The 55-Day Siege of the Beijing Foreign Legations Quarter by the Boxer Movement and Imperial Chinese Army in Summer 1900

The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists — known in English as the Boxers because of the martial-arts training that was central to their ritual practice — was an anti-foreign, anti-Christian peasant militia movement that emerged in the western Shandong province of northern China in 1898. The movement’s recruits believed that ritual practice and specific protective spells made them invulnerable to European firearms.

The 1890s political context in Shandong was a accumulation of grievances: famine following Yellow River flooding in 1898; economic dislocation from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895; resentment of the extraterritorial rights granted to Catholic and Protestant missionary stations under the treaty system; concrete tension over specific land disputes between Christian-converted Chinese villagers (who had recourse to European-protected courts) and unconverted villagers (who did not).

The Boxer movement spread north from Shandong into Hebei and Beijing through 1899 and the first half of 1900. By June 1900 the Boxer presence in Beijing had become enough to begin attacks on Chinese Christians and foreign nationals. The Qing imperial government — under the Empress Dowager Cixi — equivocated through the first weeks and decided on 21 June 1900 to declare war on the Eight Powers and to use the Boxer militia as auxiliary irregular forces.

The siege

The Beijing foreign Legation Quarter was a walled enclave covering approximately 1 square kilometre adjacent to the Forbidden City. It contained the diplomatic missions of 11 foreign powers, European-style residences for approximately 900 diplomats and family members, and buildings serving approximately 2,800 Chinese Christian refugees who had fled to the quarter for protection.

The siege began on 20 June 1900 with the assassination of the German ambassador Klemens von Ketteler in the Beijing street. The siege lasted 55 days.

The defenders had approximately 400 armed soldiers from 8 powers and approximately 125 improvised civilian volunteers. They were outnumbered approximately 20 to 1 by besieging Boxer militia and Qing imperial army units. The defenders held an irregular perimeter that contracted progressively as Boxer pressure took outlying buildings.

The siege casualties were 76 defenders dead, 179 wounded. The Chinese Christian refugee casualties were much higher — conventional estimates are approximately 500 dead through combat and disease.

The Eight-Nation Alliance

The Eight-Nation Alliance — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary — organised a relief force at the port of Tianjin in July 1900. The Alliance army, approximately 20,000 troops under the overall command of the German field marshal Alfred von Waldersee (who did not arrive until after the siege was over), marched on Beijing in early August 1900.

The Alliance force fought its way up the 80 miles from Tianjin to Beijing across 11 days. The decisive engagement at Tongzhou on 12 August 1900 destroyed the main Qing army group on the Beijing approach. The Alliance entered Beijing on 14 August 1900. The siege was relieved.

The Empress Dowager Cixi fled Beijing on the night of 15-16 August 1900 disguised as a peasant in a peasant cart, accompanied by the Guangxu Emperor (whom she kept under close personal supervision) and a small retinue. They reached Xi’an in October 1900 and remained there for the next 14 months.

The Boxer Protocol

The 1901 Boxer Protocol, signed at Beijing on 7 September 1901, imposed the following terms on the Qing government:

— indemnity payment of 450 million Tael silver (approximately $333 million 1901 USD, approximately $12 billion in 2025 money) payable over 39 years at 4 percent interest — execution or exile of 10 named Boxer-sympathising senior officials — permanent foreign military garrison rights in Beijing and at 12 cities along the Tianjin-Beijing-Shanhaiguan railway — 2-year prohibition on Chinese arms imports — restrictions on Chinese civil-service examination access in cities where foreigners had been killed — public apology missions to Germany and Japan for the killed diplomats

The 450 million Tael indemnity was approximately one Tael per Chinese subject — deliberate symbolic collective punishment of the Chinese population. The 39-year payment schedule extended Chinese indemnity payments to 1940. The United States returned part of its share of the indemnity to China in 1908 for educational scholarship purposes — the founding endowment of Tsinghua University. The other powers did not return their shares.

What followed

The Cixi government returned to Beijing in January 1902. The post-Boxer reform programme — described in the Cixi article — restarted on a Hundred Days Reform model. The Qing dynasty survived for nine more years and fell in the Xinhai Revolution of October 1911.

The Russian troops occupying Manchuria as part of the Eight-Nation Alliance refused to withdraw at the end of the campaign — the Russian occupation of Manchuria produced the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. The Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War destabilised the Russian Tsarist regime and contributed to the 1905 Russian Revolution.

The Boxer Rebellion was the last pre-1949 Chinese military attempt to expel foreign powers by direct military force. The 1949 Communist victory was a different political project but shared with the 1900 Boxer movement the substantive objective of expelling foreign military and economic extraterritorial control from Chinese territory. The 1949 victory achieved that objective.