Chinese guerrilla forces in the New Territories—as this leased area is still called—opposed the British occupation but were defeated and driven out by British troops in a ten-day campaign. That was the easiest part of it. It took four years of wrangling with the uncooperative Chinese residents to establish valid titles to private plots of land in the New Territories. Kowloon City, an eight-acre patch on the border of Kowloon and the New Territories, became a kind of orphan in the transaction, with the British firmly insisting it was part of the lease and the Chinese arguing somewhat inconclusively that it was not. Nationalist China claimed it as recently as 1948, but Red China has not so far pushed a similar claim. Britain regarded it as hers in 1960, and sent in her police to clean out the robbers and murderers who had long used it as a hiding place. A general deterioration of Sino-British relations followed the leasing of the New Territories. The two empires were at odds over the maintenance of Chinese customs stations in the New Territories, the presence of Chinese warships in Kowloon Bay and the treatment of Chinese prisoners in Hong Kong jails. Moreover, each disagreement was intensified by the patriotic fervor which led to the Boxer Rebellion. At the opening of the twentieth century, the Chinese Empire had been driven into a hopeless position. Bound and crippled like the feet of her women, she had neither the weapons nor the industrial capacity to repel the encroaching armies of Europe and Japan. By any reasonable standard, she was beaten before she started to fight back. Out of China’s desperation grew a super-patriotic secret society, The Fist of Righteous Harmony, or Boxers, who claimed that magical powers sustained their cause, making them invulnerable to the superior weapons of foreigners. Occult arts and a rigorous program of physical training, the Boxers professed, would carry them to victory. It was a crusade of absurdity; foolish and foredoomed, but plainly preferable to unresisting surrender. The Boxers opened their offensive by murdering missionaries and Chinese Christians, causing a new rush of refugees to Hong Kong. They burned foreign legations in Peking and sent the surviving Chinese Christians and foreigners fleeing to the British legation for safety. An international army, composed of French, German, Russian, American and Japanese units, lifted the siege of the legation on August 14, 1900, and remained in Peking until peace was signed eleven months later. Recurrences of plague killed 7,962 persons in the colony at the turn of the century, but the discovery that plague was borne by rats prompted a war to exterminate them. Rewards of a few cents were paid for their carcasses, and profit-hungry Chinese were suspected of importing rats from Canton to claim the bounty. The threat of plague gradually decreased, but malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and cholera remained to ravage the refugee-jammed colony.