22 To War against the World Powers – with the Boxers
(1899–1900)
THAT the foreign legations took the side of her adopted son embittered the empress dowager. But she was more enraged by how the powers treated her empire after she sought their friendship at the reception for the diplomatic ladies. Soon after she reached out and proclaimed ‘One family; all one family', she was dealt a nasty blow. At the beginning of 1899, Italy demanded the cession of a naval station on Sanmen Bay, a deep inlet on the east coast of Zhejiang province. This was not so much for some strategic reason as for Italy's desire to own a slice of China as a status symbol, to keep pace with other European powers.1 As this acquisition presented no threat to the powers, Britain gave Italy its consent, as did most of the others. Italian warships then staged a demonstration off the coast near Beijing. It and other powers expected China to fall to its knees at this threat of war, as had hitherto been the case. Robert Hart, on China's side, was pessimistic: ‘The Italian Ultimatum is in: China to say “yes” in four days or take the consequences! The situation is again critical … I fear we must go on from bad to worse. We have no spare money – we have no navy – we have no proper military organization … Other powers will follow suit and the débacle [sic] can't be far off. It is not China that is falling to pieces: it is the powers that are pulling her to pieces!' Hart lamented, as he had done during the war with Japan, ‘there is no strong man …'
But this time there was a different boss. Westerners saw that, to Italy's ‘great surprise, as well as that of everyone else, China returned a stubborn refusal'. The Chinese Foreign Office sent back letters from the minister of the Italian Legation, De Martino, unopened. It explained to Sir Claude MacDonald that it, ‘being unable to accede to this request, and considering that to argue the point with the Italian minister would mean a great expenditure of pen and ink, returned to Signore De Martino his despatches'. Cixi gave orders to prepare for war. ‘There was a bustle of activity throughout the empire,' noted foreign observers.
In the middle of the crisis, Italy changed the minister at its legation. When the new minister, Giuseppe Salvago Raggi, arrived, he presented his credentials to Emperor Guangxu. Deviating from the protocol by which the head of the Foreign Office received the credentials on his behalf, Emperor Guangxu ‘stuck out his hand to take the letter', noted Salvago Raggi, whereupon ‘Prince Ching froze'. The Italians interpreted the emperor's hand as a very significant sign – that China was going out of its way to be nice to them, and that their gunboats had worked. They were deeply disappointed when Chinese officials arrived the following day to explain that what the emperor had done was only an anomaly, and that nothing should be read into it. On 20 and 21 November 1899, Cixi issued two decrees, in which she expressed her outrage and her resolve:
Now the situation is perilous, and the powers are glaring at us like tigers eyeing their prey, all trying to barge into our country. Considering the financial and military situation in China today, we will of course try to avoid a war … But if our powerful enemies try to force us to yield to demands to which we cannot possibly consent, then we have no alternative but to rely upon the justice of our cause and to unite and fight … If we are forced into a war, once the war is declared, all provincial chiefs must act together to fight those hateful enemies … No one is allowed to speak the word, he [appeasement], and no one must even think about it. China is a large country with rich resources and hundreds of millions of people. If the nation can be united in its devotion to the Emperor and Country, what powerful enemy is there to fear?
Italy, which in fact had no stomach for war, lowered its demands and eventually asked only for a concession in a Treaty Port. Cixi reportedly told the Italians: ‘Not a speck of Chinese mud.' Italy climbed down and, by the end of the year, abandoned all its claims. A ‘feeling of elation filled the hearts of patriotic Chinese', Westerners noticed. But the victory did not lessen Cixi's anxiety. She knew she was lucky, for Italy was ‘a small and poor country' and did not really want a war. It was only bluffing, and she called its bluff. But the support given to Italy by major European powers destroyed her ‘one family' illusion and deepened her bitterness. ‘Foreign powers bully us too much, too much,' she kept saying. ‘Foreign powers are ganging up on us' and ‘I feel eaten up inside.'
Even the most open-minded and pro-Western members of the elite were enraged by the European powers' scramble for China. They were appalled that America, the only major power that did not take their territory, had introduced the Chinese Exclusion Act, discriminating against Chinese immigration.2 Almost everyone had endured injury to their personal pride. One, Wu Tingfang, who had studied law in London, and headed China's mission to the United States, was much hurt by one incident: ‘Western people are fond of horse-racing. In Shanghai they have secured from the Chinese a large piece of ground where they hold race meetings twice a year, but no Chinese are allowed on the grand-stand during the race days. They are provided with a separate entrance, and a separate enclosure, as though they were the victims of some infectious disease.'
Yung Wing, the first Chinese to graduate from Yale University, described an experience in a Shanghai auction room which marked him deeply: ‘I happened to be standing in a mixed crowd of Chinese and foreigners. A stalwart six-footer of a Scotsman happened to be standing behind me … He began to tie a bunch of cotton balls to my queue, simply for a lark. But I caught him at it and in a pleasant way held it up and asked him to untie it. He folded up his arms and drew himself straight up with a look of the utmost disdain and scorn.' The matter ended in a fight when Yung Wing's blows ‘drew blood in great profusion from [the Scot's] lip and nose'. ‘The Scotsman, after the incident, did not appear in public for a whole week … but the reason … was more on account of being whipped by a little Chinaman in a public manner …' Yung Wing reflected:
since the foreign settlement on the extra-territorial basis was established close to the city of Shanghai, no Chinese within its jurisdiction had ever been known to have the courage and pluck to defend his rights … when they had been violated or trampled upon by a foreigner. Their meek and mild disposition had allowed personal insults and affronts to pass unresented and unchallenged … The time would soon come, however, when the people of China will be so educated and enlightened as to know what their rights are, public and private, and to have the moral courage to assert and defend them.
It was Yung Wing who initiated the scheme to send Chinese teenagers to America to be educated, while Wu Tingfang would in time become one of the drafters of a Western-style legal code. Both turned their hurt into an impetus to reform China on the model of the West, for which they retained a lifelong affection and admiration. Wu wrote about going to America:
When an Oriental, who, throughout his life, has lived in his own country where the will of his Sovereign is supreme, and the personal liberty of the subject unknown, first sets foot on the soil of the United States, he breathes an atmosphere unlike anything he has ever known, and experiences curious sensations which are absolutely new. For the first time in his life he feels he can do whatever he pleases without restraint … he is lost in wonderment.
For the average villagers and small-town people, anti-Western feeling was mainly directed at the Christian missions established among them. By now there were more than 2,000 missionaries living and working in China. Being foreign, they easily became targets of hate when times were bad. The inflexibility of some priests did not help. Animosity arose particularly when there was a drought, which inflicted protracted agony on the peasants. At such times, villagers often staged elaborate ceremonies and prayed to the God of Rain, in the desperate hope that they might survive the coming year. This was a matter of life and death, and all villagers were required to participate in order to demonstrate their collective sincerity. Many Christian missions held that they were praying to the wrong God and condemned the ceremonies as ‘idolatrous' theatre. E. H. Edwards, for twenty years a medical missionary in China, wrote, ‘It can scarcely be conceived by foreigners (to whom these theatrical displays are senseless and absurd) what a hold they have upon the people, and what immense sums are spent upon them every year.' Thus missionaries would forbid their converts to pay their dues or to take part. As a result, when the drought was prolonged, villagers blamed the foreigners and converts for offending the God of Rain – and causing them starvation. When mandarins explained this to the priests, the answer was unyielding, as Edwards observed: ‘The officials further asked the missionaries to urge the Christians to pay such dues in order to prevent future troubles. To this request there was, of course, but one answer; and it was further explained to the officials that attendance at theatres was not only discountenanced by the Protestant Church in China, but that if any member was found to frequent them habitually he was disciplined.'
Backed as they were by gunboats, the missions had become a competing authority. As such they were able to protect their converts in numerous grass-roots disputes. The Rev. Arthur H. Smith, a missionary of the American Board in China for twenty-nine years, wrote (about the French mission):
Whenever a Christian has a dispute with a heathen, no matter what the subject in question may be, the quarrel is promptly taken up by the priest, who, if he cannot himself intimidate the local officials and compel them to give right to the Christian, represents the case as one of persecution, when the French consul is appealed to. Then is redress rigorously extorted, without the least reference to the justice of the demand.
As a consequence, some non-Christians were convinced, justifiably or not, that the local official would always judge in favour of Christians, to avoid trouble for his government and problems for his own career. Their sense of grievance sparked many a riot against Christians. Cixi's order on dealing with disputes involving Christians was always ‘be fair and even-handed'. Her government clamped down on anti-Christian riots and punished officials who failed to exert sufficient force to quell the riot – or, as sometimes happened, had a hand in stirring up the disturbance in the first place. The number of riots was thus restricted to a few dozen in four decades, and none of them resulted in the kind of massacre witnessed in Tianjin in 1870.
After Germany snatched parts of Shandong in late 1897 and established a significant presence there, many villagers converted to Christianity in order to receive protection. In a number of counties, as the local authorities saw it, people joined the Church to avoid being punished for ‘owing debts and not wanting to pay them back … committing robbery or even murder.' And there was one man who sought the shelter of the Church so that he did not have to answer a subpoena after ‘his father had filed a law suit against him for being seriously disobedient'. In one county, a Christian peasant was accused of taking wheat from his neighbour's field. In another, a relatively rich Christian, it was alleged, refused to lend grain to the starving during a drought (which was contrary to tradition). In both cases, as the local magistrates judged in favour of the converts, riots broke out that led to churches being burned. Yet another riot was triggered by Christians trying to turn a temple dedicated to the Celestial Emperor into a church. The violence usually ended with the local government punishing the rioters and paying hefty compensation to the Church – which produced even greater resentment among the non-Christians.
In spring 1899, in a bid to put an end to riots in Shandong, Germany sent an expedition into some villages, where the soldiers burned down hundreds of houses and shot dead a number of villagers. In the wake of these atrocities, a group that had been known for about a year as the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, the Yi-he-quan, gained immense popularity and acquired hundreds of thousands of followers. (Shandong was famous for the male population's fondness for martial arts, particularly a kind of fist-fighting similar to boxing.) This society blamed all the ills of the country and the hardship of their lives on foreigners, and vowed to drive them out. They were dubbed ‘the Boxers' by the foreign press. People joined the Boxers for many different reasons. Some hated the Germans who had destroyed their homes – a hatred they now directed at all foreigners and local Christians. Others had scores to settle with neighbours who had converted. Still others sought release for their pent-up anxiety as the coming year's harvest looked likely to fail. ‘On the whole … the Chinese is a fairly well-fed person,' observed the beady-eyed traveller Isabella Bird, who was in the country at this time. But as soon as the weather turned bad – as it was then in Shandong – that same person immediately faced a struggle for survival.
When violence against Christians broke out, Cixi ordered the perpetrators arrested and ‘punished severely', and the Christians protected. The governor of Shandong, Yuxian, hated Western powers and was unwilling to protect the Christians effectively. Cixi replaced him with General Yuan Shikai. Shortly after General Yuan's arrival in Shandong, on 30 December 1899, the Rev. S. M. Brooks, a missionary of the Church of England, while travelling on a donkey on country paths, was murdered by a group of marauders who admired the Boxers. This was the first time in two years that a missionary had been murdered in China. An edict from Cixi declared that she was ‘most deeply aggrieved', and commanded General Yuan to ‘catch the criminals and punish them severely'. Yuan soon found the culprits and brought them to justice. Some of them were executed. General Yuan also reported to Cixi that in that year the Boxers had destroyed ten family houses used as churches, raided 328 Christian homes and killed twenty-three Christian converts. The General was determined to use force to suppress the Boxers, which Cixi endorsed, at the same time cautioning him that he must be ‘extremely circumspect' in taking large-scale military action. His aim must be to ‘disband' the gangs, punishing only those who had actually committed crimes. As Yuan conducted his campaign against the Boxers, they began to disperse – helped by a much longed-for snowfall that lasted for days, promising a better harvest in the coming year, and a full stomach. The life-saving snow was followed by thorough rain in the spring, further reducing the Boxer ranks.
Still, some Boxers became bandits, living on robbery, and roamed into the neighbouring Zhili province surrounding Beijing. On 19 February 1900, Cixi banned the Boxers in Zhili as well as in Shandong, ordering ‘harsh punishment' for anyone engaged in violence. Following standard practice, the decree was copied out and pasted on the walls in the two provinces.
The foreign legations, which had found Cixi's edict about the Rev. Brooks's murder ‘soothing', were dissatisfied with her ban on the Boxers. What they – mainly Britain, America, Germany, Italy and France – wanted was a nationwide imperial proclamation against the Boxers and any affiliated society, ‘ordering by name [their] complete suppression'. They demanded that it must be ‘distinctively stated in the decree that to belong to either of these societies, or to harbour any of its members, is a criminal offence against the laws of China'. They further insisted that the proclamation must be published in the Peking Gazette, the government news bulletin.
Cixi declined to do as told. Apart from feeling defiant, she did not want to broadcast her ban to the whole empire, given that the Boxers only existed in two provinces. She would only ban the Boxers where they were active, Shandong and Zhili. She would punish those who had committed violence and broken the law, but would not criminalise the average members. She especially loathed being perceived by the population to be heavy-handedly suppressing anti-Western sentiment, and hated to be taken for a puppet of the foreign powers. Besides, she felt the legations were being unfair and unreasonable. None of them had so much as raised a murmur against the offending German soldiers, while she was actively clamping down on the Boxers. Moreover, her approach was working: the Boxers in Shandong had largely been dispersed. The more the legations insisted on their demands, the more she dug in. No mention of the Boxers was made in the Peking Gazette. Sir Claude MacDonald, the British minister, wrote in frustration on 2 April: ‘I have never known the [Chinese Foreign Office] so pigheaded or so pleased with themselves …' He blamed the Italian back-down: ‘their ships came, looked, and went away and their Minister was recalled – the pigtails winning all along the line.' What Sir Claude did not know was that Cixi would have acted the same way with or without Italy's debacle.
On 12 April, Sir Claude and his colleagues, whilst deciding ‘not to press further for a special Decree in the Gazette', gave the Chinese government two months to exterminate the Boxers. Otherwise, they threatened, their forces would enter China to do the job themselves. This threat was backed up by an emphatic parade of gunboats outside the Dagu Forts. Not wishing for a confrontation, Cixi made concessions. Two days later, a memorandum from the Viceroy of Zhili describing how government troops were dispersing the Boxers was published in the Peking Gazette, thus announcing to the country that the Boxers were illegal. On the 17th, a decree was carried in the Gazette condemning those who ‘make a pretext to oppress converts … and involve themselves in crime'. The legations read the translation: ‘the Throne sets no bounds to its principle of regarding all men with equal benevolence'; officials must ‘take every opportunity of making it clearly known to all, that every man must attend to his own business and live continually at peace with his fellow men.' The decree did not mention the Boxers by name, and the tone was firm without being draconian.
That these items appeared at all in the Peking Gazette pleased Sir Claude and his colleagues, but the lack of desired severity in the decree left them far from satisfied. The gunboats remained outside the Dagu Forts, their presence sending a daily reminder that if Cixi did not wipe out the Boxers within two months, there would be an invasion. Western powers did not really want a war. As Mrs Sarah Conger, wife of the American minister, wrote, ‘none of them wish to get into war with China'. But she also noted that ‘there are many warships at Ta Ku [Dagu]'. These were part of the bluff. But as Britain's Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, later remarked, ‘I have passed some time in trying to persuade my countrymen that bluffing with the Chinese was a dangerous amusement: but I did not anticipate such a very striking confirmation of my views.' For Cixi, incensed, became more determined to defy the powers.
Ever since China's disastrous war and ‘peace' with Japan five years earlier, a pattern had been established: foreign powers would make demands, then threaten force, and Beijing would instantly do as it was told. Cixi had just broken the pattern by calling Italy's bluff. She was committed to doing the same with the other, stronger powers. But if her challenge did lead to a war, how – and with what – could she fight? The navy had been destroyed and the army was weak. Defeat appeared inevitable. It was at this point, in desperation, that Cixi clutched at a straw: perhaps the Boxers would be able to fight a sort of ‘people's war' against the invaders. The Boxers' hatred for foreigners would make them fierce and courageous soldiers, she thought.
Pragmatic men around Cixi, like Junglu, saw that a collision with the West was imminent and counselled accommodation with the legations in order to avoid it. Cixi turned a deaf ear. Fearing the worst, Junglu asked for sick leave, and stayed away from the court for sixty days. Her confidant, whose sensible advice she usually heeded, was thus absent when Cixi made her most fateful decision.
The man who had her ear now, Prince Duan, was the father of the newly appointed heir-apparent. Hating Westerners for snubbing his son, he vehemently promoted the idea of using the Boxers as soldiers. He and other like-minded princes and aristocrats tried to convince Cixi that the Boxers were loyal, fearless and ‘disciplined'. They offered to organise the Boxers into a fighting force, prepared for invasion. Cixi's rational side told her that the Boxers were not remotely suited to such a conflict, but her emotional side desperately wanted to believe otherwise. They were her last resort. She may also have calculated that the Boxers could at least inflict some damage on the invaders, which could give her a chance to negotiate a compromise and so avoid a wholesale capitulation.
As she tilted towards using the Boxers as soldiers, her hand that was striking at them became hesitant. Although the army continued to try to disband the Boxers, Cixi's half-heartedness and ambivalence were felt by the troops, whose own ardour slackened. The Boxers, emboldened, increased their ranks and spread like wildfire, right in the area around Beijing.
In spring 1900, while Shandong was relieved by rainfall, the region surrounding Beijing was hit by a devastating drought. A contemporary missionary wrote: ‘For the first time since the great famine in 1878 no winter wheat to speak of had been planted … Under the most favourable circumstances the spring rains are almost invariably insufficient, but that year they were almost wholly lacking. The ground was baked so hard that no crops could be put in, and at such times the idle and restless population are ready for any mischief …' Tormented by fear of starvation, the Boxers claimed that the God of Rain was not answering their prayers because he was bewitched by the ‘foreign devils' – those inhuman creatures who had blue eyes! As the Chinese have black eyes, the colour of foreigners' eyes marked them out. There was a widely believed rumour that their multicoloured eyes could see through the surface of the Earth and spot underground treasures, which they proceeded to steal, leaving China poverty-stricken.
In May, the Boxers, mostly peasants hit hard by the bad weather, entered Beijing and crowded the capital's streets in their many tens of thousands. They wore red head-kerchiefs, red shirts, with a red sash around the waist, and they wielded large carving knives. Moving in gangs, they set up shrines worshipping a variety of deities – very often characters from popular theatre like The Monkey King. In the course of a ceremony the chief of the gang would act as though the spirit of a deity had entered him, thus making him and his words sacred. He would jump up and down, howling and dancing wildly as if in a trance: gestures that were also copied from Peking Operas. Members recited meaningless incantations after him and they learned kung-fu kicking. They were told that protective spirits had now entered their bodies and had made them immune to bullets and weapons, so foreigners' firearms could not hurt them.
Among them were some young women, who called themselves the Red Lanterners, and who had to be virgins or widows. Often carrying red lanterns as well as red-tasselled spears, the women wore red tops with short sleeves and tight trousers and paraded themselves in the streets. All this was a breach of tradition. And they went even further by waving to onlookers with their red handkerchiefs. These handkerchiefs were said to possess magical properties: place one on the ground and step on it and a Red Lantern girl would be carried to the sky (as in the theatre), where she could locate a foreign devil's head and sever it with a knife. She could also dust a tall building (such as a church) with a handkerchief, and the building would be set on fire and reduced to ashes. These women, most of whom led downtrodden lives, were now enjoying their moment of liberation, not least seeing crowds of men prostrating themselves on the ground in homage when they strode by.
On the walls in the Beijing streets, right next to the imperial edicts banning them, the Boxers' own eye-catching posters were defiantly displayed, calling for the ‘killing of all foreigners in three months'. On 31 May, as the situation was running out of control, Cixi gave permission for 400 Western troops to enter Beijing from Tianjin, to protect the foreign legations. The legations did not feel this was sufficient, so on 10 June more than 2,000 troops under Admiral Edward Seymour, Commander-in-Chief of the British navy's China Station, set off for Beijing from Tianjin, 120 kilometres away, by railway. The expedition was not authorised by Cixi, who told her diplomats to persuade the legations to turn it back. The head of the Foreign Office, Prince Ching, was sympathetic to the coming of this foreign army, so Cixi in anger replaced him with the hardline Prince Duan. The legations refused to turn back the expedition.
Determined to halt a foreign army entering the capital unauthorised, Cixi endorsed the mobilisation of some Boxers along the railway line, in an attempt to stop it. The Boxers proved surprisingly effective. They thoroughly sabotaged the line and fought ‘with the utmost courage', according to Captain Jellicoe, Admiral Seymour's Chief of Staff. Lieutenant Fownes Luttrell also remarked on the ‘great bravery' of the Boxers. Soon joined by the imperial army with modern weapons, they managed to hold back the Seymour Expedition. This success raised Cixi's hope that the Boxers could indeed help repel invasion.
The fighting heightened tensions in Beijing. On 11 June, soldiers of a largely Muslim army defending the capital killed a chancellor of the Japanese Legation, Sugiyama Akira, while he was out on the street. Cixi publicly expressed ‘deep regret' over the atrocity against a foreign diplomat, and promised punishment of the perpetrators. But when she gave the order to the commander of the army, Dong Fuxiang, he replied that if one single soldier from his army were executed for the murder, his forces would mutiny. After a long silence, Cixi said, ‘Well, what's done is done?…'
Supported by the Muslim army, the Boxers began to destroy railways, trains and telegraph lines. Telegraphic communication from Beijing to the provinces was broken, and the Viceroys from the south had to send their cables to Shangdong, to be relayed to Beijing on horseback. In Beijing, the Boxers started to burn churches and foreign properties, cheered on by large crowds. In an act of extreme hatred the mob raided foreign cemeteries, smashing tombstones and monuments, dragging out of their graves the bodies of foreigners, striking them with spears before burning them.
Foreigners were often referred to as ‘Hairies' – mao-zi – because they have more body hair than the Chinese. Chinese Christians were called ‘Secondary Hairies' – er-mao-zi – and they bore the brunt of the Boxers' ferocity. With their bodies horribly burned and lacerated, they fled into the legations for protection: ‘more than flesh and blood could stand to see,' wrote a guard. Rescue parties were sent out in the hope of saving others, and they opened fire on the crowds, killing some 100 Boxers and other Chinese in a couple of days. Hatred overflowed. Frenzied men girt with red sashes and armed with swords, spears and knives crowded outside the Legation Quarter and laid siege to it.
Home to the representatives of eleven countries, the Legation Quarter, an enclave roughly 3 kilometres long and 1.5 kilometres wide, was situated right next to the southeastern walls of the Royal City, which cradled the Forbidden City. The south of the Quarter was bounded by the crenellated wall that separated the Manchu-inhabited Inner City from the Han-inhabited Outer City. A shallow canal running north and south roughly bisected it. Within the Quarter, 473 foreign civilians and thousands of Chinese Christians took refuge with 400 military guards, who constructed a labyrinth of barricades. The Boxer crowds, numbering tens of thousands, surged against the walls and the defending cordon, shouting ‘Kill the foreign devils! Kill! Kill! Kill!' Those who listened to the blood-curdling nocturnal yells would ‘never forget the suggestion of a pandemonium, a rehearsal of hell,' wrote the Rev. Arthur H. Smith.
Cixi sent the pro-Western Junglu, now back from ‘sick leave', to lead his troops to protect the Legation Quarter. She issued many decrees intended to rein in the Boxers, and dispatched grandees whom the Boxers seemed to trust to try and talk them into disbanding and returning to their villages. If they did not stop destroying railways, churches and foreign residences, and stop assaulting – even murdering – foreigners and Chinese Christians, then they would be subject to an extermination campaign by government forces. Meanwhile, Cixi cabled Earl Li to come to Beijing to negotiate with the Western powers. The earl at that time was the Viceroy of Canton, governing two coastal provinces in the south. Considering Cixi's handling of the Boxers to be ‘inconceivably preposterous', he had been exchanging cables with other dignitaries daily to discuss what to do. Burning with impatience to help, he wished he could ‘fly with wings' to Beijing. But then, before he set off, events overtook all these efforts as Cixi learned that scores of Western warships were gathering on the coast, and many more thousands of troops were on their way. Invasion seemed inevitable.
Going to war meant gambling with the survival of the dynasty, and Cixi felt the need to be endorsed. On 16 June, she convened an unusually large meeting of more than seventy participants: the Grand Councillors and ministers of the government, who were – it was strikingly noticeable – overwhelmingly Manchu and undistinguished. An eye-witness recorded the scene. In a packed audience hall all attendants were kneeling before Cixi and Emperor Guangxu, who were seated side by side. Prince Duan led a chorus of heated voices calling for the Boxers to be given legitimate status and to be used as a fighting force. But a few spoke against the idea, asking instead for harsher measures to suppress the mob. As one of them was talking, Prince Duan cut him short sarcastically: ‘Yours would be a very good way to lose the support of the people', at which point he stuck up his right thumb, a (universal) gesture for ‘a very good idea'. When one attendant argued that the Boxers could not be relied on to fight a war, ‘because much of their courage comes from the black arts which claim to shield them from bullets', Cixi herself replied indignantly, ‘It's true that such arts cannot be relied upon, but can we not rely on the hearts and minds of the people China has been weakened to an extreme degree, and all we have is the hearts and minds of the people. If we cast them aside, what do we have to sustain our country ' She proceeded to look furiously at those who persisted in arguing.
That same day, something ominous occurred. In the busiest shopping district in Beijing, just outside the Inner City and near the legations, the Boxers set fire to a pharmacy selling Western medicine and to other shops with foreign merchandise. As the flames leapt from store to store, devouring the best and rarest of silks, furs, furniture, jewels, antiques, art and other of the empire's most beautiful artefacts, a spark flew onto the Qianmen Gate tower nearby. Rising more than 30 metres above the ground, and nearly 15 metres above the wall on either side, this was the loftiest of all the city gates in Beijing, due south on a central axis from the Forbidden City. The gate would only be opened for the emperor, when he went to pray at the Temple of Heaven or the Temple to the God of Agriculture. The Boxers did not mean to destroy it and, as it was consumed by the flames, they dropped to their knees to beg the God of Fire to spare this sacred edifice. The gate tower was soon reduced to a huge pile of smouldering charcoal and rubble. The biggest fire in the capital for more than 200 years, it terrified all who learned about the destruction, who regarded it as a deadly omen.
Although she believed in omens, there was no retreat now for Cixi. On that very night, a joint force of eight countries – Russia, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, America, Italy and Austria-Hungary – attacked the Dagu Forts that guarded the sea entry to Tianjin and Beijing. After a fierce six-hour battle, the Forts fell. To Cixi, the fall of the Forts was associated with an enduring heartache: four decades earlier they had been seized by another allied, Anglo-French army, which had led to her fleeing with her husband, who died a bitter death outside the Great Wall. The invaders had then burned down the Old Summer Palace, leaving a vast ruin – and a gaping hole in her heart. Ever since then, it had been her dream to restore even a small part of the Old Palace, for which she had stolen from the navy and disobeyed Heaven – and attracted denunciation. At the fall of the Forts this time, nothing could stop her from fighting it out.
War was anticipated on all sides. In Britain, on that day, Queen Victoria wrote to Lord Salisbury: ‘Should be glad to hear your views on the state of affairs in China which seem to me most serious: also please say what you propose to do …' From that day on, ‘China Telegrams', in massive numbers, were typed out and presented to the queen, who sent out many messages, one of which read: ‘Feel anxious for personal safety of Sir C. MacDonald. Have you considered possibility of removal of foreign Ministers from Peking. If one of them were killed war would be inevitable.'
All the reformers who mattered to Cixi – Junglu, Earl Li, Viceroy Zhang, among others – were opposed to the war and to her policy. In the previous conflict with Japan, there had been numerous impassioned petitions urging fighting. But now they were missing. Many felt that the foreigners had reason to send in troops to protect their own people, who were not being properly protected by the Chinese government. ‘We are in the wrong', li-qu, Cixi was told. Grass-roots officials wanted the mob suppressed, as they were harassed and terrorised by the Boxers, who demanded food and shelter and exacted revenge for past grievances. But Cixi had made up her mind. At another top-level meeting she raised her voice and declared to the assembled dignitaries: ‘Our choice is whether to put our country on a platter to hand over to the invaders, or to fight to the end. I cannot face our ancestors if we do not put up a fight. I would rather fight to the end … If the end comes, you gentlemen here are my witnesses and can testify that I have done my best.' Her passionate words and unusual agitation made a great impact on all present: they banged their heads on the floor, vowing to follow her.
On 20 June, soldiers of the Muslim army shot dead the German minister, Baron von Ketteler, when he stepped out of the barricades to go to the Foreign Office.3 Her bridge was now burnt – for Cixi knew, as Queen Victoria had spelt out, if one of the ministers ‘were killed war would be inevitable'. The next day, 21 June, Cixi declared war on all eight invading countries.
1 This was at a time when Italy was asserting itself as a major sea power, and emphatically claimed that it had invented the compass, which had by common consent been invented in China. A statue of the supposed inventor, Flavio Gioja (who did not exist, as Italian historians have concluded), was erected in Amalfi in 1900.
2 The federal law was signed in 1882, thus revising the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. This law was repealed in 1943. On 18 June 2012, the US Congress formally passed a statement of ‘regret' for this discriminatory law against the Chinese.
3According to his biographer, Andrew Roberts, Lord Salisbury told Betty Balfour that von Ketteler's death was ‘poetical justice'. Salisbury said, ‘It's all the fault of Germany. They began all this trouble.'