You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [55]
As a result, the Boxers were able to convince many members of the populace that their rites rendered them invulnerable to bullets and other weapons — claims that adherents sought to prove during wild demonstrations, when members of the audience were challenged to attack them. The wounds they sometimes suffered were dismissed as a failure to use the correct techniques and had little or no effect on recruiting.
The movement spread quickly and became especially popular in Shantung province, the place where Confucius was born. During the late 1800s not only was the area devastated by a series of natural disasters, including floods and plagues of locusts, it also came under attack from foreign technology, culture and religion.
Steamboats, trains and imported textiles put thousands out of work even as Christian missionaries roamed the land, built churches using funds extorted from the Chinese government and sought to turn the populace against their traditional gods.
No wonder then that it was in Shantung where the first missionaries were murdered and where the Boxers launched their initial attacks on thousands of Christian converts. Some were hacked to death, while others were skinned or buried alive.
Shortly thereafter, and with the assistance of the imperial troops that the empress supplied, the Boxers surrounded more than four thousand Chinese and foreigners in the port city of Tientsin, even as almost nine hundred citizens of eighteen foreign nations were trapped in the diplomatic quarter of Peking (now called Beijing).
Having been established during the years following Great Britain and France’s defeat of China earlier in the century, the quarter was a bustling mix of foreign embassies, offices and stores where all manner of luxuries could be bought.
The ensuing siege lasted for two months and took place during the worst heat of the summer as thousands of Boxers and imperial troops tried in vain to take the diplomatic quarter. They attacked in waves, tunneled in under the walls, and burned a neighboring library filled with ancient texts in an effort to break through.
In the meantime American, British, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, German and Japanese soldiers, diplomats, missionaries, journalists, socialites and adventurers of every stripe fought side by side to repel the oncoming hordes even as cowards hid in cellars, women made sandbags out of silk, and the warm humid air grew thick with the stink of rotting flesh. Food soon ran short, and denied an equitable distribution of what remained to be eaten, more than three thousand Chinese converts began to starve.
Finally, by the time foreign troops came to the rescue in August, more than two hundred of the foreigners holed up in Peking had been killed or wounded, an equal number of priests, nuns and missionaries had been murdered in the countryside, and tens of thousands of Chinese converts had been indiscriminately slaughtered. There is no way to know how many Boxers and imperials were killed — but it seems safe to say that the number was in the thousands.
Unfortunately the rebellion brought more foreigners into China; they cut the country into even smaller slices, and Tzu Hsi was eventually forced not only to enact the reforms that she hoped to avoid but to do so with such speed that they undercut the dynasty she sought to perpetuate. The Old Buddha died in 1908 and the last emperor was deposed three years later. Now, after some ninety-five years, we’re left to ask “Manchu who?”
You Allowed What?
Here is a less than glowing…well, maybe glowing is too accurate a word…story of politics and a just plain lack of good sense. Or maybe someone forgot to tell him that Australia wasn’t a penal colony anymore.
MARALINGA: AUSTRALIA’S NUCLEAR FOLLY
PRIME MINISTER CLEMENT ATLEE
AUSTRALIA, 1950
James A. Hartley
In 1950, Britain, hoping to proceed with its atomic weapon testing program, was denied use of the Nevada testing facilities in the United States. As a result, Labor prime