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, including 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'