In the summer of 1900, bands of peasant youths from the villages of north China streamed into Beijing to besiege the foreign legations, attracting the attention of the entire world. Joseph Esherick reconstructs the early history of the Boxers, challenging the traditional view that they grew from earlier anti-dynastic sects, and stressing instead the impact of social ecology and popular culture.

A concise history of an uprising that took down a three-hundred-year-old dynasty and united the great powers. The year is 1900, and Western empires are locked in entanglements across the globe. The British are losing a bitter war against the Boers while the German kaiser is busy building a vast new navy. The United States is struggling to put down an insurgency in the South Pacific while the upstart imperialist Japan begins to make clear to neighboring Russia its territorial ambition. In China, a perennial pawn in the Great Game, a mysterious group of superstitious peasants is launching attacks on the Western powers they fear are corrupting their country. These ordinary Chinese—called Boxers by the West because of their martial arts showmanship—rise up seemingly out of nowhere. Foreshadowing the insurgencies of our recent past, they lack a centralized leadership and instead tap into latent nationalism and deep economic frustration to build their army. Many scholars brush off the Boxer Rebellion as an ill-conceived and easily defeated revolt, but in The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China, the military historian David J. Silbey shows just how close the Boxers came to beating back the combined might of the imperial powers. Drawing on the diaries and letters of allied soldiers and diplomats, he paints a vivid portrait of the war. Although their cause ended just as quickly as it began, the Boxers would inspire Chinese nationalists—including a young Mao Zedong—for decades to come.

Part Two explores the thought, feelings, and behavior of the direct participants in the Boxer experience, individuals who, without a preconceived idea of the entire event, understood what was happening to them in a manner fundamentally different from historians.

This book tells the story of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. The Boxers were a fanatical secret organization who were incited by anti-foreign elements in the Chinese Government to commit wide-scale deportations against foreign missionaries and their Chinese converts. The Boxers had the tacit support of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi who maintained all the while that they were beyond her control. The Boxer Rebellion came to a head with the 55-day siege of the Peking Legations and ended in total humiliation for the Chinese.

This is an account of the ferocious uprising of Chinese peasants and the ensuing siege of Peking in the summer of 1900 - a 55-day confrontation between the Boxers (so-called for their martial-arts skills) and the Westerners they terrorized. The drama of this bloody battle is conveyed here through records of the personal experiences of trapped people in Peking, of missionary women confronted by Boxer mobs, chased from village to village, then savagely murdered, as well as those more fortunate, who were able to escape.

One of the most violent episodes of China’s Boxer Uprising was the Taiyuan Massacre of 1900, in which rebels killed foreign missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians. This first sustained scholarly account of the uprising to focus on Shanxi Province illuminates the religious and cultural beliefs on both sides of the conflict and shows how they came to clash. Although Franciscans were the first Catholics to settle in China, their stories have rarely been explored in accounts of Chinese Christianity. Anthony Clark remedies that exclusion and highlights the roles of Franciscan nuns and their counterparts among the Boxers—the Red Lantern girls—to argue that women’s involvement was integral on both sides of the conflict. Drawing on rich archival records and intertwining religious history with political, cultural, and environmental factors, Clark provides a fresh perspective on a pivotal encounter between China and the West.

In 1900, China chose to take on imperialism by fighting a war with the world on the parched north China plain. This multidisciplinary volume explores the causes behind what is now known as the Boxer War, examining its particular cruelties and its impact on China, foreign imperialism in China, and on the foreign imagination. This war introduced the world to the "Boxers," the seemingly fanatical, violent xenophobes who, believing themselves invulnerable to foreign bullets, died in their thousands in front of foreign guns. But 1900 also saw the imperialism of the 1890s checked and the Qing rulers of China move to embark on a series of shattering reforms. The Boxers have often been represented as a force from China's past, resisting an enforced modernity. Here, expert contributors argue that this rebellion was instead a wholly modern resistance to globalizing power, representing new trends in modern China and in international relations. The allied invasion of north China in late summer 1900 was the first multinational intervention in the name of "civilization," with the issues and attendant problems that have become all too familiar in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, understanding the Boxer rising and the Boxer war remains a pressing contemporary issue. This volume will appeal to readers interested in modern Chinese, East Asian, and European history as well as the history of imperialism, colonialism, warfare, missionary work, and Christianity. Contributions by: C. A. Bayly, Lewis Bernstein, Robert Bickers, Paul A. Cohen, Henrietta Harrison, James L. Hevia, Ben Middleton, T. G. Otte, Roger R. Thompson, R. G. Tiedemann, and Anand A. Yang.