(Originally published January 2017)
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| Empress Dowager Cixi whose Decree caused such bloodshed |
The Boxer Rebellion was a violent movement in China which targeted Christians, missionaries in particular, between 1899 and 1901. It was initially a nationalist group (“Boxer” was the English translation for the name of this group) that pushed for expulsion of foreigners and their interests and eventually grew into a much larger movement.
When the Boxers finally blockaded the Legation Quarter of Beijing, which housed many foreigner delegations and missions, the Empress Dowager Cixi (believing that armed invasion to lift the siege was immanent) weighed in and supported the Boxers through an Imperial Decree “declaring war on foreign powers”. This led to the killing of many foreigners and significantly more native-born Christian converts in China, mostly in the northern provinces near Beijing.
According to Wikipedia, a total of 136 Protestant missionaries, 47 Catholic nuns and priests, 53 foreign children, and thousands of convert Chinese citizens were killed during the rebellion. In all, between 2,400 and 2,600 people were killed after Empress Dowager made her proclamation supporting the Boxers.[i]
Annie Allender Gould was my great-grandfather’s first cousin and was, therefore, my first cousin three times removed. She was also a Presbyterian missionary in China and one of the 136 Protestant missionaries killed by the Boxers. Laying aside the moral questions of attempting to convert people to one's own religion, this is a depiction of a violent episode in history and its impact on a family.
