 name to the Europeans.
The Boxers believed that they could, through training, diet, martial arts and prayer, perform extraordinary feats, such as flight, and could become immune to swords and bullets. Further, they popularly claimed that millions of spirit soldiers would descend from the heavens and assist them in purifying China from foreign influences. Boxers recruited local farmers and other workers made desperate by disastrous floods, and focused blame on both Christian missionaries and Chinese Christians. Some Chinese Christians were recent converts and some had been born into the faith, but missionaries secured special protection for them using the shelter of extraterritoriality. Aggression toward missionaries and Christians gained the attention of foreign (mainly European) governments.
After the Hundred Days Reform failed, the conservative Empress Dowager Cixi seized power and put the reformist Guangxu Emperor into house arrest. Western countries were sympathetic to the imprisoned emperor, and opposed Cixi's plan to replace the Guangxu emperor. Empress Dowager Cixi decided to use Boxers to expel Western influences from China; meanwhile, the Boxers would be weakened by Western forces. Then the Boxer slogan became "support the Qing, destroy the Foreign." (扶清灭洋) 
One of the first signs of unrest appeared in a small village in Shandong province, where there had been a long dispute over the property rights of a temple between locals and the Roman Catholic authorities. The Catholics claimed that the temple was originally a church abandoned after the Kangxi Emperor banned Christianity in China in 1715. The local court ruled in favor of the church which angered villagers who claimed the temple for rituals. After the local authorities turned over the temple to the Catholics, the villagers (led by the Boxers) attacked the church building.
The exemption of missionaries from many laws further alienated local Chinese. In 1899, with the help of the French Minister in Peking, the missionaries obtained an edict granting official rank to each order in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Local priests, by means of this official status, were able to support their people in legal disputes or family feuds and go over the heads of local officials. After the German government took over territory in Shandong, many Chinese feared that the missionaries, and by extension all Christians, were part of an imperialist attempt to "carve the melon," that is, to divide China and colonize the pieces separately.
The early years of the movement's growth coincided with the Hundred Days Reform (11 June–21 September 1898). They persuaded the Guangxu Emperor to institute reforms, which alienated many officials by their sweeping nature and led the Empress Dowager to step in and reverse the reforms. Making matters worse, massive floods in some areas and drought in others created poverty and refugees.
Now with a majority of conservatives in the Imperial Court the Empress Dowager changed her long policy of suppressing Boxers; she issued edicts in defense of the Boxers, which drew heated complaints from foreign diplomats in January 1900. In June 1900 the Boxers, now joined by elements of the Imperial army, attacked foreign compounds in the cities of Tianjin and Beijing. The legations of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United States, Russia and Japan were all located on the Beijing Legation Quarter close to the Forbidden City in Beijing. The legations were hurriedly linked into a fortified compound that became a refuge for foreign citizens in Beijing. The Spanish and Belgian legations were a few streets away and their staffs were able to arrive safely at the compound. The German legation on the other side of the city was stormed before the staff could escape. When the envoy for the German Empire, Klemens Freiherr von Ketteler, was murdered on June 20 by a Manchurian man, the foreign powers demanded redress. On June 21 Empress Dowager Cixi declared war against all Western powers; regional governors, i