PROLOGUE

Summary

IT is for war correspondents to describe Sir Edward Seymour's “Forlorn Hope” in answer to despairing telegrams, the siege and relief of Tientsin and Peking, together with the subsequent punitive expeditions so-called. Why and how the Boxer Movement arose in China is still a problem to many minds. As some help to its solution I here attempt to picture in outline the condition of things before the uprising of 1900, that Annus Funestus, and that especially in relation to us foreigners in China, just as in Intimate China I tried to portray the Chinese people as far as possible apart from foreigners. Beginning with the decay of Peking, the stagnation of Taku, I here seek to reproduce in black and white the picturesqueness and the medieval usages, the drowsy dulness, then unexplained attacks on the part of the Chinese, the equally unexplained absence of all measures on the part of the British Government to prevent their recurrence: then again the friendliness of the people, the amiability of the officials, indications of progress on all sides, till on a sudden came the thunder-clap of 1900, with here and there in relief against the blackness of the following Typhoon the sympathetic and self-sacrificing kindliness of here an official, there a peasant, here a trembling1, ignorant woman, there an educated man.

May those who read these pages gain at least some insight into the many redeeming qualities of that last survival from the Past of Nineveh and Babylon, of Alexandria and Pompeii—the Chinese nation of to-day.