty. "With tears we have proclaimed the war before our ancestral shrines", it ended. It was "better to do and die, than to live in humiliation." You already know what to make of the part about the forts. It was Cixi's decision, but her government was split down the middle. Some powerful officials understood that winning against the West would be worse than losing, because a victory would bring certain revenge. For now, they were drowned out. Within days, decrees put the Boxers under the command of Gangyi and a prince of the blood, ordered rice issued to them, and counted them as one of five army corps, each to get a hundred thousand taels as a reward. Five high officials who had urged a crackdown on the Boxers, among them the presidents of the Boards of War and of Revenue, would be arrested and executed. And yet the court had already lost control of the thing it had just embraced. You can hear it in the court's own decrees that summer. On the first of July, one complained of wanton murder and robbery by men only pretending to be Boxers. On the second, another said the converts were "also the children of the state, including many good and worthy people", only led astray by the missionaries. The missionaries, it said, must all be driven out of the country at once, but care must be taken to protect them on the journey. And on the third of July, with the legations under fire every day, a letter went out in the emperor's name to the ruler of each foreign power, each one shaped for its reader. Every letter blamed the troubles on quarrels between the Christians and the people of Zhili and Shandong, and named the seizure of the Dagu forts as the real cause of the fighting. To Britain it pointed out how much of China's trade was British. America was reminded of its treaty promise to mediate. Germany was told how much the court regretted the murder of Baron von Ketteler by rebels, and that they would be punished. To Japan it spoke of what the nations of the East had in common against the West. The powers all gave the same answer. Prove that our envoys are still alive, put us in touch with them, and have your troops help our relief force on its way. Read those letters next to that declaration of war, and ask yourself who was really in charge in Beijing.

At Tianjin, the consuls had one more worry, and it had a name. Nobody knew which way Yuan Shikai would jump in Shandong, and the consuls could give no assurance about it. They need not have worried. On the sixteenth of June, the two great viceroys of the Yangtze valley, Liu Kunyi at Nanjing and Zhang Zhidong at Wuchang, joined by Yuan Shikai and the governors of Anhui and Jiangxi, had telegraphed the throne. They begged Cixi to put the Boxers down at once, because they were not patriots but rebels, and they offered to lead their combined forces north to help the government restore order. Liu meant it. In early June he had ordered every Big Sword man in his provinces arrested and executed without even referring the case to him, and on the twentieth two of them were put to death at Nanjing. When the admirals put out a declaration of their own on the twentieth, the Yangtze viceroys answered that they would each use all their powers to keep order. Zhang Zhidong put up a proclamation in four lines of four characters: obey the imperial decree, arrest rebels, keep the peace, and anyone spreading rumours or attacking churches would be executed as an example. Then came the declaration of war, ordering them to back the Boxers. Li Hongzhang at Guangzhou, his protégé Yuan Shikai in Shandong, Liu Kunyi and Zhang Zhidong announced together that they would not obey. Li refused it, and said that Guangdong would not obey. Then he went further, and agreed no longer to recognise the government in Beijing at all. On the third of July the viceroys telegraphed China's envoys abroad with a proposal: "regardless of what may happen in the north", the powers would send no troops into the Yangtze valley or the interior of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and the viceroys would guarantee the lives and property of foreigners of every nationality in their territory. The terms had been worked out with the foreign consuls at Shanghai. The man in the middle of that bargaining was Sheng Xuanhuai, the official who ran China's telegraphs from Shanghai. Remember him; he will matter a great deal later. The powers found the arrangement satisfactory and accepted it, and the two viceroys proclaimed it to their people. So while the north burned, the great trading cities of the Yangtze, Shanghai and Nanjing and Wuchang, stayed calm. And when Yuan Shikai was asked directly where he stood, he telegraphed back one line: "My views are the same as those of the viceroys." Remember Duanfang, one of the three reform directors thrown out of office? He was in Shaanxi now, and he too took his stand against the madness in Beijing. In the end, the Boxer rising found active support in only three places: Zhili, Shanxi and Manchuria. In effect, much of China had seceded from the court's authority. Why did they do it? Their reasons were mixed. They hated Prince Duan and his plans. Some took the side of the people against the Manchus. They wanted to protect the emperor, and to save the Empress Dowager from the consequences of what she had done. And they had a formula that let them disobey without rebelling: this was an uprising, not a war with foreign countries, and the powers wanted no Chinese land. But there was a limit. The viceroys made it plain that their neutrality depended on one guarantee: that the person of the Empress Dowager would be respected. They would disobey her. They would not abandon her. And Yuan Shikai, sitting at the edge of events, not yet strong enough to steer them, had judged correctly once again. He had seen exactly how this had to end. Which leaves Beijing, and the woman who had made this choice. Her leading governors had refused to follow her, and in midsummer an allied army would take Tianjin and march on Beijing. Next time: the legations under siege all summer, and Li Hongzhang, begged to come north and make the peace.

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