Boxer Rebellion: A History from Beginning to End

by Hourly History

Discover the remarkable history of the Boxer Rebellion...
The Boxer Rebellion saw impoverished Chinese peasants strike a blow against the Western powers, particularly the British, who had come to challenge China’s sovereignty. The uprising was both a harbinger of things to come for China and a by-product of simmering decades of friction between the Chinese and the British. The Chinese had been able to call the shots during the initial engagement of trade with the West but lost control after the British began smuggling opium into the country. What was a lucrative product for British trade was devastating to the Chinese as addiction began to take its toll on the population. The British fought and won the Opium Wars, and with the victory came trade advantages that eroded China’s autonomy.

By the late 1800s, humiliated by Chinese military defeats, enraged by the encroachment of Christian missionaries, and alarmed at the role that Western influence played in China’s politics, a group of rebels known as the Boxers, so-named because of their emphasis on physical fitness and the martial arts, rose up against the foreign enemy and set the stage for cataclysmic changes to come in China’s history.

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43 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 29, 2021

About the author

At Hourly History, we focus on publishing history books that are concise, straightforward and take no longer than one hour to read.

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Reviews

[Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Boxer Liberation

Mark Twain called the Boxers patriots and, despite the brutality of the warfare engaged in by these Chinese fighters (not to ignore the viciousness of the colonial powers that opposed them) I tend to agree with him.

The history of China’s exploitation by foreign powers, especially Great Britain, is sickening to read about and a disgrace to the nations which perpetrated the crimes. Imagine forcing China to import opium, because it made Britain wealthy, even though it addicted millions of Chinese and destroyed their country. Queen Victoria knew about it and would not stop it. Neither would the Christian missionaries raise their voices in protest.

No wonder many Chinese finally chose to fight back and resist foreign intervention and oppression. We call it the Boxer Rebellion because they wanted to throw off the yoke of foreign control. It would be better called the Boxer Liberation because they wanted to free their country just like American Revolutionaries wanted to free theirs.

I am no friend to dictatorships or autocratic rule wherever it exists, including China. But now that I have a better understanding of how world powers used and abused that great nation, I understand why Mao seized absolute control and shut out foreign powers and why Beijing is leery of, and hostile to, western interference in their country even to this day.

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writing and compilation could have been better.
***

"Great Britain had been on the losing end of the trade with China, as the British and the Western world were ardent buyers of Chinese goods, but the Chinese did not reciprocate when British goods were offered for sale. The financial future of the British East India Company was at risk. Then the Portuguese discovered a highly potent form of opium in India, one that was much more powerful—and addicting—than what the Chinese used in their medicines. The poppy which produced this opium was grown in Bengal, which was under the control of the British."

But it wasn't that China was then guilty of unfair trade, as this author insinuates. British had little or nothing to offer to either India or China, and trade was in favor of the latter because they had far superior products.

In case of India, too, British reversed it by physical force. Weavers of India who produced far superior material had their thumbs chopped off by British, to promote then far inferior goods from Manchester mills. This wasn't called war.

In case of China, British only tried to force opium, and since they were refused entry, had a war perceived as such.
***

"“If you put together all the Christians in the world, with their Emperors and their Kings, the whole of these Christians—aye, and throw in the Saracens to boot—would not have such power, or be able to do so much as this Kublai, who is Lord of all the Tartars in the world.”

"—Marco Polo"

But surely his brothers and cousins had rest of Asia and more, of territories conquered by their grandfather, divided between them for administrative purposes, and Kublai Khan was responsible only for China?
***

"Trade with imperial China, which was already thriving in the East when the Roman Empire was coming to dominance in the West, was the stuff of legend early on in Chinese history, as the Silk Road brought merchants to Cathay, as China was then known. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo, along with his merchant father and uncle, traveled to China, where they were received by Emperor Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty.

"Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, was a Mongolian who did not speak Chinese and was mainly raised by his mother, a Nestorian Christian princess. Under Genghis Khan, the Mongols had conquered China. By the time Kublai Khan was emperor, the empire under his control reached from the Caspian Sea to the Korean peninsula. In 1271, Kublai Khan’s ambition was to unify China under his rule, which he named the Yuan Dynasty, and establish Beijing as the capital of the nation."

That's very incorrect. Most of Central Asia, and all of Tibet as its boundaries were before being swallowed by China, was in control of and administered by various other grandsons of the conqueror grandfather.

Tibet was still independent until Marco Polo went with Kublai Khan's emissaries following his military to conclude, post war, a treaty, which is the sole basis of China claiming Tibet.
***

"Even though China itself was actually a conquered territory under the control of the Mongols, the Chinese regarded everyone who was not Chinese as inferior. The Chinese were Huá; those outside China were Yi, or “barbarians” and “uncivilized.” Despite his identity as a foreigner, Polo was entrusted with diplomatic missions on the emperor’s behalf, traveling within China as well as to neighboring Asian regions. Polo reportedly stayed in China for 17 years, and upon his return to Europe, his accounts of the exotic East excited the imaginations—and the commercial interest—of Western explorers and monarchs, who learned from his writings of Chinese products such as paper money, gunpowder, coal, and porcelain.

"Under the Ming Dynasty, which ruled from 1368 to 1644, the emperor welcomed foreign envoys to Nanjing and Beijing but did not permit Chinese merchants to venture abroad in pursuit of private trade. The Chinese under the Ming era explored much of Asia while the Ming leaders limited but did not discourage trade with other nations."

Very confused paragraph there.

What exploration exactly did get to take place, then, if Chinese traders weren't allowed to go for trade outside China? There are sizable Chinese populations in Southeast Asia right up to Malaysia, keeping themselves separate from natives, surely they were trading!
***

"After 1557, trade with other nations opened up. It was then that the Portuguese began to trade with the Chinese. China soon also started trading goods with the Spanish in exchange for silver mined from Spain’s New World colonies. So much silver currency was exchanged in China that the silver became a familiar sight and would, in time, become a bulwark of the Chinese economy.

"For the Western world, mercantile expansion was also a route to Christian evangelism, and Jesuit missionaries began to come to China under the Ming Dynasty. It was in fact the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci who translated the name of a Chinese philosopher, Kong Qiu, into Confucius. Working with a Chinese colleague who had been baptized, Ricci also translated Euclid’s Elements into Chinese. The cross-pollination of ideas followed the incursion into China made by commerce.
***

"Although the Chinese emperor decided against expanding trade with Great Britain in 1793, trade between the West and East still played an active role in the commercial enterprises of Western nations. However, the Chinese did not need Western trade as much as the West needed trade with the Chinese. The Chinese operated outside the European sphere of influence and were capable of meeting the domestic needs of their own citizens, offering a high standard of living, independent innovation, and agricultural prowess. There was no need for the Chinese Empire to feel threatened or even influenced by Western demands. China remained focused upon its own world view, establishing policies which mitigated the expansion of Western power."

This author must be copying from official propaganda, even if second hand. The picture one gets, even from literature by those who loved China and revered everything thereof, is far from that assertion above.
***

"“You do not wish opium to harm your own country, but you choose to bring that harm to other countries, such as China.”

"—Lin Zexu"
***

"It wasn’t long before Chinese traders were willing to accept opium as payment in exchange for goods, even though the transaction was illegal in China. The result led to alarming rates of addiction; some estimates claim that perhaps as many as 90% of the young men along the east coast of China were opium addicts by 1830. Operating by stealth, the British East India Company outsourced the opium to private traders it had licensed to transport the opium from India to China, selling it to smugglers along the coast of China. The traders gave the gold and silver they received for the opium to the British East India Company; the company then used the gold and silver to buy Chinese goods it could sell at a profit in the United Kingdom.

"The increase in opium sold to China was staggering; the Chinese purchased 1,000 chests of opium in 1767. Between 1820 and 1830, the sale increased to 10,000 chests a year. Each chest contained approximately 140 pounds of opium. By 1838, 40,000 chests per year were being imported into China, aided by corrupt Chinese officials who helped develop an effective network for distributing it.

"Opium addiction had infiltrated the empire’s military troops and officials as well as the lower classes. With the illegal opium trade, Great Britain was winning the trade war; the opium production and smuggling process now made up between 15 and 20 percent of the revenue of the British East India Company. To protect this monopoly on opium production, Great Britain annexed whole sections of the Indian subcontinent where the poppy grew."

Author fails to inform readers about the facts regarding the latter - how growing opium as whole fields, much less a large scale harvest, wasn't natural to India until enforced by British, and how it empoverished the farmers in India, resulting in bonded labour exported from British to their plantations throughout the empire.

Why author refrains from mentioning this isn't clear. Colonial racism? Macaulay policy?
***


"Meanwhile, China was losing the addiction war. Even though the Chinese had completely outlawed opium in 1796, its prevalence was felt throughout Chinese society, particularly in the cities on the coast. An imperial edict was issued, stating that opium was a poison undermining the morals and customs of China. The warning went unheeded. By 1839, an estimated 27% of Chinese males were opium addicts. The viceroy to the emperor, Lin Zexu, sent a letter to Queen Victoria, asking for her help and challenging the morality of her government’s actions. Citing the British ban on opium, Lin wrote, “You do not wish opium to harm your own country, but you choose to bring that harm to other countries such as China.”

"The British monarch did not reply to the letter. ... "

This unforgivable lapse makes any claim on her behalf - or on behalf of british in general, for that matter -regarding morals, or good governance, at best very questionable, and in reality exposed as no more than fraudulent propaganda.

This is even more so of every possible church and in particular all missionaries, who did not protest any of this, much less vigorously so.

" ... Driven to do something to ease the crisis, in the spring of 1839, Lin Zexu had the opium dealers arrested and confiscated 1,200 tons of opium and 70,000 opium pipes, destroying over 20,000 opium chests that had been stored in Canton warehouses by the British merchants. While some British ships were able to escape Canton, some of the traders had no choice but to surrender their opium, which was destroyed. The opium trade became an offense punishable by death."

Quite right. Well done.
***

"British influence—some would say control—over Chinese policies extended beyond trade. In July of that year, a Chinese villager was killed by two drunken British sailors. The British government refused to release the sailors to the Chinese to face the justice of the Chinese legal system. As a result, tensions between the two countries heightened."

Considering the recent behaviour by Europe in general and Vatican in particular regarding Italian sailors guilty of murder of infant fishermen in coastal waters of India, oneust say nothing is different as far as either racism or morals of Europe are concerned, or of church for that matter. Any claim therefrom to fairness, justice, humanity, morals et al is obviously fraudulent.
***

"The British had a military presence in the area, and Charles Elliot, the British Superintendent of Trade in China, commanded a fleet which were stationed outside the Canton harbor. After the Chinese authorities issued a statement requiring all foreign ships to sign a bond agreeing not to trade opium, Elliot countered by ordering a blockade preventing British ships from trading with the Chinese. In November 1939, the British fired warning shots when one British trading vessel, the Royal Saxon, ignored the blockade and attempted to sail into Canton port. The Chinese ships sailed out of the harbor to preserve order. Firing ensued, and the Chinese ships were disabled."

So any Brits attempting a moral and legal stance were assaulted by British institutions!
***

"Back in London, feelings ran high at the incident. Many British felt that the Chinese were violating free trade. The Whig government proposed going to war, a decision opposed by the Tories; their opposing motion was defeated by nine votes, revealing the controversial nature of the conflict. The British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, instructed the British military to engage the Chinese in a punitive expedition and to capture Hong Kong, which would serve the British as a trading site in the future."

Author misleads readers here in refraining from mention of actual state of affairs. Hong Kong wasn't a bustling port, much less of a city, then - but only an island or a bunch thereof, with few poor local fisher folk as residents.
***

"“The opium trade produced a rationale for the Christian presence in China, turning the country into a depraved mass of opium sots to be disciplined and improved by salvation-hungry missionaries.”

"—Julia Lovell"

Indeed! What else could they feed on if not poverty, disease, filth, depravity ... guilt?
***

"The French and British entered Beijing on October 6 as the emperor, with no military forces to protect him, escaped from Beijing, leaving Prince Gong behind to negotiate peace terms. Western retaliation was vicious. The French and British troops attacked the Old Summer Palace to liberate the Western prisoners who were held there. Chinese art was looted and taken home to Britain and France. Diplomats were able to dissuade Lord Elgin from burning Beijing to punish the Chinese for the kidnapping and torture of the prisoners; instead, he settled for burning the Old Summer Palace."

Very comparable with, and reminiscent of, the horror of destruction and havoc wreaked throughout the continent South of Panama, by Europeans.
***

"“Take away your missionaries and your opium and you will be welcome.”

"—Chinese official"

Very succinctly said, very astute.
***

"For the Qing Dynasty, which had reigned over China since 1644, the erosion of its power and sovereignty was ominous. Their authority over the people had overseen everything from language to rituals to religion and social customs. The Qing came from Manchuria, and they had preserved their identity as outsiders who had conquered China. But the control they could impose upon regions in the past had been changing as Asia was accommodating the intrusion of the West."

Notice the minimisation of what West did to Asia, by this author, in labelling it "intrusion". The said "intrusion" amounted, not only to loot of billions, but deaths of millions due directly to the said "intrusion" by West, quite apart from the deaths caused in course of the two world wars - which originated in, and due entirely to, West.
***

"“The Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success.”

"—Mark Twain"

More moral, Mark Twain, than all the Western governments put together, not to mention traders and shipping lines involved in pushing opium into China.
***

"“Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners.”

"—Boxer slogan"

Wonder if the European term 'king' is a derivative of the Chinese 'Qing'.
***

"On June 21, the empress dowager declared war against all the foreign powers. However, the regional Chinese governors, who commanded fighting forces in Canton, Shandong, Wuhan, and Nanjing, refused to take part in the hostilities. They prevented the declaration of war from being publicized to the public in the south. By remaining neutral, these governors, called the Mutual Protection of Southeast China, kept most of the Chinese people from becoming involved in the fighting."

China must blame them for defeat of China against West, and not Asian soldiers who were employed in Western forces due to colonial regimes having reduced them to seeking employment, even at cost of risking life.
***

"“Suppose . . . the great nations of Europe were to put their fleets together, came over here, seize Portland, move on down to Boston, then New York, then Philadelphia, and so on down the Atlantic Coast and around the Gulf of Galveston? Suppose they took possession of these port cities, drove our people into the hinterland, built great warehouses and factories, brought in a body of dissolute agents, and calmly notified our people that henceforward they would manage the commerce of the country? Would we not have a Boxer movement to drive those foreign European Christian devils out of our country?”

"—Rev. Dr. George F. Pentecost"
***

"Sun Yat-sen later commended the Boxers’ bravery in taking on the military might of the Western powers. In fact, their actions—violent and even barbaric though they seemed to others—were in many ways matched by the actions of the Western nations. There were even people in the West who acknowledged the fact that the Boxers were just in their motives to defend their country against Western arrogance. It was a time when bigotry toward Asians was tolerated often without restraint. Some people, including some theologians, remarked that the behavior of the Christian powers toward the Chinese had displayed no Christ-like attributes."

When did any "behavior of the Christian powers toward" anyone, with exception of Germans post WWII, display any "Christ-like attributes"? Towards Indians or any other Asians, Africans, or natives of "New World" whether East of Pacific Ocean or West? The very epithet "New World", for that matter, denies human status to natives of that "New World"!
***

[David Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Western colonialism

“Suppose . . . the great nations of Europe were to put their fleets together, came over here, seize Portland, move on down to Boston, then New York, then Philadelphia, and so on down the Atlantic Coast and around the Gulf of Galveston? Suppose they took possession of these port cities, drove our people into the hinterland, built great warehouses and factories, brought in a body of dissolute agents, and calmly notified our people that henceforward they would manage the commerce of the country? Would we not have a Boxer movement to drive those foreign European Christian devils out of our country?”

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brief but informative

It was important to bring the Boxer Rebellion into 2022 as it is a reminder to China’s 3rd term President of how the foreigners treated the Chinese, how they Chinese were exploited and how the West had destroyed the Empress’s Summer Palace all those years ago. The Chinese lost Face at the conclusion of the Boxer Rebellion and have never forgotten it. Recently at the Presidents 3rd appointment as President many of the government officials did not want him to have the same or more powers as Chairman Mao had years ago but it didn’t prevent the 3rd term president to have such overwhelming authority.

[Abel Moreno]

Quick History of China and Western Nations

This was a short and quick read that covered the Boxer Rebellion and China's battles with Western Nations. The Opium War is covered, the downfall of the Quin Dynasty, what led to the rise of Communism (very brief), and outcome of it all. A lot is covered in this quick read but it is written very well. A lot of interesting facts of why and how everything happened.

[Glenn Lygrisse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful Overview

This missive helps to see an overview of this time of history in China. There is much more to read and learn, but this is a good introduction and easy read as a glimpse into this era of history.

[Al Handa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good well written overview

A readable overview that covers the events in a manner that gives the reader a good sense of what happened, before and after. This Hourly Series is very uneven with a lot of mediocre but this one is well done.

[George Polansky · Rating 4 out of 5]

An introduction to western arrogance affected relations with China and its impact on the lower classes.

[Vince Pillig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting take!

United States Marine corps history has a different outlook on the boxer rebellion. Not sure who's correct. Interesting book though.

[Susan J Benna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fair Review

Good quick overview of the events leading up to the Boxer Rebellion. Also an overview of the political consequences of the rebellion. Would have like to have seen more information on the rebellion itself.

[Kenneth Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read.

Real history. Not the same as a movie. What really happened in Peking during the final days of the Quin Dynasty.

[carl caldwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colonialism.

[Teresa A. Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting...

Tidbit of history. It delves just deeply enough to make it interesting yet short enough that your not bored. Very good read!

[Charles Gebhardt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short History

The book covers the history of the Boxer Rebellion. Unfortunately there is more history to be covered than I anticipated. This
made the history hard to follow.