New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable AwakeningBrown, Arthur Judson
History
New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable Awakening
Brown, Arthur Judson
China -- Commerce; China -- Foreign relations; China -- Politics and government; Missions -- China
I called on the famous Bishop. He was, for he has since
died, a burly, heavily-bearded Frenchman of about sixty-five
apparently. He received us most cordially and readily talked
of the siege. He said that of the eighty Europeans and 3,400
Christians with him in the siege, 2,700 were women and children.
Four hundred were buried, of whom forty were killed
by bullets, twenty-five by one explosion, eighty-one by another
and one by another. Of the rest, some died of disease but the
greater part of starvation. Twenty-one children were buried
at one time in one grave. Beside these 400 who were killed
or who died, many more were blown to pieces in explosions so
that nothing could be found to bury. Fifty-one children disappeared
in this way and not a fragment remained.
The first month of the siege, the food allowance was half a
pound a day. The first half of the second month, it was reduced
to four ounces, but for the second half only two ounces
could be served and the people had to eat roots, bark and the
leaves of trees and shrubs. Eighteen mules were eaten during
the siege. The Bishop said that in the diocese outside of
Peking, 6,000 Chinese Catholics, including three native priests,
were killed by the Boxers. Only four European priests were
killed, one in Peking and three outside. ``Not one foreign
priest left the diocese during the troubles,'' a statement that is
equally true of the Presbyterian missionaries and, so far as I
know, of those of other churches.
Clouds lowered as we left Peking, July 6th, on the Peking and
Hankow Railway for Paoting-fu, that city of sacred and painful
interest to every American Christian. Soon rain began to
fall, and it steadily continued while we rode over the vast level
plain, through unending fields of kao-liang, interspersed with
plots of beans, peanuts, melons and cucumbers, and mud and
brick-walled villages whose squalid wretchedness was hidden
by the abundant foliage of the trees, which are the only beauty
of Chinese cities. At almost every railway station, roofless
buildings, crumbling walls and broken water tanks bore painful
witness to the rage of the Boxers. At Liang-hsiang-hsien the
first foreign property was destroyed, and all along the line
outrages were perpetrated on the inoffensive native Christians.
Nowhere else in China was the hatred of the foreigner more
violent, for here hereditary pride and bigoted conservatism,
unusually intense even for China, were reinforced by Boxer
chiefs from the neighbouring province of Shantung, and were
particularly irritated by the aggressiveness of Roman Catholic
priests and by the construction of the railroad. It is only 110
miles from Peking to Paoting-fu. But the schedule was slow
and the stops long, so that we were six hours in making the
journey. Arriving at the large, well-built brick station, we
bumped and splashed in a Chinese cart through narrow, muddy
streets to the residence of a wealthy Chinese family that had
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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