Decline, Fall, and Aftermath of the Qing Empire 111
Christian missionaries who moved into many parts of the Chinese coun-
tryside in the late nineteenth century. Western missionaries were coura-
geous people, and some of them did amazing medical and social work in
China. The fi rst women’s movement against foot-binding was inspired
by Western missionary women. But many Chinese could not forgive the
fact that Western Christianity and opium came to China at the same
time and in the same way, backed by Western guns pointed at Chinese
heads. Much wealthier than most Chinese peasants, Western missionar-
ies lived in their own walled compounds apart from the Chinese, under
the protection of extraterritoriality. Some poor Chinese “converted” to
Christianity for economic reasons, gaining the label “rice Christians,”
and authorities suspected Chinese criminal elements of becoming nomi-
nally Christian only to use extraterritoriality to avoid Chinese prosecu-
tion. All of these practices angered poor Chinese peasants, as did all the
foreign wars and unequal treaties of the past half century.
After initially trying to suppress the Boxers’ attacks on foreigners,
the Qing court in the summer of 1900 decided to support the Boxers
and to try to use them to drive the foreigners out of China once and for
all. One factor in the empress dowager’s decision to back the Boxers
was that foreign governments had strenuously objected to her plans
to depose the Guangxu Emperor in 1898, an act she saw as an intoler-
able level of foreign interference in Chinese affairs. Some court offi cials
also told her that the Boxers’ religious rituals made them immune to
Western fi rearms, and this appeared to be true when she was given a
demonstration (with the shooters using blanks).
All that saved the dynasty from collapse at this point was the fact that
southern Chinese offi cials ignored the court’s orders to declare full-scale
war on all foreigners. An eight-nation invasion force (the Western powers
plus Japan) quickly took Beijing in 1901, and the empress dowager fl ed
the capital disguised as a Buddhist nun. On her trip through the desolate
countryside, she was confronted for the fi rst time with the realities of Chi-
na’s poverty and weakness. Once a new truce was negotiated, with China
agreeing to pay four hundred million ounces of silver in damages, the
empress dowager returned to Beijing, invited the wives of Western dip-
lomats to her court for tea, and vigorously promoted the same kinds of
modernizing reform she had violently suppressed just three years earlier.
The Boxer Rebellion brought the Qing dynasty’s reputation to an
all-time low throughout the world. China was now seen as a backward,
dangerous, and barbaric place. One Westerner who perceived the larger
signifi cance of the event was Robert Hart, an Irishman who oversaw the
China Maritime Customs Offi ce from 1865 to 1908. In the aftermath