Many of these accounts were published in a four-volume publication in the early s Jian Bozan, with only rare translations into European languages one such translation being Becker, Several field surveys conducted by the University of Shandong and Nankai University from the late s onwards collected oral testimonies of peasants and urbanites who were participants or victims of the movement or neutral bystanders Lu Yao et al.
When assessing the validity of these testimonies, it must be taken into account that the interviewees had to recollect past events from memory. Moreover, the Shandong surveys cover only the early stages of the Boxer movement and provide no information about atrocities committed in the course of the foreign intervention. These officials traced the spread of the Boxer movement and, in the wake of the peace settlement, carefully recorded the death toll among Christians and the damage done to their property e.
In doing this, they had to rely on oral and written testimony by missionaries and Chinese Christians. An enormous amount of archival material also exists on the Western side, both in government and mission archives, and only small portions of this material have been put to scholarly use. In addition, a lot of eyewitness accounts were published, especially in the immediate aftermath of the war.
As is the case on the Chinese side, Western witnesses encompass all categories. Of the Western men and women who were besieged in Beijing and Tianjin, many wrote accounts of the siege. As some of these people joined in the looting orgy that followed the relief of Beijing or took part in punitive expeditions, they assumed the double role of victims and perpetrators.
Some of the survivors published accounts of hairbreadth escapes, often including lengthy descriptions of how their fellow missionaries were put to death by the Boxers.
As Roger Thompson has shown with regard to the Taiyuan massacre, accounts of missionary suffering are not always trustworthy and more often reflect a Protestant discourse on martyrdom than present an accurate description of what actually occurred.
On the other hand, missionaries were the only group of foreigners who sympathized with at least one segment of the Chinese population, i. Some of them also described and deplored acts of violence committed by the foreign troops. Other missionaries accompanied the Allied expeditionary forces e. Brown, or took part in punitive expeditions, acting as guides or interpreters. Many eyewitness accounts of soldiers were published in the wake of the war, others posthumously, and a vast number of unpublished reports still slumber in the archives.
Regardless of whether they were critical of the intervention and their own role in it, many of the published texts are quite outspoken about Allied atrocities, especially those not originally intended for publication e. The same can be said of the private correspondence of German and French soldiers, some of which appeared in local newspapers.
The last Western group were professional or amateur journalists who had set off for China, realizing the enormous potential of the warlike events there Wegener, ; Loti, Apart from their articles in newspapers and magazines, many of them published book-length accounts on their return to Europe.
Much like the other foreign groups, they were divided in their opinion: some ardently supported the war e. Zabel, , others vociferously opposed it, providing detailed accounts of the appalling conduct of the foreign troops in China e. Lynch, and Memory of the Boxer War on both the Chinese and Western sides did not focus on the victims, the only noteworthy exception being the martyrologies produced by mission societies Broomhall, ; Coerper, ; Planchet, For the most part, memory served immediate political interests.
On the Western side, where the production of memory commenced almost with the outbreak of the war, it was the partly conscious, partly subconscious, result of a collective effort to legitimize the intervention in China and to get the better of its discontents.
It should not be forgotten that public opinion in the Allied States was not unanimous in its support of the Boxer War and that a substantial and vociferous minority challenged the legitimacy of the war and criticized the way it was conducted Klein, One important function of memory being the justification of the war, there were numerous ways to achieve this end.
One was to impose on China a specific interpretation of the causes of war, namely that China had broken international law and committed crimes against humanity and civilization. Another important strain of politically charged collective memory was the cult of what may be called the heroes of civilization, i. By and large, however, the officially instituted memory was rather successful, all the more so as personal recollections of the Boxer War began to fade and other events notably the two World Wars and the mass violence connected with them shifted to the center of Western collective memory.
Only a few attempts were made to draw attention to the perspective of the Chinese victims. The college authorities immediately ordered that the new monument, which commemorated the Chinese killed by the Allied troops, be pulled down Hevia, The suffering of the Chinese victims has, however, been marked there by a commemorative plaque since In China, several narratives of the Boxer movement and the subsequent war competed with each another. One version, championed by Confucian literati and modern intellectuals, decried the Boxers as superstitious rabble and held them responsible for the calamities that had befallen China.
This view, which probably originated during the war, dominated the first two decades of the twentieth century and occasionally resurfaced thereafter. A second discourse focused on Western atrocities and Chinese suffering. The concept of guochi identified events connected with foreign imperialism then still a force to be reckoned with as undermining Chinese self-respect, focusing not so much on individual victims, but on the suffering of the Chinese nation as a whole Cohen, ; Hevia, ff.
This was the dominant narrative in the s and some former champions of the first version defected to it, most notably the intellectual-turned-Communist Chen Duxiu, one of the most influential thinkers of his time.
The third approach focused on heroic Chinese resistance in the Boxer War. Both official memory of the regular military and unofficial memory of the Boxer movement existed in the decade after the war. For example, a memorial was erected in Tianjin which was dedicated to General Nie Shichen who had tried in vain to defend the city against the Allied invasion and committed suicide after his defeat Koberstein, At the same time, recollections of the Boxers as popularized in folk operas fuelled peasant resistance against the policy of modernization advocated by the Qing dynasty in the last decade of its rule Prazniak, Stories appeared in the foreign media describing the fighting going on in Beijing.
Some were mere rumor or exaggerated the nature of the conflict, but others more accurately described the torture and murder of captured foreigners. Chinese Christians suffered even more greatly, as there were more of them and most were not able to seek refuge in the legations, having to seek shelter elsewhere. Those that were caught were raped as well as tortured and murdered.
As a result of these reports, a great deal of anti-Chinese sentiment was generated in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Despite their efforts, the Boxer rebels were unable to break into the compound, which was relieved by the international army of the Eight-Nation Alliance in July.
Japanese print, Foreign navies started to build up their presence along the northern China coast from the end of April Upon the request of foreign embassies in Beijing, troops from five countries were dispatched to the capital on May As the situation worsened, a second international force of 2, marines under the command of the British Vice Admiral Edward Hobart Seymour, the largest contingent being British, was dispatched from Tianjin to Beijing on June They were met with stiff resistance from Chinese governmental troops and were finally rescued by allied troops from Tianjin, where they retreated to on June 26, with the loss of men.
With a difficult military situation in Tianjin, and a total breakdown of communications between Tianjin and Beijing, the allied nations took steps to reinforce their military presence dramatically. On June 17, they took the Dagu Forts commanding the approaches to Tianjin, and from there brought more and more troops on shore. The international force, with British Lt-General Alfred Gaselee acting as the commanding officer, called the Eight-Nation Alliance, eventually numbered 54,, with the main contingent being composed of Japanese soldiers: Japanese 20, , Russian 13, , British 12, , French 3, , American 3, , German , Italian 80 , Austro-Hungarian 75 , and anti-Boxer Chinese troops.
The international force finally captured Tianjin on July 14, under the command of the Japanese colonel Kuriya, after one day of fighting. The capture of the southern gate of Tianjin. British troops were positioned on the left, Japanese troops at the center, French troops on the right.
Forward Looking. Campus Environment. Student Life. Historical Contexts. Wider World. This dramatic change is described in a hand-written report of the Chinese Mission in Kalgan: " Before the Boxer uprising, we had a church of members, 30 of whom were massacred; some here since died and others fallen away.
In a January letter, Alice Browne Frame describes what her compound looked like in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion: "As you walk into our mission compound, lying close outside the south wall of the city, the first buildings you will notice are those of the North China Union College, with its central recitation hall and dormitories lying behind.
Navy Assistant Surgeon T. Lippett from the USS Newark. On June 18, foreign ministers in Peking received word from the Chinese government that a state of war would soon be in effect. The declaration came in response to the capture of the Chinese forts at Taku by the foreign powers the day before.
The foreign ministers were given twenty-four hours to leave Peking with the promise of safe passage as far south as Tientsin.
The ministers met the next day and declined the offer to leave. The empress dowager issued a declaration of war that included praise for "the brave followers of the Boxers. Chinese artillery and small arms fire became constant. There were no organized attacks against the legations. On the twenty- fifth, marines took a critical position on the Tartar Wall. Since the beginning of the siege, Chinese forces had constructed barricades some distance from the front of the marines.
On the night of June 28, Pvt. Richard Quinn reconnoitered one of these barricades by crawling on his hands and knees to the Chinese position. Starting around two o'clock the next morning, Captain Myers led U. Marines and British and Russian troops in a charge on the Chinese barricade. The attack, carried out during a rainstorm, was successful; the Chinese fell back to another barricade hundreds of yards to the rear. Two marine privates were killed, and Myers was wounded in the leg. Sniper and artillery fire died down to a minimum after an informal truce was made on the sixteenth.
This activity continued until the foreign legations were relieved on August Marines participated in several actions in China after Myers's force reached Peking. Before the siege began, an allied force moved north from Tientsin toward Peking days after a railroad line was torn up, isolating the capital city. Navy Capt. Bowman McCalla second in command. Seymour's expedition included American sailors and marines. The allied force traveled north, rebuilding the railroad line as they went.
Seymour's expedition came within twenty-five miles of Peking but was forced by Boxers and Chinese soldiers to retreat back toward Tientsin.
After five days of retreating south, Seymour's force fought its way into a Chinese arsenal six miles north of Tientsin, where they fortified their position and waited for help. The United States quickly scrambled to send additional troops to help lift the siege of Peking.
Two separate detachments of marines left Cavite in the Philippine Islands and joined up near Taku, China. Littleton W. On the twentieth, this marine battalion and approximately four hundred Russians engaged the Chinese near Tientsin. The marines were the spearhead of the American-Russian attack but had little success against the more substantial Chinese forces.
After an overwhelming counterattack, the Americans and Russians retreated. The marines formed the rear guard of the retreat, in which they were pursued for four hours. Ending up where they started, the marines had marched a total of thirty miles after going to Tientsin and back. They suffered three killed and seven wounded. This enlarged force went on the offensive the next day and took all but the inner walled city of Tientsin. On the twenty-fifth, the international force relieved Seymour's expedition, which had been held up for a month at the Hsi-Ku Arsenal north of Tientsin.
The Ninth U. Infantry arrived on July 6 and joined the allied forces near Tientsin. The number of marines in China increased when Col. Robert L. The next day, the allied force launched an attack against Tientsin to rid the walled inner city of the remaining Chinese and Boxer forces.
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