Meanwhile one important result came from the war. Li Hung Chang and the other progressive statesmen of the empire, who had long been convinced that the only hope of China lay in its being thrown open to Western science and art, found themselves able to carry out their plans, the conservative opposition having seriously broken down. The result of this was seen in a dozen directions. Railroads, long almost completely forbidden, gained free “right of way,” and promised in the near future to traverse the country far and wide. Steamers ploughed their way for a thousand miles up the Yang-tse-Kiang; engineers became busy exploiting the coal and iron mines of the Flowery Kingdom; great factories, equipped with the best modern machinery, sprang up in the foreign settlements; foreign books began to be translated and read; and the empress even went so far as to receive foreign ambassadors in public audience and on a footing of outward equality in the “forbidden city” of Peking, long the sacredly secluded center of an empire locked against the outer world. The increase of European interference in China, with indications of a possible intention to dismember that ancient empire and divide its fragments among the land-hungry nations of the West, was viewed in China with dread and indignation, the feeling of hostility extending to the work of the missionaries, who were probably viewed by many as agents in the movement of invasion. THE BOXER OUTBREAK The hostile sentiment thus developed was indicated early in 1900 by the outbreak of a Chinese secret society known by a name signified in English by the word “boxers.” These ultra-patriots organized an anti-missionary crusade in several provinces of North China in which many missionaries and native Christians were killed. The movement extended from the missionary settlements to include the whole foreign movement in China, and was evidently encouraged by the dowager empress and her advisers. As a result the outbreak spread to Peking, where Baron von Ketteler, the German minister, was killed, several of the legation buildings were destroyed, and more than two hundred refugees were besieged within the walls of the British legation. The danger to which the ministries and their assistants and families were exposed aroused Europe and America, and as the Chinese government took no steps to allay the outbreak, a relief expedition was organized, in which United States, British, French, German, Russian and Japanese forces took part.