Boxers Defeated: Allied Troops Occupy Beijing to End Rebellion

An allied force of 20,000 soldiers from eight nations battered through the gates of Beijing on August 14, 1900, ending a 55-day siege that had trapped foreign diplomats and Chinese Christians inside the Legation Quarter. The relief of the legations ended the most dangerous phase of the Boxer Rebellion, a violent anti-foreign uprising that had brought China to the brink of war with every major industrial power simultaneously. The Boxers, known formally as the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, were a grassroots movement of peasants and laborers who blamed foreign missionaries, merchants, and their Chinese converts for the humiliations China had suffered since the Opium Wars. They believed ritual exercises made them impervious to bullets. By the spring of 1900, Boxer bands were burning churches, killing Chinese Christians, and tearing up railway lines across northern China. Empress Dowager Cixi, calculating that the movement could be directed against foreign encroachment, gave the Boxers tacit imperial support. On June 20, the Boxers and elements of the Chinese imperial army laid siege to the foreign legations in Beijing. Inside were roughly 900 soldiers, marines, and civilian volunteers from a dozen nations, along with several thousand Chinese Christians who had taken shelter. The defenders held out for nearly two months, surviving artillery bombardment, mining attempts, and sustained infantry assaults. A first relief expedition, the Seymour Expedition, had been turned back in June. The eight-nation force that finally broke through included soldiers from Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. The aftermath was punishing. Allied troops looted Beijing systematically for days. The Boxer Protocol of 1901 imposed crushing indemnities on China equivalent to more than a year's government revenue, further weakening the Qing dynasty and accelerating the revolutionary pressures that would topple it in 1911.