After 1900, why could no Chinese person live on this street? | Shenzhou 06 · 神州大地 · 第一季

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.