"An enthralling history." –The New Yorker
"Diana Preston succeeds in conveying both the human drama of the besieged community
of foreigners and their terrified Christian converts and the effect of the rebellion
on the larger national drama of 20th-century China…a highly
readable history." –Wall Street Journal
In the final years of the 19th century, China was in grave danger of becoming
a colony of the West. While various powers bickered over how to slice the pie,
their very presence in China, like their new technologies and Christian missions,
undermined the people's traditional ways. A strange, reactionary movement—mystical,
nationalistic and virulently anti Christian—began to spread like wildfire
among the Chinese peasants. The contemptuous foreigners, snickering at their
martial-arts routines, nicknamed them "The Boxers." Few could imagine that the
Boxers would receive backing from China's Empress Dowager, herself eager for
a showdown with the foreigners, and would soon terrorize them and the world.
The Boxer Rebellion is a panoramic chronicle of the uprising and ensuing
two-month siege of the 11 foreign ministries in Peking (now Beijing), and of
the foreign community in Tientsin (now Tianjin) during the summer of 1900—an
event whose repercussions have echoed throughout the intervening century. It
left tens of thousands of Chinese dead, precipitated the end of dynastic rule
in China, and has tainted China’s relationship with the wider world to
this day. It is also a richly human story.
Relying on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of the defenders, and on her own
extensive research from both Chinese and western perspectives, Diana Preston
portrays the dramatic human experience of the Boxer rising: in the diplomatic
district of Peking, cut off from the outside world during the desperate weeks
of the siege; behind the high, byzantine walls of Peking’s Inner City,
where decisions were made that forever changed Chinese society; among the allied
relief forces struggling to lift the siege; in the aftermath when the great
city was savagely looted and despoiled. Here is young Herbert Hoover, then a
mining engineer, patrolling the barricades of Tientsin at night on bicycle;
British admiral Sir Edward Seymour, whose aborted rescue mission became itself
a survival story; Polly Condit Smith, the observant young Boston guest of American
first secretary Herbert Squiers, who was besieged in Peking; the French Bishop
Auguste Favier, whose successful defense of Peking's Peitang Cathedral was nothing
short of a Christian miracle; and Tzu Hsi, the fabled Empress Dowager who had
held power for nearly forty years, fighting to preserve her own throne and a
dynastic way of life that had lasted for centuries.
Placing readers squarely in the middle of events as they unfolded, Diana Preston
proves herself a master of narrative history, a writer who brings the past alive
with style and freshness. Offering a view through the lens of the rapid changes
in society and culture at the time, The Boxer Rebellion broadens our
knowledge of the 20th century.
