The Cult Dossier · No. 136 · Apocalyptic / Doomsday
Boxers
Yihequan; Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists
1898 – 1901 · Shandong, Zhili and Beijing, China
XIII. FILLING THE GAPS — ASIA, AFRICA AND LATIN AMERICA
Fully religious — spirit-possession martial movement
Who led it
No central leader. Local Boxer bands under their own masters; ultimately given official sanction by the EMPRESS DOWAGER CIXI in June 1900.
What it worshipped and taught
Spirit possession by gods and heroes from Chinese opera and popular novels — Sun Wukong the Monkey King, Guan Yu, characters from Water Margin. Initiates performed rituals to invite possession, after which they believed themselves INVULNERABLE TO SWORDS AND BULLETS. Doctrine was anti-foreign and anti-Christian: 'Support the Qing, destroy the foreign.' Chinese Christian converts were the primary targets and made up the overwhelming majority of the dead.
Who was in it
Empress Dowager Cixi; the Boxer bands and their local masters; Baron Clemens von Ketteler, the German minister killed in June 1900; the Eight-Nation Alliance; the roughly 32,000 Chinese Christians killed.
How it ended, or where it stands
Crushed by foreign military intervention; the punitive settlement contributed directly to the fall of the Qing in 1911.
The dead
MORE THAN 32,000 CHINESE CHRISTIANS, a figure corroborated across multiple independent sources. Foreign dead: 188 Western Protestant missionaries, and roughly 200–250 foreign nationals in total, most of them missionaries. THE RATIO IS THE POINT — ALMOST 200 CHINESE CHRISTIANS DIED FOR EVERY ONE FOREIGN MISSIONARY. Tens of thousands more died in the suppression and the reprisals that followed
Of note
The invulnerability doctrine again, and at enormous cost. Also a case where the atrocity ran in both directions: the Boxers massacred Chinese Christians, and the relieving armies then sacked Beijing.
Its timeline
- 1898 Movement grows in Shandong amid drought, flooding of the Yellow River and resentment of foreign missionary privilege.
- 20 JUNE – 14 AUGUST 1900 Cixi declares support and THE SIEGE OF THE LEGATIONS begins, lasting 55 days. Inside are some 473 foreign civilians, 409 soldiers and sailors from eight countries, and about 3,000 Chinese Christians.
- 1900 MORE THAN 32,000 CHINESE CHRISTIANS ARE KILLED — the great majority Catholic, with over 1,000 Protestants among them. 188 Western Protestant missionaries die, within a total of roughly 200–250 foreign nationals. ALMOST 200 CHINESE CHRISTIANS WERE KILLED FOR EVERY FOREIGN MISSIONARY, a proportion almost entirely absent from the Western accounts of the rising.
- August 1900 The Eight-Nation Alliance takes Beijing and conducts widespread looting, rape and reprisal killings.
- 7 SEPTEMBER 1901 THE BOXER PROTOCOL, signed between China and ELEVEN powers, imposes an indemnity of 450 MILLION TAELS OF SILVER — roughly 333 million US dollars in contemporary gold terms — secured against China's tariff income and salt tax and payable over THIRTY-NINE YEARS at 4 PER CENT ANNUAL INTEREST. With interest the total would have reached ABOUT 982 MILLION TAELS by maturity, more than doubling the principal.
- 1901 THE SUM WAS CHOSEN AS A STATEMENT. 450 million taels matched the estimated Chinese population of the time — ONE TAEL FOR EVERY PERSON IN CHINA. It was apportioned among the eight intervening powers largely in proportion to troop contributions and claimed damages.