# Chapter Seventeen — China’s Troubles

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## The Boxer Rebellion

As Americans were moving west into Native American land, another kind of invasion was taking place in the great country of China.

For many years, European countries, along with the United States, had been trying to creep into China. After the Opium Wars, China had been forced to open its ports to American and British ships—and whatever those ships brought with them. While Russia was trying to take land away from the Ottoman Turks, it was also trying to push down into the northern Chinese province called Manchuria. In the year 1897, the Germans had moved into the southern province of Guizhou and occupied it, stationing German soldiers throughout the whole area. And in 1898, the British seized control of Weihai, an important port city on the Yellow Sea.

To fight the invasions of the West, a small group of Chinese rebels formed a secret society. Like the secret societies of the Young Turks, the Young Bulgarians, and the Young Italians, this society was called “secret” because it wasn’t officially recognized by the government. It was made up of men and women who were fiercely patriotic (loyal to their country), but who didn’t think that their government was doing a very good job protecting the Chinese people. This Chinese secret society called itself “Yihhe Quai,” or the “Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists.” But Westerners just called it “the Boxers,” because the members were so good at martial arts.

The Boxers weren’t just good at fighting. They also believed that they could become possessed by spirits who gave them strength and skill. When they got ready to fight, they went into a trance and started foaming at the mouth. They believed that this ritual made them invincible, and that swords and bullets would simply bounce off them! And they also claimed that thousands of “spirit soldiers” would rise from the dead and join them in their fight against Western occupation. As they went into battle, the Boxers chanted their slogan: “Destroy the foreigners! Destroy the foreigners!”

The Boxers planned to begin their war against foreigners by attacking both missionaries from the West and Chinese Christians. They believed that these Chinese Christians were traitors to their country, because they had converted to a “Western” religion. According to the Boxers, Christian missionaries brought Western ways into China, and helped to destroy the traditions of the Chinese.

The first attacks were made against German missionaries. Germany had sent hundreds of missionaries into the center of China, near the Yellow River. And these missionaries had been very unwise. Instead of simply preaching Christianity, the missionaries had gotten involved in the local government. They had promised the Chinese near them that, if they became Christians, the Germans would help them sue non-Christians in court—and win. This made them very unpopular with Chinese who already resented Western involvement in China’s business.

German missionaries were attacked and killed. Chinese Christians who were friends of the missionaries were also killed. And Germany’s ambassador to China was murdered by Boxers right in the middle of the street in the city of Beijing. He had been on his way to complain to the Chinese government about the Boxer violence against Germans in China!

The government of China had done very little to stop the Boxers. The emperor of China himself refused to approve of the Boxer attacks. But many of his court officials did—and so did his aunt, Cixi.

Cixi was the real ruler of China. Her actual title was “Empress Dowager.” Her nephew, Guangxu, had inherited the throne and the title of “Emperor.” But when Guangxu first became emperor, he made himself unpopular very quickly. In a hundred days, Guangxu made forty separate decrees, changing China’s government, law, schools, money systems, army, and police so that China would be more modern. This was a lot of change, all at once—especially for a country that thought “more modern” meant “more like the Western countries that are trying to take us over.”

When Cixi saw how nervous Guangxu’s new decrees made the Chinese officials and the Chinese people, she rounded up the army, convinced them to fight for her, executed six of Guangxu’s advisors, and put her nephew on an island in the middle of the palace lake. Now she held the real power in the capital city of Beijing. And she hated the foreigners who were pushing into China.

The Boxers roamed through the country, killing missionaries who could not get away from them, burning churches, and pulling up railway lines. Almost all of the railroads in China had been built by European merchants, with European money, in order to bring trains filled with European soldiers, European goods, and European customs into the center of China. Getting rid of the railroads was an important step in getting rid of European influence in China!

Governments from around the world sent messages to Cixi, ordering her to stop the rebels. Cixi agreed. She called up the army and put them on the alert—but she never actually told them to attack. She liked what the Boxers were doing. Although she might pretend to obey the Western countries telling her to stop them, she had no intention of actually doing so.

As the Boxer Rebellion grew larger, many foreigners in China fled to the city of Beijing. In Beijing, many different countries had offices called “embassies.” These embassies were, by tradition, off-limits to Chinese officials. They were like little outposts of each country *in* China. And they were all located in a walled section of the city called the “legation compound.”

The foreigners ran to their embassies and closed the gates of the legation compound. And not a moment too soon. The Boxers were already marching into Beijing, shouting, “Protect the country! Destroy the foreigners!”

Instead of stopping the Boxers with the imperial army, Cixi let them come in and surround the embassies. She declared that China was at war with the countries of the West.

Now the legation compound was under siege. There were almost five hundred foreign diplomats, journalists, and missionaries inside, along with about 450 soldiers from eight different countries. Three thousand Chinese Christians had also fled to the legation compound for safety. And the compound also had a stable inside it with 150 racehorses. When the besieged foreigners ran out of food, they ate the horses.

But news of the siege had reached the outside world. Soldiers from several different countries were preparing to march on Beijing to rescue the foreigners. The largest group of soldiers was from Russia (which was very happy for an excuse to send more armed Russians into China!). The second largest division of soldiers was from Japan. And the third largest was from the United States.

These soldiers were joined by British and French fighters. Nineteen thousand men landed on the shore of China and marched towards Beijing. Along the way, the army was attacked by Boxer raiders. But they pushed on towards Beijing. On August 14, 1900, two months after the siege of the legation compound had begun, the army of foreigners arrived in Beijing.

The Boxers, convinced that the special charms they wore and the words they recited would make them invincible, went out to meet them. But the Western soldiers shot the Boxers down. They broke down the gates of the Forbidden City, where the Chinese government had its headquarters, invaded the city, and burned the great Summer Palace—one of the greatest and most beautiful buildings in the world. Cixi barely escaped. She dressed herself as a peasant, grabbed her nephew from the island in the middle of the palace lake, got into a cart, and rattled out of the city.

The government officials who were left in Beijing had to face the victorious Western army! They promised that if the soldiers would go back home instead of staying in Beijing, the Boxers would be properly punished. They insisted that Cixi’s declaration of war hadn’t been an official *Chinese* declaration. Finally, they signed an agreement with eleven foreign countries, spelling out how the Boxers would be punished. The Chinese agreed to punish officials who had supported the Boxers, to build stronger walls around the legation compound, to repair the railroads, and to pay 333 million dollars in fines to the rest of the world.

Once again, Western countries had managed to take control of Chinese affairs. As a matter of fact, Great Britain assumed that it could do as it pleased with China. One British official wrote that the British had three options, after the Boxer Rebellion. Britain could divide China up, replace the Qing dynasty with another dynasty, or just try to patch things up with the existing Qing ruler.

The third option seemed to be the best. So Cixi was allowed to return to Beijing as Empress Dowager. But she had to agree that schools would now teach Western ideas. She had to agree to outlaw several traditional Chinese practices, such as footbinding (wrapping girls’ feet in tight bandages so that they would stay small). She also had to agree to send Chinese officials abroad to study and learn from the constitutions and governments of other countries.

The Qing dynasty had survived the Boxer Rebellion. Seven years later, when Cixi died of a stroke, the three-year-old prince Puyi inherited the throne of China.

But China had already been conquered by Western ideas. And Puyi would be the last Qing emperor of China.

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## The Czar and the Admiral

When those nineteen thousand soldiers landed on China’s shores, ready to put the Boxer Rebellion down, Russian and Japanese soldiers had marched side by side. Together, they had fought against the Boxers, invaded Beijing, and set the besieged foreigners free.

But now that the Boxer Rebellion was over, Russia and Japan would no longer be allies. They would become enemies, because both countries wanted to grab part of China for themselves.

At the time of the Boxer Rebellion, the czar of Russia was Nicholas II, who had inherited the throne from his tyrannical father Alexander just six years earlier. Under Nicholas II’s reign, Russia had started to build a new railroad in China. It would run from Haerbin, a large city in the northern province of Manchuria, all the way down to Port Arthur on the Yellow Sea. Russia had convinced China to rent Port Arthur to Russia for ninety-nine years. This meant that, for almost a century, Port Arthur would belong to Russia—in exchange for a large amount of money.

The Russians needed Port Arthur. The easiest way to move soldiers, food, tents, and other supplies quickly along the Russian coast was by sailing through the Pacific Ocean. And Russia only had one other port that lay on the Pacific. That port was so far north that it was completely frozen over every winter! Without Port Arthur, Russia had no way to move troops and supplies by sea.

The railroad was almost as important as Port Arthur. When the railroad was finished, Russian ships could land at Port Arthur, filled with soldiers. The soldiers could travel up the railroad into the center of Manchuria. For years, Russian soldiers had occupied Manchuria. Now, the railroad would allow Russia to build this small occupying force up into a huge army—that could invade and seize other parts of China.

Port Arthur and the railroad were both part of Russia’s plan for taking over land in Asia. After the Boxer Rebellion ended, Nicholas II decided that Russia should begin by seizing the little country of Korea.

This wasn’t the first time Russia had considered a takeover of Korea. A few chapters ago, we read about Queen Min of Korea, who doomed herself by sending Russia a message, asking the Russians to become her allies against Japan. When the Japanese found this out, they got rid of Queen Min. Japan didn’t want Russia to ally itself with Korea—and Japan certainly didn’t want to lose Korea to Nicholas II.

The Japanese tried to make this known through *diplomacy* (sending polite messages to another country by way of an ambassador). Japan sent its ambassadors to Moscow with a message to Nicholas II: “Japan would appreciate it if you would move your soldiers out of Port Arthur, and also out of Manchuria.” What this respectful-sounding message *really* meant was: Don’t even think about using those soldiers to invade Korea!

Nicholas II refused to remove the Russian soldiers in Port Arthur, so Japan called its ambassadors home and told them to take no more messages to the czar. This was called “breaking off diplomatic relations.” When a country told all of its ambassadors to leave another country and come home, this was often an announcement that a declaration of war was coming!

The czar wasn’t worried. After all, for centuries Japan had been an old-fashioned, isolated country without a modern army. During the Meiji Restoration, when the emperor was returned to the throne, Japan had started to make its army more modern. The traditional army of samurai had been replaced with a new, Western-style army—an army made up of paid soldiers who carried Western guns. But this new Japanese army had not been in existence for very long, and the Russians were not very afraid of it. Russian officers didn’t even tell the battleships and troops at Port Arthur to keep a special watch. “If a shot is fired,” Nicholas II remarked, “the Japanese, not the Russians will have to fire the first shot.”

He only said this because he was sure that the Japanese would not dare to attack the Russian ships and soldiers in Port Arthur. After all, the Russians had the third largest navy in the world. Only France and Great Britain had more ships.

This was a mistake.

It was February 9, 1904, just after midnight. The Russian ships lay quietly at anchor at Port Arthur. On board, Russian sailors stood along the bridge, keeping watch. Off-duty sailors lay in their bunks, sleeping. Searchlights from the battleships swept over the dark surface of the water, showing nothing but the ripples of the waves.

In the dark of the ocean beyond the floodlights, Japanese destroyers were steaming silently towards the port. The commander of the Japanese navy, Admiral Togo, was a shrewd and fearless man. He had been given permission by the Japanese government to start a war—not by sending an official declaration of war to the Russian government, but by firing at the Russian fleet. The Japanese government had decided to follow a traditional piece of advice often given to samurai: “If your sword is too short, take one step forward.” Since their army was not as strong as it could have been, the Japanese were attacking, without waiting for their enemy to move first.

Admiral Togo’s spies had told him that the battleships and the forts at Port Arthur were expecting an attack. The spies were wrong. The Russians expected nothing. But Admiral Togo thought that the ships would all be waiting for him. So he told his captains to be as silent and secret as possible. They were to cover up the lights on deck, and keep any sparks from flying out of the steamship funnels.

At half-past midnight, the captain of the lead Japanese ship gave the signal to his men. A torpedo flew from the ship’s torpedo tubes and slammed into the nearest Russian battleship. On the shores, the Russian officials heard explosions, and wondered why the battleships were doing target practice in the middle of the night. For hours, no one on shore realized that an attack was underway.

The Japanese fired sixteen torpedoes. Only three Russian ships were hit—but two of those ships were the most valuable battleships in the Russian fleet.

The attack at Port Arthur was just the first. Admiral Togo launched attack after attack on the larger Russian force, defeating the Russian ships again and again. Three months after the initial attack, the Japanese navy managed to destroy the *Petropavlovsk*, the flagship of the Russian navy. The admiral who commanded the whole Russian fleet was on board. The boat sank, and the admiral was never found—just his coat with his admiral’s insignia on the shoulders floating on top of the water. Now Russia had lost its most experienced commander.

For 148 days, Japanese ships kept Port Arthur under siege. Finally, the Russian forces at Port Arthur had to surrender. Then the Japanese army marched against the Russian soldiers on land. In the Battle of Mukden, the largest land battle ever fought up to this time, the czar’s army was defeated.

On May 27, 1905, the rest of the Russian fleet was destroyed by the Japanese fleet, still under the command of Admiral Togo. Huge Russian battleships turned upside down and sank. The men who leaped from them described how the setting sun flooded, blood-red, over the capsizing steel ships. The war was over, and Japan had won.

The president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, helped to arrange a peace treaty between the two countries. Russia was forced to give up all plans for ever invading Korea. Russia also had to give Japan part of Manchuria, all of Port Arthur, and several other pieces of land.

In August of 1905, the treaty between the two countries was signed in the United States—in the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Four hundred thousand Russian soldiers and sailors had died, and the war had cost Russia the equivalent of millions of dollars.

Japan had stopped Russia’s attempts to expand east, into China. For the first time, a European army had been defeated by an Asian country. And it had become clear to the whole world that Japan, not China, was now the master of the East.

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