After 1900, why could no Chinese person live on this street? | Shenzhou 06
《神州大地》第 7 集 · 語言：English · 時長：24:25
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Beijing has a lane called Dongjiaomin Xiang.

It runs east from the inside of

Chongwenmen and west to the road along the east side of Tiananmen Square,

a little over fifteen hundred metres,

the longest lane in Beijing.

In September 1901 a treaty stated that this

strip was set aside for the legations

of the foreign powers, to be defended

by them, and that Chinese people were

not permitted to live inside it.

A street in the middle of a

Chinese city where Chinese people could not

live. That treaty — where did it come

from?

Begin with the weather that summer.

In 1899, the twenty-fifth year of Guangxu,

the governor-general of Zhili, Yulu, sent up

a memorial. It reads: "since summer and

autumn of this year rain has been

scarce, and the drought-stricken districts of Zhili,

Shanxi, Shandong and Henan are very extensive. "

In Shandong that autumn the report reads:

"insects have eaten the crops to nothing,

and grain prices are high. "

North of the Yellow River in Henan,

across three prefectures, the report reads:

"for a thousand li, not a bird

is seen. " The drought carried into the

next year. In 1900 the governor-general of Zhili,

Li Hongzhang, reported fifteen districts and counties

affected.

And before the drought, this region had

been fighting a different war for a

long time. Between foreign missionaries and Chinese

Christians on one side, and Chinese who

did not convert on the other,

conflict had piled up over decades

over the return of property, over levies,

over lawsuits. In January 1900 the Shandong governor

Yuan Shikai sent the Zongli Yamen a

report with one figure in it:

from August 1899 to January 1900, across three prefectures — Jinan,

Dongchang, Tai'an — and the independent prefecture of

Linqing, in seventeen districts and counties,

there had been one hundred and forty-six

incidents involving missionaries and converts.

Five months. Seventeen districts and counties.

One hundred and forty-six.

The court was not calm either.

After 1898, the Empress Dowager Cixi had resumed

ruling from behind the curtain, and the

Guangxu Emperor had lost real power.

On 24 January 1900 the court issued an edict

in the emperor's name, naming Pujun,

son of Prince Duan Zaiyi, as Heir

Apparent. The edict went out; the foreign

ministers refused to offer congratulations, and the

matter was set aside.

In that same year an organisation called

the Boxers spread out from Shandong and

Zhili. The name was not new.

The three characters " Yihe Quan" appear as

early as 1779, in a memorial from

the governor-general of Zhili, Zhou Yuanli.

On 26 October 1898, at Jiangjiazhuang in Liyuantun,

Guan County, Shandong, Zhao Sanduo and Yan

Shuqin and others gathered and attacked the

local church. Zhao Sanduo belonged to the

Plum Blossom boxing school, and he renamed

it " Yihe Quan". In June 1900 large numbers

of Boxers entered Beijing.

They came into the inner city on

13 June. That day eleven churches in the

city were burned, among them the Asiatic

Petroleum chapel in Xiaoshun Hutong, the Catholic

East Church at Bamiancao, and the Congregational

church at Dengshikou. The same day,

three thousand two hundred Catholics took refuge

in the North Cathedral in the western

city, and more than two thousand Christians

in the legation quarter at Dongjiaomin Xiang.

On 11 June the Japanese legation's secretary,

Sugiyama Akira, was killed inside Yongdingmen by

Dong Fuxiang's Gansu troops.

On 14 June the German minister von Ketteler

ordered German soldiers to open fire,

killing about twenty Boxers.

On 19 June the Zongli Yamen informed the

foreign envoys that they must leave Beijing

within twenty-four hours. The next morning von

Ketteler left in a sedan chair,

to negotiate a delay at the Zongli

Yamen.

On the morning of 20 June 1900, the German

minister von Ketteler left Dongjiaomin Xiang in

a sedan chair, bound for the Zongli

Yamen. The day before, the Zongli Yamen

had told the foreign envoys to leave

Beijing within twenty-four hours.

Von Ketteler was going to ask for

a delay. At the west mouth of

Xizongbu Hutong, on the street north of

the Dongdan arch, a Qing soldier fired.

Von Ketteler died on the spot.

Accounts from the time leave the name

of the man who fired: Enhai,

a bannerman of the musketry unit of

the Shenjiying. On 31 December that year he

was taken to the spot where von

Ketteler died and executed there.

That afternoon, Dongjiaomin Xiang was surrounded.

The siege lasted fifty-five days.

Inside were the legation guards of the

various powers, more than four hundred men;

four hundred and seventy-three foreign civilians

one hundred and forty-nine women and seventy-nine

children — and more than two thousand eight

hundred Chinese Christians. Why they ran in:

from 13 June onward, accounts of churches burned

and Christians killed had come one after

another. The total for those guards comes

out differently depending on who is counting.

Four hundred and thirty-two is the two

waves of guards who came to Beijing

added together; four hundred and nine is

the number of soldiers actually defending the

legation quarter when the siege began;

eight hundred and eighty-two is the four

hundred and nine soldiers plus the four

hundred and seventy-three foreign civilians.

Three numbers. Three bases.

On 23 June, the Hanlin Academy — sharing a

wall with the British legation — caught fire.

B. L. Putnam Weale, a Briton then

inside the legation quarter, wrote down that

day in Indiscreet Letters from Peking:

"yesterday a fire-setter came creeping like a

cat... threw the fire-brand into the Hanlin,

and in one hour the British legation,

where all the ministers live, was in

desperate danger. " The Hanlin stood right against

the British legation. The fire did not

burn the stone-built legation.

What burned was the Hanlin, and the

books in its courtyard.

Among those books were the Jiajing copy

of the Yongle Encyclopedia — moved into the

Jingyi Pavilion of the Hanlin during the

Yongzheng reign — and the master copy of

the Siku Quanshu.

The count of that one book kept

falling. Under Qianlong it was checked and

over nine thousand volumes were held;

a second check in 1875 found under five

thousand; in 1894 Weng Tonghe made a count

and found eight hundred left.

How much was lost in this fire,

accounts differ: one says at least six

hundred and five volumes, another says about

three hundred. After the fire, the British

legation handed back about three hundred and

thirty volumes.

Life inside the siege was one ceasefire

after another, and then firing again.

On 25 June the Qing troops stopped attacking.

They raised a white flag at the

north bridge and hung out a wooden

board reading: " By imperial edict the legations

are to be protected; the attack is

stopped at once. " At midnight that day

the shelling resumed, and the British minister

Claude MacDonald called it in his report

the heaviest of the whole siege.

On 17 July the two sides agreed a

ceasefire. There was another line of events

in the western city.

The North Cathedral was surrounded from the

evening of 15 June and held out until

16 August.

The day after the siege began,

21 June, the court issued an edict.

Later generations usually call it the "declaration

of war edict". The edict names no

country. Throughout, it calls the other side

only "them". What is later described as

"a declaration of war on eleven countries"

those eleven are the signatories of the

Boxer Protocol the following year: Germany,

Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Spain, France, Britain, Italy,

the United States, Japan, the Netherlands and

Russia. Whether this edict amounts to a

formal declaration of war, historians hold two

positions. Both are set out here.

One position holds that it is not

a formal declaration. In 2006 the first issue

of Shixue Yuekan, published by Henan University,

carried Guo Tianxiang's article " A query on

the 'declaration of war' by the Qing

government in 1900". He puts four points:

the edict names no clear opponent;

no Chinese or foreign newspaper reported a

declaration; the envoys abroad and the foreign

side knew nothing of it; and the

Qing government neither broke off relations with

the powers nor recalled its envoys.

Hu Sheng, in From the Opium War

to the May Fourth Movement, also writes

that this edict was not delivered to

any foreign government in any form.

The other position holds that it is

a declaration of war.

The Qing History edited by Nan Bingwen,

the General History of China: Early Modern

edited by Bai Shouyi, Lin Huaguo's A

Study of Boxer Affairs, and the Cambridge

History of China: Late Ch'ing edited by

John King Fairbank all treat it as

one. Both positions stand.

Take the attacking side first.

The nominal commander was the Grand Councillor

Ronglu. The main force actually attacking was

Dong Fuxiang's Gansu troops, pressing in from

the north and the west.

They had artillery. Li Yuerui, a man

of the time, recorded one incident in

Chunbing Shi Yecheng —The court pressed for the

attack; the Wuwei Army's field-gun battery entered

the city. The Tianjin brigade general Zhang

Huaizhi got the guns onto the wall

and then held fire.

He came down from the wall to

see Ronglu and asked for a written

order. Ronglu said: " Either way, the sound

of the guns will be heard inside. "

Zhang Huaizhi understood. He went back up

and changed his tune, saying the ranging

was off and the guns must be

re-laid; he moved the battery and fired

for a day and a night at

open ground outside the legations.

The legations were not damaged.

During the siege the two sides were

still in touch. On 25 June the Qing

troops stopped firing and sent watermelons and

vegetables to the legations; from mid-July they

also sent vegetables, white rice, watermelons and

wine.

Now the defending side.

More than four hundred guards from the

various powers held several positions: the British

legation at the core; the United States

and Germany on the city wall;

France, Italy and Japan in the north-west.

They were short of weapons.

The heaviest gun the defenders had was

one they had captured from the attacking

side. Over the fifty-five days of the

siege, the guards lost fifty-five killed and

about one hundred and thirty-five wounded.

On the other line, the North Cathedral

was held by some forty French and

Italian soldiers, together with about three thousand

Chinese Christians. The attacking force numbered in

the thousands. Mines were blown four times:

11 July, 18 July, 12 August and 13 August.

On 18 July, the western part of the

Sisters' House at the cathedral's north end

collapsed in a mass.

The defenders' casualties were mostly not caused

by bullets. The researcher Dai Haibin counted:

during the siege of the North Cathedral

more than four hundred died, one hundred

and twenty of them children; far more

died of disease and hunger than of

gunfire, and the great majority of them

were Chinese. He also points to something

else: the cathedral held to the end

not entirely because it was "well defended"

most of the shells flew too high,

and the Qing troops never attempted an

assault at close quarters.

That summer, both sides inside Beijing left

records. On 13 June, eleven churches in the

inner city caught fire on the same

day. The commander of the gendarmerie,

Chongli, wrote in his report: "churches within

both wings of my jurisdiction suddenly caught

fire at the you hour on the

seventeenth, starting inside Chongwenmen in Xiaoshun Hutong...

churches in various places caught fire one

after another. " The next day, the Catholic

South Cathedral inside Xuanwumen was burned.

In the diary of Bishop Favier:

"on 14 June, at half past eleven,

the South Cathedral too caught fire;

the hospital, the schools and the foundling

home were all affected. "

On 16 June a foreign-goods shop on Qianmen Street

caught fire and the fire spread.

The count afterwards: the Zhengyangmen gate tower

burned down; about a thousand shops and

twenty-four silver-melting works were burned.

The resident Zhongfang Shi recorded that day

in Gengzi Jishi. The number of Christian

dead varies widely between accounts.

The church historian Gu Changsheng's figures are

about eighteen thousand Catholic converts and about

five thousand Protestant converts.

Another set of church statistics gives thirty

thousand Chinese Catholics. The China Inland Mission

monthly of the time reprinted a London

Times survey saying that in north China

"between fifteen and twenty thousand believers were

killed".

In less than a month, it was

the other side's turn.

On 14 August the allied troops broke into

Beijing. What followed was written down in

the commander's own report.

Waldersee wrote to the German emperor:

"the details of all the damage and

looting China suffered this time can never

be ascertained, but they must unquestionably be

very great... and the rapes of women,

the acts of cruelty, the killing at

will and the burning without cause that

occurred during the looting were very numerous. "

Zhongfang Shi wrote in his diary on

the twenty-third day of the seventh month:

"the foreign soldiers of the various countries,

after forming up on the twenty-first,

looted and plundered everywhere, all under the

name of seizing Boxers and searching for

arms... kicking in doors from house to

house... every coin, watch and valuable was

carried off, and this was called 'disturbing

the city'. Anyone who stood in the

way was killed. " Bertram Lenox Simpson,

then inside the legation quarter, recorded in

Indiscreet Letters from Peking that French troops

machine-gunned a crowd of Chinese driven into

a dead-end lane, "firing for about ten

or fifteen minutes, until not one was

left". On property: Japanese troops took about

three million taels of silver from the

Board of Revenue; Russian troops occupied the

Summer Palace on 19 August and withdrew on

2 October.

How many people died in this conflict

altogether — there is no agreed figure.

Encyclopædia Britannica puts it this way:

"perhaps 100,000 or more people died in

the conflict, although estimates of casualties vary

widely. "

Negotiations began at the end of 1900.

On 7 September 1901, Yikuang and Li Hongzhang signed

the Boxer Protocol on behalf of the

Qing government. On the signing side were

eleven countries: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Spain,

France, Britain, Italy, the United States,

Japan, the Netherlands and Russia.

The treaty has twelve articles and nineteen

annexes. Four main provisions

Indemnity: 450 million taels of customs silver,

at four per cent a year,

repaid over thirty-nine years from 1902, principal and

interest together more than 982,230,000 taels,

secured on the customs and salt revenues.

The legation quarter: the Dongjiaomin Xiang area

of Beijing was set aside for the

exclusive use of the foreign legations,

to be defended by each power itself,

and Chinese people were not permitted to

live inside it. Forts and troops:

the Dagu forts and all forts between

Beijing and the sea were to be

razed; foreign powers could station troops along

the railway from Beijing to Shanhaiguan;

no Chinese troops within twenty li of

Tianjin; and for at least two years

China was forbidden to import arms and

the materials for making them.

Prohibition of hostility to foreigners: Chinese people

were permanently forbidden to form or join

any organisation hostile to the foreign powers;

officials who had supported the Boxers were

to be punished; and in towns where

incidents involving foreigners had occurred, the civil

and military examinations were suspended for five

years. The indemnity figure, 450 million taels,

was close to China's population at the

time. Later on people said this was

"one tael per person".

Those four characters are not in the

treaty. Article 6 reads: "the indemnity to

be paid to the powers shall be

450 million taels of customs silver...

at four per cent a year,

the principal to be repaid by China

over thirty-nine years in instalments according to

the schedule annexed. " " One tael per person"

is a later interpretation of the relationship

between that sum and the population figure.

This street is still there today.

Dongjiaomin Xiang runs east from the inside

of Chongwenmen and west to the road along the east side of Tiananmen Square,

a little over fifteen hundred metres in

all. On 25 June 2001 the State Council listed

it as a fifth-batch Major Historical and

Cultural Site Protected at the National Level,

under the name "the Dongjiaomin Xiang legation

buildings", thirteen buildings in all.

Those buildings each have their own use

today: the former Yokohama Specie Bank is

the China Court Museum, the former National City

Bank is the Beijing Police Museum,

the former Japanese legation is the Beijing

Municipal People's Government, and the former Russian

legation is the Supreme People's Court.

Some names are gone.

The Grand Hôtel des Wagons-Lits, the Hongkong

and Shanghai Bank, Jardine Matheson, the German

legation — all demolished.

The North Cathedral is still there too,

in the same place, and still in

use. It did not begin there.

In the thirty-second year of Kangxi the

emperor fell ill with malaria; the French

Jesuit Jean-François Gerbillon brought cinchona bark,

and the emperor recovered.

The emperor granted him a plot of

land at Candi Kou, west of the

Central Lake, and a church was built

there. In the twelfth year of Guangxu,

when the three lakes of the Western

Garden were being repaired, the court took

that land back and allotted a new

site at Xishiku, and the new church

was completed in the fourteenth year of

Guangxu. The cathedral standing now is the

one rebuilt then. There is also a

stone arch in Zhongshan Park.

In 1901 the Qing government began a memorial

at the spot where von Ketteler was

killed, and it was completed in 1903

white marble, blue glazed tile roof,

four pillars, three bays, seven roof ridges.

In 1918, when the First World War ended,

China was on the winning side.

On 13 November President Xu Shichang ordered the

memorial demolished. The stone was taken down,

moved to the Central Park and reassembled,

the original wording cut away, and four

new characters carved: " Right prevails".

In 1952, when the Asian and Pacific Peace

Conference was held in Beijing, the arch

was renamed "the Peace Defence Arch",

the four characters written by Guo Moruo.

It is still in Zhongshan Park today,

inside the south gate.

Part of that indemnity came back later.

On 25 May 1908 the United States Congress passed

a resolution authorising the return of the

portion it judged to exceed actual losses;

President Roosevelt signed it on 28 December that

year. The return began on 1 January 1909.

In June 1909 the Bureau for Students to

America was set up; in August the

Qinghua Garden was handed to it as

a preparatory school for study in the

United States; in October the first group

of forty-seven students sailed.

In August 1910 a second group of seventy

left. In February 1911 the school moved into

the Qinghua Garden and was renamed " Qinghua

College"; on 29 April it formally opened.

Back to that street from the beginning.

After 1901, Dongjiaomin Xiang became a place where

Chinese people could not live.

The stone buildings on that street stayed

standing, and went through several rounds of

other uses. On 6 January 1950 the Beijing Military

Control Commission issued a proclamation taking back

the properties of the foreign barracks in

Beijing and requisitioning the barracks and other

buildings. That month the American, French and

Dutch barracks were handed over one after

another; in April the British barracks were

handed over as well.

From 1959 the foreign legations moved out to

the area beyond Jianguomen one by one.

The history of Dongjiaomin Xiang as a

legation quarter ended there.

Today it is the longest lane in

Beijing, with a main road at each

end.

The complete transcript, bibliography and further reading

for this film are at sylogs.com.

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Source: sylogs.com