The 1890s were a miserable decade for China. Droughts caused famine and several colonial wars resulted in the occupation of the country. After losing several battles in a row, the Chinese government agreed to allow the colonial powers to do business within China’s borders; part of this agreement meant Christian missionaries would be free to proselytize amongst the population. For many rural Chinese, deeply religious and uneducated, this situation resulted in financial ruin and the blame for all their troubles was laid at the feet of the invading foreigners.
    And so arose the Yihetuan, the translation meaning The Militia United in Righteousness. The colonialists called them the Boxers. The Yihetuan were a millenarian cult devoted to ancestor worship. They practiced trances that involved sword dancing and spirit possession. They believed their faith made them invincible to the bullets and cannonballs used in colonial warfare. They also believed that when entering into combat, an army of ancestral spirits would descend from heaven to help them defeat their enemies. They also engaged in a form of competitive kickboxing and so the missionaries referred to them as the Boxers.
    The Boxers had a particular dislike for Christian missionaries. Being ancestor worshipers, they did not take kindly to Christians telling the local populace that they were possessed by Satan. The missionaries had gained some ground in their time. They attracted a small number of converts, most likely by offering food and shelter to the starving peasantry. Thereby, the missionaries started disrupting the social fabric of the clan-oriented Chinese society and weakening the family ties that had once been a social safety-net for the community. The missionaries also engaged in the offensive practice of seizing Chinese temples and turning them into churches.  The dry weather and droughts did not help matters either. The superstitious agricultural community  firmly believed that bad weather was caused by the moral weakness of the emperor. The conservative and reactionary sector of the population traditionally vowed to overthrow the Qing dynasty, who they saw as a cabal of evil invaders, and wished to restore of  Ming dynasty who they regarded as the only true Chinese people. So the political agreements made between the Qing emperor and the colonialists was believed by the Boxers to be the cause of their agricultural failures.
    The Yihetuan built up a lynch mob of vigilantes and began attacking, burning, and looting Christian monasteries. This chaos went on for some time until the government, fearful of losing their colonial oppressor’s protection, intervened with the military to put down the rebellion. Things stayed quiet for a while and then in 1899, the Boxers destroyed the railway line connecting Tianjin and Beijing, effectively isolating the capitol city, the seat of the government, and the throne of the Qing emperor. Then one day, a teenage boy left the Yihetuan monastery in full Boxer regalia; he was seized by two German soldiers and executed. This event set off a wave of riots, a buildup of militias, and the peasant army of Boxers began marching on Beijing. By this time the conservative empress dowager Tzu Shi started expressing open support for the Boxers and sent the Qing military to march along with them.
    The British navy then called up 2000 soldiers from other colonial outposts in the region. They marched into Beijing and stopped in the embassy quarter to protect the missionaries and Chinese Christian converts who had moved there seeking shelter from the lynch mobs. Once there, the Chinese military erected barricades around the legations and set up troops so that no one could leave. Empress dowager Tzu Shi offered to let them leave with the assistance of the military but the colonial powers did not trust her, fearing it was a set up so that the Boxers could ambush and massacre them on the way out. The Boxers and the military commenced attacking the colonial prisoners but their military was too weak to fight them off. The worst damage they did was setting some embassies on fire and burning one of their own libraries which was filled with ancient Chinese manuscripts. They also killed lots of  missionaries and Chinese converts. As the imprisoned foreigners fought them off, the Boxers soon realized that their magic could not stop bullets and their religious faith did not bring an army of ancestral spirits to help lead them to victory. But still they were strong enough to keep the foreigners from escaping.
    By April 1900, the battle had reaches a stalemate and the colonialist invaders were sick, hungry, and weak. The British led a coalition of eight nations made up of Italian, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, British, American, Russian, and Japanese soldiers to intervene and end the war. The ill-prepared troops had an arduous journey to Beijing, suffering from dehydration, heat stroke, malnutrition, and the constant ambushes of the Boxer and Qing militias. The British were the first to reach the legations under siege and quickly ended the war.
    Many of the Qing conservative politicians were forced out of office by the colonial powers. The empress dowager Tzu Shi herself escaped in an oxcart, under a pile of blankets, disappearing into the western Muslim-dominated regions of China, never to be seen again. A gruesome period of retaliatory atrocities ensued with soldiers mostly from Russia, Germany, and Japan raping and slaughtering civilian supporters of the Boxers. Many Christian missionaries went on a looting campaign to acquire reparations. Foreign domination of China became more severe until the rise of the nationalist Kuomintag party led by Sun Yat-sen began the severe march toward independence and the eventual take-over by Mao Zetung and the Chinese Communist Party.
    The Boxer rebellion was yet another one of those wars in which no one came out looking good.
Booth, Martin. The Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon Of the Triads. Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., 2000.