The Righteous Fists

By the end of the 19th century China lay prostrate before the foreign powers. Defeated by Japan in 1895, the Qing Empire had been forced to grant 'spheres of influence,' leased ports, railways, and mining rights to Britain, Russia, Germany, France, Japan, and others, until it seemed the ancient empire might be partitioned outright like Africa. Christian missionaries, protected by treaty, penetrated the countryside, and their converts — enjoying foreign legal protection in local disputes — bred deep resentment among their neighbours.

Into this humiliation came natural disaster: years of drought and then famine across the North China plain in 1899, which idle, desperate peasants readily blamed on the foreigners and their railways and telegraph lines that, it was said, had angered the gods and disturbed the earth's harmony. Out of the secret-society tradition of the region arose the 'Righteous and Harmonious Fists' — the Boxers — who practised martial and spiritual rituals they believed made them invulnerable to bullets, and who preached the expulsion of all things foreign.

The movement spread like wildfire through Shandong and Zhili, attacking Chinese Christians, burning churches, and tearing up railways. At first the Qing authorities wavered between suppressing and using it. But at the summit of power sat the Empress Dowager Cixi, who had crushed a reform movement in 1898 and nursed a bitter hatred of the foreigners — and a powerful faction at her court, led by Prince Duan, urged her to see in the Boxers not a threat but a weapon. It was a fateful temptation.