China, 1895 to 1916, episode 5

Fifty-Five Days and the Price of Peace

For eight weeks diplomats, soldiers, missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians hold out in the legation quarter while the outside world believes them dead, and Li Hongzhang, the old negotiator, tries to talk the allies out of marching. The episode follows the siege, Cixi's flight in disguise, the looting of Beijing and Li's last task, signing the Boxer Protocol, and asks what it cost China for a generation. It leans heavily on foreign observers, who wrote nearly all the siege accounts; the Chinese side of the siege is thin and the episode says so.

Transcript

Last time, Cixi's court threw in its lot with the Boxers and declared war on every foreign power at once. The day before, a Manchu soldier had shot the German envoy, Baron von Ketteler, dead in a Beijing street, and after that nobody in the legations would leave the city under a Chinese escort. And far to the south, the great viceroys, Li Hongzhang among them, refused to obey. In effect, much of China had seceded from the court. This time, the siege. And the old man in the south whom everyone, in the end, would need to clean it up. The envoys had been sent a request to leave Beijing, dated to the hour. At four in the afternoon of the twentieth of June, twenty four hours had passed since that hour. Punctually at four, exactly as if the note had been an ultimatum, a storm of rifle fire swept the legations, and the Catholic cathedral across the city. That was the moment the rifles of the imperial army joined the matchlocks, spears and swords of the Boxers. From then on the fire was generally constant and furious. So who was inside? The legation quarter sat south east of the Forbidden City, near the great Front Gate. The foreign community there came to 473 civilians: 245 men, 149 women and 79 children. Guarding them were 451 soldiers and marines, from eight different countries. And with them were some thousands of Chinese Christians who had nowhere else to go. On the twentieth the whole community crowded into the British legation, which became the citadel for every foreign civilian. Nobody was really in charge. Each detachment guarded its own legation, under its own officers and its own envoy. The senior officer was an Austrian naval captain, and his first act was to abandon the Austrian legation in a hurry, which left the French legation's flank wide open. After that the British envoy, Sir Claude MacDonald, an old soldier, was named commander of the defence. Even so, his control was little more than nominal, and to the end each legation was held mainly by its own guards. The civilians organised themselves. The missionaries had formed committees back at the Methodist mission, and now those committees took on the running of the whole community. Fortification fell to an American missionary named Frank Gamewell. It was said of him during the siege that he was "a representation of limited omnipresence", and his work was judged literally indispensable to the defence. Much of the digging and the filling of sandbags was done by the Chinese Christians. There were seventy five civilian volunteers, thirty one of them Japanese, men who could shoot straight, and the church contributed what everyone called the "six fighting parsons". They fought with spare rifles from the American legation, or any rifle or sporting gun they could find, and their ammunition was whatever was left over from the shooting season. Now the weakest point, and the man who held it. The Chinese Christians had been herded into the grounds of a Manchu prince's palace, Prince Su's, and the job of guarding them went to the Japanese, whose own legation was covered by the others. It was a great walled compound of halls and gardens, just across a canal from the British legation. When the Austrians pulled back, Prince Su's palace was thrust into the front line. The Japanese there were led by Colonel Shiba, and by general consent he was the most distinguished soldier in the legations. He was the military attaché of the Japanese legation. With his own men, thirty Italians and most of the volunteers, he held a long, exposed line around the palace. On the twenty ninth of June, Shiba reported that he could hold the palace for two or three days longer. He held it until he was wounded. And then his men held it, to the end of the siege. He was reckless in courage, never stopped watching, and was always full of plans. And Western men who had looked on Asians as an inferior breed came to hold him in high esteem. Think about that. A few years earlier Japan had smashed China's army and navy. Now a Japanese colonel was holding the line for the Western powers in the middle of the Chinese capital. Outside the barricades, Beijing was coming apart. Once the soldiers were let loose, they plundered the defenceless city alongside the Boxers. For now, the Boxers were masters of the capital. Their plans were the government's plans. On the twenty fourth of June, a decree ordered the extermination of all foreigners. That same day, Chinese Christians were put to death in Beijing. There was no mistaking what the people behind the barricades could expect if the barricades fell. Inside, a thousand foreigners used to great comfort lived for most of the siege on rice and a thin ration of horse meat. The three thousand Chinese Christians had only rice, and toward the end, less of that. The horses were the ponies of the foreign community's racing club. Among the non combatants, six infants died of the privations. On the other side of the barricades, ammunition seemed to be unlimited. Someone estimated that between one and a half and two million bullets were fired at the legations, and a careful count found about 2,900 shells landed inside. The defenders had less than three hundred rounds per rifle, and some had less than a hundred. The Americans and French started with three hundred a man, the Italians ninety, the Russians sixty five and the Germans forty. Toward the end, they were buying small amounts of ammunition from the Chinese soldiers who were attacking them. Sit with that one for a moment. The British marines, seventy nine of them, were the reserve, holding their own legation where all the women and children sheltered. The Germans held theirs under heavy attack, and the French legation was the most dangerous corner of all, exposed to constant assaults and to mines dug underneath it. Among the defenders who made a name for themselves was the American legation's secretary, Herbert Squiers, a soldier too, whom everyone remembered as the embodiment of cheerfulness and ready resource. They improvised. Someone turned up an old cannon barrel in a junk shop, and they mounted it on an Italian gun carriage and fed it Russian shells. They called it the International Gun. In the first week, the attackers set fire to the Hanlin Academy, right next to the British legation, hoping the flames would carry across. The legation survived, but the academy burned, and much of its ancient library with it. And yet something about the attacks was strange. Sir Robert Hart, inside with everyone else, noticed that the attacks never came in anything like the numbers the government had. They "were never pushed home, but always ceased just when we feared they must succeed". And, he wrote, "had the force round us really attacked with thoroughness and determination, we could not have held out a week, perhaps not even a day." Hart concluded that "somebody, probably a wise man who knew what the destruction of the legations would cost empire and dynasty, intervened between the issue of the order and the execution of it." In fact, all through the summer some Qing troops were defending the legation quarter while others attacked it, and twice the Zongli Yamen even sent in emergency food. There were three real pauses in the shooting: one day in June, ten days at the end of July, and two days in August. Still, at no moment in those eight weeks did anyone but the most optimistic believe they could come through.

Now cross the city. On the far side of the palace lakes stood the Beitang, the North Church, Beijing's Catholic cathedral. The man in charge there was Bishop Favier, the head of the Catholic mission. He was a Frenchman who had spent nearly forty years in China, and in May he had written to the French envoy warning that the Boxers were coming for the Christians of Beijing, and asking for guards. He got forty three French and Italian marines. Behind his walls was a crowd of some three thousand Chinese Catholics. About five hundred of them were armed with improvised spears, and a few with rifles taken from dead attackers. The attacks on the Beitang were even more furious than on the legations. Over 2,400 shells were counted falling inside the walls, and the mines dug underneath were an even greater danger. The worst of the mines, in August, killed dozens of people in a single blast. And the hunger was worse. From the first of August the daily ration, for everyone but the marines, was five ounces of food. From the eighth it was three. Five ounces is about one bowl of rice, for a whole day. Of the forty three marines, eleven were killed and twelve wounded. And over the two months, more than four hundred of the Chinese inside were buried in the cathedral garden. So this was the second siege. Most of the people who held it, and most of the people who died in it, were Chinese. When it was over, Favier called it a miracle from heaven. And grieving over the work of centuries undone, he said "it is almost a pity that we were not all massacred", because then "we should have died martyrs". Let me tell you now how it ended. Relief came two days after it reached the legations, on the morning of the sixteenth of August, from two directions at once: the Japanese from the north, and from the west a mixed force of four hundred each of French, British and Russian troops. The Japanese were the first to fight their way in, and soon after them came the French.

Meanwhile, the old man in the south. On the ninth of July, the court sent a decree calling Li Hongzhang away from Guangzhou and back to his old post as governor general of Zhili. He was seventy seven years old. He travelled by way of Hong Kong, and the British governor there told him his place was in Guangzhou. At Shanghai the foreign consuls told him that if the envoys were alive he must negotiate with them, and if they were dead he must deal with their governments at home. He was visibly chagrined. But he did get assurances from the foreign ministries that the powers wanted no Chinese territory, and to his own government he gave sound advice. On the fourteenth of July, the allies took the city of Tianjin by assault. And that same day in Beijing, something odd happened. A messenger the legations had sent out, whom the Chinese had caught, came back unharmed. He was carrying a letter signed by Prince Qing and others, in the usual form of the Zongli Yamen, but worded so that nobody could tell who had actually written it. More letters like it followed, handed over at one point on the line while the rifle duel carried on everywhere else. The first expressed pained surprise that the legation guards kept up their attacks. It invited the envoys, with their families and staffs, to take refuge at the Zongli Yamen, but "there must not on any account whatever be taken any single armed foreign soldier". The envoys declined. They answered that envoys were sacred everywhere, and that every shot they had fired was in self defence. Unarmed, into the hands of the government whose soldier had shot the German envoy in the street. You can see why they said no. Then, before the eighteenth, the firing stopped. A decree dated the seventeenth was sent to the foreign powers. It expressed deep regret for the killing of the chancellor of the Japanese legation and for the "violent removal" of the German envoy, and it promised that the murderers would be punished. Through the whole night of the seventeenth, only five rifle shots were fired. It came just in time. On the fourteenth, those who were in a position to judge had said the French could not hold their legation for more than two more days. After the first day or two the truce was not complete, but it gave the besieged a rest they badly needed, at a moment when they were nearly at the end. There were even courtesies. On the twentieth of July, by imperial order, the Zongli Yamen sent in a gift of vegetables and watermelons. China's envoys abroad let it be known that their government was feeding and protecting the legations. What actually came in would not have fed the crowd inside for a single day. The Chinese ministers showed great concern for Sir Robert Hart. One note asked where he was. Another asked his opinion of the new arrangements for running the customs, and others passed on anxious telegrams from his family. The ministers who could not stop their soldiers shooting at Hart wanted to know what he thought about the customs. The envoys asked to send telegrams home in their own codes. They were told their telegrams must be in plain words, "stating that all is well, without touching on military affairs", and they refused. Here is why that mattered. In Washington, China's envoy, Wu Tingfang, had been telling the American government and the newspapers that all was well. Apart from Baron von Ketteler, the envoys were alive, and the government was protecting them. The American Secretary of State, John Hay, set him a test: get a telegram through to the American envoy, Edwin Conger, in the State Department's own cipher, and get one back. On the sixteenth of July, in the middle of the truce, Conger received a telegram in that cipher. On the seventeenth he sent his answer: "For one month we have been besieged in British legation under continued shot and shell from Chinese troops". And: "quick relief only can prevent general massacre". The outside world was ready for the worst. In the middle of July, a report had gone out that the whole foreign community in Beijing had been massacred on the eighth. In London the newspapers printed obituaries of people inside the legations, and a memorial service was arranged at St Paul's Cathedral. Conger's telegram reached Washington on the twentieth, and it relieved the minds of many millions of anxious people. But the picture it drew was grim. So why the pause at all? The fall of Tianjin had shaken the war party. Ronglu had renewed his protests to Cixi. And Li Hongzhang, and probably the Yangtze viceroys too, were pressing hard for peace. A court that could order the shooting to stop could also have ordered it to end. It did not. The quiet lasted, with some bursts of firing, until the twenty eighth. For three days there were signs the truce was nearly over, and on the twenty ninth the attacks began again.

While the legations rested, the killing went on in places no relief force would ever reach. At Baoding, south west of Beijing, a Chinese pastor named Meng was arrested on the twenty eighth of June, tortured, tried, and beheaded the next day. On the thirtieth, a Boxer crowd helped by soldiers in uniform attacked one mission there, and the others the next day. The missionaries and their families were killed in the attack, or burned in their houses, or beheaded. Eleven Americans and four English died at Baoding, and most of the Chinese servants, who could have run, stayed with them and shared their fate. Then the orders came to Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi, where Yuxian was governor. On the twenty seventh of June a crowd destroyed a mission hospital there. Everyone escaped except one English woman, who was wounded and pushed back into the burning building to die. The missionaries begged the authorities for protection. On the third of July, three officials who said they came from the governor urged all of them, Protestant and Catholic, to gather in a single house, and on the sixth they did, with many of their servants. Another group, from a mission eighty miles to the east, tried to escape toward the coast, failed, and were brought to Taiyuan and locked in the prison on the eighth. On the ninth of July all of them were taken to the governor's yamen. A yamen was an official's headquarters, his office, court and residence in one. There, outside the main gate, men, women and children were stripped to the waist like common criminals, and made to wait. Then Yuxian came out. He looked them over, and ordered their immediate beheading. It was done there and then, in front of him: first the Protestants of Taiyuan, then the Catholics, then the Protestants from the east. The Catholic bishop, an old man with a long white beard, asked the governor why he was doing this wicked thing. For an answer, Yuxian drew his sword across the bishop's face, and the blood ran down into his beard. Then the bishop was killed, and the priests and nuns after him. Forty six people died at Taiyuan that day under Yuxian's eyes and by his orders: thirty four English and Scottish Protestants and twelve Catholics, fifteen men, twenty women and eleven children. And by his own report to Cixi, the heads of six American missionaries killed at another town were sent to him. Some missionaries in Shanxi fled west instead, over the border into Shaanxi, where the governor, Duanfang, protected them, and in the end they were brought through to Hankou. At least seven died of the hardships on the way. And remember the Chinese Christians. For every foreigner killed that summer, many more of them died, right across the north. Hold on to Yuxian's name. When the bill came, it would be on it.

Li Hongzhang got as far as Shanghai, and there he stopped and started bargaining. On the twenty fourth of July he undertook to put down the "Boxers and rebellious troops", and to escort the envoys safely to Tianjin. But he explicitly refused any responsibility for anyone else: "the women and children, the preachers and teachers, customs people and guards". Neither side said a word about the three thousand Chinese Christians the legations were protecting. The American consul at Shanghai asked him exactly what he meant. Li's answer was that he would try to persuade the throne to send the envoys to Tianjin, after which he hoped the fighting would be suspended and negotiations could follow. The Boxers and the troops, he said, could be stopped by the Chinese government. And he added: "Assures envoys now safe." John Hay took his time, and then answered flatly: "This government will not enter into any arrangement regarding disposition or treatment of legation without first having free communication with Mr. Conger." The envoys' safety was the Chinese government's responsibility, Hay said. If it had the power to deliver them at Tianjin, it had the power to protect them where they were, and to let them talk to their governments. That was the trap in Li's offer, and everybody could see it. The powers had their own ideas about pressure. At Tianjin, the consuls proposed telling the Chinese government that if the envoys were harmed, foreign troops would destroy the tombs of the dynasty. It was thought very unlikely to have any effect on mutinous soldiers or a riotous mob. Instead, the powers declared together that if the legations came to harm, every official in Beijing, of whatever rank, would be held responsible in person and property. The violence went on. In Beijing, the same offer reached the envoys on the nineteenth of July: an escort to Tianjin. It came with a warning. If the envoys chose to stay, and "any unforeseen disaster" followed, the government, having "faithfully given warning in advance", could not accept the responsibility. The envoys asked why, if the government could not protect them inside the city, it was so sure it could protect them on the open road to Tianjin. Among themselves, they believed the proposal meant "certain death". Meanwhile, on the thirtieth of July, the government assured the powers that the envoys were all safe and well, that vegetables, fruit and provisions had been sent in to them again and again, and that "Relations most friendly." On the thirty first, Li tried again. If the envoys could talk freely to their governments, he asked, "will America arrange that allies will not advance" on Beijing while the two sides negotiated? The firing on the legations had already started again. He was told it was not thought worth putting his proposal to the other powers, and he went on pressing the escort plan. In Beijing, letters from Prince Qing and others kept coming through the last days of July and into August, urging the envoys to leave for Tianjin, one of them even promising to protect the Chinese Christians who would have to stay behind. And all that time, day and night until the morning of the third of August, the rifle fire never stopped. On the second, the Zongli Yamen sent in some intercepted letters. They were full of misleading news, but they gave away one fact the envoys could be sure of: when they were written, the relief force had not even started. On the third, the firing suddenly stopped. A letter arrived insisting on the envoys' departure and announcing that Ronglu had been put in charge of the arrangements. Inside, the French envoy guessed the calm was meant to win their confidence, so they would agree to go. The likelier reason was that the troops had been pulled away to meet the relief force. On the evening of the fourth, the sniping started again. On the fifth of August, a message from Conger dated the twenty first of July finally got out: "enough provisions, little ammunition, hope speedy relief". And on the eighth, Sheng Xuanhuai, at Shanghai, told the consuls that "the viceroys were expecting an edict degrading them and ordering them to commit suicide." That was what it could cost to stand against the war party. Officials at court who had argued for crushing the Boxers had already paid with their lives. On the seventh of August, the court named Li Hongzhang its plenipotentiary, with full powers to negotiate with the powers by telegraph. The envoys warned their governments that stopping the relief force now would mean a general massacre. On the twelfth of August the allied army reached Tongzhou. Li made one last try to stop it there, warning the powers that if their troops entered Beijing it would bring great disaster on the imperial dynasty. The answer came back that there would be no negotiations at all until the legations were in a position to go to Tianjin under an adequate foreign escort. Remember that answer. I will tell you shortly when it was sent.

Now the army, and the man sent to stop it. His name was Li Bingheng. In 1897 he had been governor of Shandong, and it was on his watch that two German missionaries were murdered, the excuse Germany used to seize Jiaozhou. As part of that settlement he was dismissed, and declared forever unfit to hold any office. That lasted two years. In 1899 the court made him high commissioner to investigate the finances of Manchuria, the dynasty's homeland. In June 1900 he was ordered to Beijing, and when he came he threw his weight behind the war party and struck at the Chinese who were friendly with foreigners. On the twenty ninth of July, Cixi received him in audience. That was the day the guns opened on the legations again. Then he was sent to take supreme command of the forces in the field, and troops were pulled out of the firing line in Beijing to meet the relief force, Dong Fuxiang's Gansu men among them. What he faced was a cobbled together army of over eighteen thousand men: British, Russians, French, Americans, Austrians, Italians, and by far the largest contingent, some eight thousand Japanese. Most of the British force were Indian soldiers, Sikhs and Rajputs and others from the army of British India. The powers meant to punish the Qing while leaving the dynasty in power. The army set out from Tianjin on the fourth of August. At four the next morning, the Japanese hit the Chinese defences in front of the village of Beicang, and after some stubborn fighting the allied left wing had the place by noon. The Chinese fell back in disorder, and word was that Li Bingheng himself had been wounded. On the sixth, the Chinese were caught at Yangcun, and by half past two in the afternoon they were routed. The Americans and British took the brunt of that fight. After the defeat, Yulu, the governor general of Zhili, killed himself. The generals held a conference at Yangcun and agreed to push on to Tongzhou. From there the Japanese, the most numerous and the best equipped, took the lead, with the Russians, the British and the Americans behind them. Li Bingheng did not long outlive the defeat either. Beaten, he took his own life. After that, the only enemies left on the road were the burning sun and the stinging dust, until a fight just short of Tongzhou, which the allies took at half past four in the morning on the twelfth of August. And along the way, many Chinese died as the foreign troops moved through hundreds of villages between the coast and Beijing, looting, raping and burning. Down in the south, Chinese readers were being told a different war. A Guangzhou newspaper assured its readers that Chinese forces had fought the foreigners twenty or thirty times around the capital and Tianjin and won victory after victory. "This news is reliable." It reported that at Yangcun the allies had lost several thousand men by drowning, thanks to a stratagem of Li Bingheng's: he had dammed the river and then let the water go. Then came a telegram from its Shanghai correspondent. On the seventh of August, it said, the foreign troops had lost "over 20,000 men by drowning, and 8000 to 9000 by death in battle with our troops." That would have been more men than the whole allied army.

At Tongzhou, the Russian commander asked for a day's rest on the thirteenth, because his men could not move. The others would not agree, and they settled on a day of scouting instead. The Russians stayed in camp. Then, toward evening, they marched out. At about nine that night, heavy firing broke out to the north west, and it went on all night. It turned out to be a Russian attack on the Dongbian Gate. Inside, that same night, a customs man who had fought all through the siege as a volunteer was on duty at Prince Su's palace. "Suddenly one of the most furious rifle attacks that we ever sustained commenced", he remembered. "Lead was simply poured into us." He and three others began to cheer, to try to daunt the attackers. The Japanese on their left cheered too, and blew the bugle for the charge, and the Italians at the far end rattled stones in kerosene tins. It rained all night, and thundered, and the water in their trench was over their ankles. Then someone called out. Did they hear that? A machine gun, working outside the walls. "The relief force is outside the city". They stood there listening, laughing and joking. At daybreak the American commander, General Chaffee, learned that the Russians were not where they were supposed to be. Around noon he found them in the Dongbian Gate, their "artillery and troops were in great confusion in the passage, the artillery facing in both directions." Some American troops boldly climbed the wall of the Inner City, swept along the top of it, and by three in the afternoon were level with the American legation. Theirs was the first flag on the wall. The British commander, General Gaselee, had marched at two in the morning, and he went in through a gate of the Outer City without opposition. And here Sir Claude MacDonald had done something clever. He had sent out a letter in cipher telling Gaselee that the easiest way into the Inner City was the water gate, just south of the British legation. The water gate was a culvert where a canal ran under the city wall, and the troops waded in through its mud. So the British were the first into the Inner City, and the first into the legations, at three in the afternoon. The Americans came through the same water gate soon after. The Japanese met fierce resistance at their gate, and were the last into Beijing. Back in the legation, the customs volunteer was back on picket duty when another volunteer rushed in shouting: "The relief force is in". And: "The Sikhs are in the legation". Everyone who could leave his post ran. And this is what he saw. "Men, women and children, every one out on the lawn, cheering, yelling, crying, mad with excitement and delight". "and there coming in, line after line, waving their turbans and cheering, real, live, big, burly Indian troops, dripping with perspiration, covered with dust, and thoroughly tired." He ran up to the first one he saw, clapped him on the back, shook his hand, yelled and cheered. "I, who had thought I should never come out of this awful siege alive, could now realise and see that I was at last saved". From the deadline at four in the afternoon on the twentieth of June to the Sikhs on the lawn, the siege had lasted fifty five days. On the capture of Beijing, the Chinese forces simply scattered. The cost of the whole summer's fighting, from June to August, was nearly eight hundred foreigners dead, and countless thousands of Boxers and Qing soldiers. And the siege went on killing after it was over. The strain had been enormous, the seeds of disease had been planted in many of them, and not a few died months later in their own countries, as truly killed by the siege as if they had died inside it. The French envoy came down with typhoid. Hart called it another after the siege case. And remember Li Hongzhang's last plea from Tongzhou, and the answer that there would be no talks until the legations could leave under foreign escort? By the time that answer was given, the army had already been inside Beijing for two days.

And Cixi? The court fled. It was not a long prepared plan to carry on the war somewhere else. It was a hasty act, driven by fear. She did not have to go. Had she stayed and played her hand, the few real statesmen among the Manchus would have rallied to her, and the viceroys had already made it plain that their loyalty depended on her safety. And the powers, relieved to find their envoys alive, would almost certainly have put expediency first. But her conscience was not clear, she was in the grip of the leaders of the Boxer movement, and nobody around her could believe the foreigners would spare a single Manchu they could lay their hands on. Cixi and the emperor put on the blue cotton clothes of ordinary commoners and, in that disguise, fled Beijing in a donkey cart as the foreign armies arrived. They slipped out before dawn on the fifteenth of August. Cixi was sixty four. For a hundred years, no emperor had ventured out of the Forbidden City except for a few brief yearly ceremonies, and for the two flights: in 1860, and now. In 1860, when British and French troops took Beijing, the court ran north to the hunting palace at Chengde. Cixi had been on that flight too, as a young consort of the emperor. This time the court went west, to Xi'an, near the ancient site where the Qin had founded China's first empire. Xi'an had been the capital of the empire fourteen centuries before. The road west was long and stony. On the way, the court stopped for some weeks in Taiyuan, the very city where Yuxian had beheaded the missionaries. They reached Xi'an in late October. There the court and the government of the empire were set up again. Readers in Guangzhou got a gentler version. The same newspaper explained that China must have agreed to let a limited number of foreign troops into Beijing to protect their envoys. To be on the safe side, it said, the emperor and the Empress Dowager had consented to go to the imperial hunting lodge at Wutai, in northern Shanxi, until peace was restored. "We shall be pleased to publish further good news as it is received." Whether or not she had fostered the Boxers, she had knowingly let them grow. The allied march on Beijing and the flight to Xi'an forced her to face what she had done. She had let herself be ruled by narrow and cruel men, she had caused unspeakable outrages, and worst of all, she had blundered. Her pride demanded that she win back the good opinion of the foreign nations, and whatever she did, she would face suspicion at home and abroad. The court's decree spoke differently. It was issued in January 1901, from Xi'an. Since the court had left the capital, the decree said, the Empress Dowager had been consumed with anxiety day and night, and then, in the emperor's own voice: "We Ourselves do not cease from vehement self-reproach". He reflected on how much the abuses and the "perfunctory and specious routine" of recent decades had brought on the calamity, and he declared that "the whole system of government must be radically reformed". The Empress Dowager, he said, had told him China must take on the good qualities of foreign nations, to make up for its own shortcomings. In the same breath, the decree said the harm done by Kang Youwei's faction was greater even than the harm done by "those dealers in magic the Boxers". Self reproach, then. But not for what she had done to the reformers.

Back in Beijing, the city she left behind paid for her choices. Strong men fled. Those who were not so strong fled too, if they could find any way to travel, and there was very little. The city had already been plundered by the Boxers and then by the Chinese soldiers. They had only skimmed the surface. The foreign troops now set to work to sack it, riotously, but systematically. Many thousands of men were killed in a wild orgy of slaughter. At first the soldiers went wherever they pleased across the city. Then each army plundered the district it had been given to police. The commanders tried to bring some order to it by setting up prize funds, with all loot to be handed in to a prize agent. The Japanese probably did hand theirs in. The Western armies' prize funds never came to much, because their troops were out of hand, and they looked on Beijing and everything in it, people and property alike, as the prize of war. China had broken the law of nations, and the world answered by keeping none of its own laws. In the British legation, captured loot was sold off at auction. The British went after the Summer Palace, on the grounds that it belonged to the emperor and plundering it would not hurt ordinary people. Of all the armies, the Japanese were most highly spoken of for their conduct. The French looted methodically and thoroughly. On the eleventh of September, at a conference of the allied commanders, General Gaselee said "there were many Chinese in all sections of the city except the Russian, where there were only dogs." In October an American report noted that the American section had been crowded with Chinese for a month. Just across the street, the German section was almost deserted. "The Chinese say they are robbed by the Germans." Sir Robert Hart wrote that men were being "seized and made to do all sorts of work and not paid". And at the end of August: "Such confusion and disorder I have never lived in." "The desolation all around is appalling", he wrote. And: "what a punishment the court has brought on the capital". A Japanese member of parliament praised the Americans from every point of view, and spoke of the "ferocity and callous cruelty displayed by the Russians." As part of their plunder, the Germans carried off bronze astronomical instruments from the old imperial observatory on the city wall. They were shipped to Potsdam, and China only got them back after the First World War. The palace itself was spared. American troops forced their way through three gates into the Forbidden City, and at the fourth they were stopped, and the generals decided not to occupy it. On the twenty eighth of August the allied armies marched through the imperial palace in a military parade.

The victors were not finished. After Beijing fell, Japanese and Western troops went out into the country to mop up, and they punished whole communities for what the Boxers had done. The Kaiser had handed a field marshal's baton to Count von Waldersee and hailed him as "the head of the united troops of the civilised world". Germany had sent no force at all to relieve the legations. Waldersee reached China in late September, more than a month after the siege was over. Once he arrived, the policy of punishment Germany had called for led to many more punitive expeditions, and to vindictive punishments inflicted on city after city. This was what the Kaiser's speech about the Huns looked like in practice. Some of the expeditions did rescue people. In October a thousand French troops marched south from Tianjin and relieved a mission where eighteen hundred Chinese Christians had been besieged by Boxer bands for more than three months. On the way they destroyed villages that had taken an active part in the massacre of Christians. Before Waldersee even arrived, the allies decided they needed the coastal forts, because the one port they could use all winter was Qinhuangdao, where the sea did not freeze. Under Li Hongzhang's orders, the garrisons offered only a nominal resistance, or left. The main fort at Shanhaiguan was taken over by seventeen men from a British gunboat called the Pigmy. Take Baoding, where the missionaries had died on the first of July. In October a French column entered Baoding without any opposition and freed several missionaries held there. Then two more allied columns arrived, three and a half thousand men from Beijing and four thousand from Tianjin. Under Li Hongzhang's policy, the Chinese garrison marched out of the city, and on the twentieth the troops forced their way in. An international military court sentenced three men to death: the provincial treasurer, who had been the Boxers' patron all year, the Manchu garrison commander, and an officer who had thrown the missionaries out of his camp when they ran to him for shelter. All three were executed. Another official was sent to Tianjin, tried and beheaded, and his head was put on display for six days. The troops knocked down the city gates and a corner of the wall, blew up two temples, fined the city a hundred thousand taels, and took the two hundred and forty thousand they found in the provincial treasury. Hart feared it would brand the foreigners as traitors in Chinese eyes forever. The Chinese soldiers had been ordered out of the way, the officials had come out to meet the troops in a friendly fashion, and then they were put on trial. "It is a nasty business altogether." Li Hongzhang sent a formal complaint about the troops' behaviour at Baoding. Four of the envoys found the tone of his letter "altogether objectionable" and sent it back to him. His standing orders to Chinese commanders were never to resist, and always to withdraw when a foreign force came near. Once, the French even asked a Chinese commander to pull out, and he did, which handed the Germans an easy victory. From the twelfth of December 1900 to the end of April 1901, forty six expeditions went out. Thirty five of them were German troops alone. One by one, the other powers turned against these raids, and Germany alone kept them up to the end. Now meet the man who said no. Adna Chaffee had joined the cavalry as a young man in the American Civil War, and spent decades after it fighting on the western frontier. He ordered that, in every case, "our troops must be fired upon before firing a shot, and, generally, that property should not be destroyed". He kept his troops out of the big expeditions, because, as he put it, "the less the disturbance of the country by military operations, the sooner would arrive the opportunity to diplomatically arrange full reparation for all wrongs committed". American officers thought the Germans, having arrived too late for the relief, simply wanted some fighting, and these expeditions were the only fighting left. The British government said on New Year's Day that "pending negotiations no further expeditions should take place unless the conduct of the Chinese should render them necessary." In America, one newspaper put it bluntly: "the greatest single obstacle to peace in China is the intransigeant attitude of Germany". Even the gentler way had a price. In one district, a report sent through Chaffee recorded twenty three villages where Boxers had killed 166 Christians. The villages were fined, made to hand over land, and made to rebuild nineteen chapels.

Someone had to make the peace, and there was only one man for it. From exile, Cixi begged Li Hongzhang to come north and lead the peace negotiations. He reached the occupied capital that autumn. His partner at the table was Prince Qing. It was not an easy job. The government was in pieces, and what authority was left lay with the viceroys. They demanded complete immunity for the Empress Dowager and full security for her person, and at the same time they denounced the Manchu leaders and urged her to "punish those who have brought the empire and the court to the present pass." There was not much negotiation with the Chinese, who had no choice but to accept the terms they were given. The hard bargaining was between the allies themselves, and at times it looked as if they would never agree. They settled it by horse trading. On the death penalties, the powers that wanted harsher punishment accepted the minimum for the sake of unity. On the indemnities, every power was allowed to put in its own claim, unchecked. The allies presented their joint demands on the twenty fourth of December 1900, and an imperial decree accepted them. Before that, the Chinese side had proposed punishments and then raised its offer, and both times the envoys found it far too little. They called the proposals inadequate, even absurd. The American envoy tried to hold the indemnity to one lump sum that China could actually pay, with every power scaling its claim down to fit. None of his colleagues liked the idea, except the Japanese. The protocol was signed on the seventh of September 1901, eleven months after the allies first drew up their demands. Prince Qing and Li Hongzhang signed for China, against the envoys of eleven foreign powers. Three of those powers, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, had taken no part in relieving the legations or in any of the fighting. Prince Zhuang, one of the war party princes, was required to die, by execution or by his own hand, along with several lesser officials. The officials who had been put to death for opposing the Boxers were restored to honour after their deaths. Prince Duan, the father of the heir, was sentenced to death, but the sentence was turned into exile for life in Xinjiang, and his son lost his place as heir. Pro Boxer officials were executed, the governor of Shanxi among them. Yuxian was beheaded at Lanzhou, in the far north west, in February 1901. But Cixi was spared, to come back to Beijing and lead the government. China had to make amends for the murder of Baron von Ketteler and of the Japanese chancellor, and put up monuments to the murdered diplomats, and send missions of apology abroad. The apology to Germany was carried to Berlin by the emperor's younger brother, Zaifeng. Remember him. And on the street where Ketteler was shot, China had to build a memorial arch. The examinations were suspended for five years. That meant the civil service examinations, in the towns where foreigners had been killed or mistreated. For the local gentry, that shut the door to office. Arms imports were banned for two years, the Dagu forts were to be razed, foreign troops would hold points all the way from Beijing to the sea, and China had to create a ministry of foreign affairs. The foreign troops stayed in north China. Most powers soon cut theirs to a token force, but Japan did not, and its troops were still there, legally, when Japan invaded China in 1937. And there was the money: an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver, just under 334 million American dollars, to be paid over forty years at four percent interest. To the Western powers, it was just retribution on an empire that had thrown down the gauntlet to the world. To most Chinese, the punishment seemed out of all proportion to the crime. After the protocol, the idea that the Qing was a sovereign empire was a myth almost no one believed any more. When he signed it, Li Hongzhang was a dying man.

Now look at the money, because it is going to shape everything that comes next. The envoys demanded a lump sum of 450 million taels, and an imperial decree of the twenty ninth of May 1901 accepted it. That was roughly one tael for every person in China. The Qing government's whole yearly revenue was only about 250 million taels. A committee of envoys had studied how China could pay, taking evidence from experts including Sir Robert Hart. It reckoned the revenue could be raised by about eighteen million taels a year, from certain specified sources. It also hoped to divert to the indemnity some of the large sums that were collected from the people but never reached the treasury, because the tax collectors and their patrons kept them. Interest ran at four percent from July 1901, and repayments from 1902 until the end of 1940. The yearly bill started at nearly nineteen million taels and climbed to over thirty five million a year from 1932 to the end. Principal and interest together came to 982,238,150 taels. Almost a billion. And the debt was owed in gold, while China counted its money in silver, so every fall in the price of silver made the burden heavier. A share was paid every month to a commission of bankers, one for each of the powers. The payments fell due monthly in Shanghai, in the hands of foreign bankers, and from then on the government in Beijing lived from one monthly settlement to the next. To secure it, the powers took the customs revenue, raised to an effective five percent duty on imports, the internal customs at the open ports, now run by the foreign led customs service, and the salt revenue. Those were the last sources of revenue of any size that the Qing had left, and they went under direct foreign control. No common rule was used to work out what each power was owed for the war, and nobody examined the figures each government sent in. Russia and Germany between them claimed nearly as much as the other six allies together, and France came a good third. America put in a flat claim of twenty five million dollars, and in 1908 it gave part of it back to China, on condition that the money go to education. That money sent Chinese students to American universities, and built the school in Beijing that became Tsinghua University. The indemnity more than doubled the burden of China's foreign debts. And it forced a change inside China. With a debt that size, the court in Beijing had no choice but to demand contributions from the provinces. Hubei alone committed 1.2 million taels a year. For half a century, money and power had been draining away from Beijing to the provinces. The Boxer debt began to pull them back. Hold on to that. Money flowing to Beijing from the provinces, and who controls it, will matter enormously in this story.

And then there was the ground the siege had been fought on. China agreed that the legation quarter would be reserved for the legations and placed under their exclusive control. No Chinese would have the right to live in it, and it could be fortified. Each power could keep a permanent guard there. The quarter became a solid block about twelve hundred metres from east to west and six hundred and fifty from north to south, some two hundred acres, with an open strip forty metres wide all round it. To the south it took in the city wall itself, the wall the Americans had fought along, with its bastions. On the west it swallowed parts of the Boards of War, Works and Justice, and the whole of the imperial carriage park. The British legation tripled in size, from twelve acres to thirty six. The Russian legation went from five acres to nineteen. A military commission proposed the size of each guard: four hundred men for Japan, three hundred and fifty for Russia, three hundred for Germany, two hundred and fifty each for Britain, France and Austria, two hundred for Italy and a hundred for the United States. The British envoy wanted them scaled down. But Germany was already building barracks for three hundred men, and its envoy thought smaller limits would be inconvenient. General Chaffee thought one company of soldiers was enough for the American guard. As a fortress in the heart of a hostile capital, it was much too big. As spacious, park like quarters for the diplomats, paid for by China, it could not be justified.

Li Hongzhang had one more piece of business. In the summer of 1900, while the world watched Beijing, Russian armies poured into Manchuria and occupied it. Since 1896, Li had believed that Russia was the only Western power that could do China real harm, or give it real support, and he had been willing to pay for that support. Part of the price was a convention on Manchuria. In an amended form, it was waiting for his signature. The other viceroys were protesting against it, and the Russian envoy was pressing him to finish it. He died without signing it. Li Hongzhang died in Beijing on the seventh of November 1901, in his seventy ninth year. So the last service he did China was the deal he did not live to make. The court was still on its way home, resting at Kaifeng. His sovereigns made him a marquis, and gave him the highest honours after death ever granted to a Chinese subject of the Manchus. He was a Chinese, not a Manchu, and the army he had built up was loyal to him personally rather than to the throne. He never disbanded it; it moved north with him, and it bore the brunt of the war with Japan. Armies loyal to their commanders, paid for with taxes the provinces kept for themselves: that was part of his legacy too. In forty years of high office he had piled up a great fortune, and he died one of the richest men in the empire. One verdict written at the time called him "a very able man, if unscrupulous". He did not live in a world of unreal things, the same verdict went on: "he did appreciate facts, and had a good working knowledge of the real relation between China and the outside world." He had built China's modern army and navy, watched Japan destroy them, signed away Taiwan at Shimonoseki, and ended his life signing away almost a billion taels for a war he had refused to fight. His post as governor general of Zhili went to Yuan Shikai, a marvellous success for a man of little over forty. The old men went one after another. A year after Li, Liu Kunyi, the greater of the two Yangtze viceroys, died at seventy four. Ronglu died in April 1903. And the service of the state was left to lesser men. The court left Xi'an on the sixth of October, and after its long stay at Kaifeng it moved on again in the middle of December. At Zhengding it boarded a train, and at noon on the seventh of January 1902 it pulled into Beijing. The court went straight into the palace, where Count von Waldersee had kept his headquarters for a year. As the Empress Dowager was carried past a balcony where people from the legations stood watching, she leaned forward in her chair and returned their greetings "with evident cordiality." The woman who had declared war on all the foreign powers came home by train. Next time: the reforms the court promised, and Yuan Shikai raising a modern army of seventy five thousand men, all looking to him as their only master. Was it a last desperate rescue, or the real start of a modern Chinese state? That is the question that runs through the rest of the dynasty's life.

Sources

• B. L. Putnam Weale, The Fight for the Republic in China (1917), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4522
• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume III: The Period of Subjection, 1894-1911 (1918), pp. 44-45, 222-223, 223-224, 226-227, 233-234, 234-236, 236-237, 240, 251-253, 253-254, 254-256, 256-257, 259-261, 269-271, 271-272, 275-277, 277-278, 278-279, 279-280, 280-282, 282-283, 283-285, 285-286, 311-313, 314-316, 316-317, 317-319, 328-330, 346-348, 351-352, 352-354, 354-356, 360-361, 363-364, 409-410, https://archive.org/details/internationalre03mors
• Percy Horace Kent, The Passing of the Manchus (1912), pp. 22-24, 26-27, https://archive.org/details/cu31924021495258
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 2, 2-4, 4-5
• William T. Rowe, China's Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009), pp. 204-206, 229-230, 243-245, 245-247, 260-261