ncluding Li Hongzhang and Zhang Zhidong, quietly refused to cooperate. Shanghai's Chinese elite supported the provincial governors of southeastern China in resisting the Imperial declaration of war. Later many peasants took up arms and joined the Boxers' cause, but were also defeated.
The Taiyuan Massacre was the mass killing of foreign Christian missionaries and of local church members, including children, from July 1900. Two hundred and twenty two Chinese Eastern Orthodox Christians were also murdered, along with 182 Protestant missionaries and 500 Chinese Protestants known as the China Martyrs of 1900. Also, 48 Catholic missionaries and 18,000 Chinese Catholics were murdered.
The Missionary Herald normally published letters and telegrams sent by priests and their families in Manchu Qing dynasty, in Shanxi province, Taiyuan city. In December 1900, after incrementally more ominous monthly reports, the Missionary Herald broke five-month-old news to its readers: "the entire mission staff in the Province of Shanxi has perished". At the end of June 1900 priests and their families had been lured out of hiding and cast into prison, then executed by the Manchu officials. The Taiyuan missionaries fled into a co-worker's house because Boxers were burning churches and houses, killing Christians and foreigners. Three days later the governor sent four deputies with soldiers, "promising to escort them in safety to the coast". Brought instead to a house near the governor’s residence, they were then "taken to the open space in front of the Governor’s residence, and stripped to the waist, as usual with those beheaded".
|“||By June 1900 placards calling for the death of foreigners and Christians covered the walls around Beijing. Armed bands combed the streets of the city, setting fire to homes and "with imperial blessing" killing Chinese Christians and foreigners. --Father Geoffrey Korz, of the Orthodox church||”|
In 2005 British Professor Henry Hart released a book, Lost in the Gobi Desert, to commemorate his great-grandfather's efforts to save the life of western missionaries and their Chinese followers from the hands of the Boxer rebels.
|“||Boxers blamed “foreign devils” like my great-grandparents for causing northern China's drought and famine, exacerbating economic hardships by building railroads and telegraph lines (because such modern conveniences eliminated jobs), undermining the native textile industry with European imports, infecting and killing Chinese children with Christian prayers and for various other real and imagined infamies.||”|
|“||The barbaric Boxer Rebellion came as a sudden thunderstorm; all foreigners were to be killed not in the sudden merciful death of a bullet but sliced to death by big, old rusty knives and swords.... I had an old Winchester rifle and plenty of ammunition ready for the journey....The Boxer uprising ultimately claimed the lives of more than 32,000 Chinese Christians and several hundred foreign missionaries (historian Nat Brandt called it “the greatest single tragedy in the history of Christian evangelicalism”||”|
The compound in Beijing remained under siege from Boxer forces from 20 June - 14 August. Under the command of the British minister to China, Claude Maxwell MacDonald, the legation staff and security personnel defended the compound with one old muzzle-loaded cannon; it was nicknamed the International Gun because the barrel was British, the carriage was Italian, the shells were Russian and the crew was American.
During the defence of the legations, a small Japanese force of one officer and 24 sailors commanded by Colonel Shiba, distinguished itself in several ways. Of particular note was that it had the almost unique distinction of suffering greater than 100 percent casualties. This was possible because a great many of the Japanese troops were wounded, entered into the casualty lists, then returned to the line of battle only to be wounded once more and again entered in the casualty lists.
Foreign media described the fighting going on in Beijing, as well as the alleged torture and murde