The anti-foreign uprising in north China (1899–1901) led by a secret society whose members believed that martial-arts ritual and spirit possession made them invulnerable to bullets. Amid drought, famine, and rage at a century of foreign domination, the Boxers killed Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries, besieged the foreign legations in Beijing, and were backed by the Qing court when the Empress Dowager Cixi declared war on the powers. An eight-nation army crushed them, sacked Beijing, and imposed the 1901 Boxer Protocol with its crushing indemnity. The rising is remembered in radically opposed ways, and its death tolls remain contested.
They believed faith could stop a bullet. Across north China in 1900, young men trained in martial arts and called down the spirits of gods, convinced that the right rituals turned their flesh to iron. They were the Boxers, and they meant to drive every foreigner out of China. They burned churches, killed missionaries, and butchered Chinese Christians as traitors. Then they laid siege to the foreign quarter of Beijing for fifty-five days, with the backing of a Qing court already in deep crisis. The bullets did not stop. Eight foreign nations sent an army that broke the siege, looted the capital, and left China to pay a debt so vast it took decades to clear. The men who thought they were invulnerable had hurled themselves at the very powers they could not defeat.