Siege of the International Legations

In the summer of 1900 an anti-foreign movement the foreign press called the Boxers reached Beijing, and on 20 June the Qing court threw its weight behind them. Eleven nations' diplomats, their families, a few hundred guards and several thousand Chinese Christians pulled back into the legation quarter and held a perimeter of garden walls and barricaded lanes for 55 days. The defence was improvised throughout: horses were eaten, sandbags were sewn from embassy silk, and the modern artillery that could have flattened the quarter was never brought fully to bear, which historians still argue about. A relief column of some 20,000 troops from eight countries fought its way up from the coast and broke in on 14 August. The army that relieved the legations then looted the capital for weeks, and the settlement imposed the following year carried an indemnity Chinese governments were still paying decades later.

The siege is one of the few episodes in modern history narrated almost entirely by the besieged, since the participants wrote dozens of memoirs and the Chinese side left very little, and Peter Fleming and later scholars have shown how much of the standard account traces back to a handful of self-serving diaries. The question of why the Qing artillery held back has been read as deliberate restraint by officials hedging against defeat, as incompetence, and as evidence that the court was split rather than committed. In Chinese historiography the Boxers have swung from superstitious rabble to anti-imperialist patriots and back again depending on the decade, and the episode anchors the century of humiliation narrative that is still politically live. The indemnity has an odd afterlife: the United States remitted part of its share to fund Chinese students abroad, which is how Tsinghua University began.