Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
FOREIGN POWERS & THE FALL OF THE QING
Foreign Legation Quarter
After the military defeats of the Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-60), the Western nations
forced the Qing emperors to allow them to open formal embassies or legations in the capit-
al. Hitherto, the emperor had had no equal in the world - foreign powers could only send
embassies to deliver tribute, and they were housed in tributary hostels.
The last of the Foreign Legation Quarter's embassies left in 1967. Now most embassies are
located east of the centre, in Cháoyáng District.
Boxer Rebellion
The British legation was the first to open after 1860. It lay on the east side of Tiān'ānmén
Square and stayed there until the 1950s when its grounds were taken over by the Ministry
of State Security. By 1900, there were a dozen legations in an odd foreign ghetto with an
eclectic mixture of European architecture. The Foreign Legation Quarter never became a
foreign concession like those in Shànghǎi or Tiānjīn, but it had banks, schools, shops, post
offices, hospitals and military parade grounds. Much of it was reduced to rubble when the
army of Boxers (a quasi-religious cult) besieged it in the summer of 1900. It was later re-
built.
Empress Dowager Cixi
The Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), a daughter of a Bordered Blue Bannermen, was
a young concubine when the Old Summer Palace was burned down by foreign troops in
1860. Cixi allowed the palace to fall into decay, associating it with a humiliation, and in-
stead built herself the new Summer Palace (Yíhé Yuán). She was left with a profound
hatred and distrust of the Western barbarians and their ways.
Over the four decades in which Cixi ruled China 'from behind the curtain' through a
series of proxy emperors, she resisted pressure to change and reform. After a naval defeat
at the hands of the Japanese in 1895, young Chinese officials put forward a modernisation
program. She had some of them executed outside Běijīng's walls, and imprisoned their pat-
ron and her nephew, Emperor Guangxu (1871-1908). She encouraged the Boxers to attack
Westerners, especially foreign missionaries in northern China, and when Boxers besieged
