2008年9月6日 星期六

Wiki boxer rebellion

Empress Dowager most remembered sayings

* (1)天下,乃我爱新覺羅之天下

Translation: 爱新覺羅 Aisin Gioro, was the clan name of the Manchu emperors of the Qing dynasty . The word aisin means gold in the Manchu language, and "gioro" means clan in the Manchu language.

天下,Literary it means everything under the heaven.Used in this context,it means CHINA as a nation.Empress Dowager was saying CHINA ,is the property of the Aisin Gioro clan.It is our family's private property,and has got nothing to do with anyone else.

* (2)量中华之物力,结与国之欢心

After the Manchu Dynasty's humiliating defeat by the Eight Nations Alliance,the western powers demanded huge compensations.To this,Empress replied:量中华之物力, 中华,the original,and the oldest name of CHINA.The whole phrase translate:We have to put together,and offer whatever CHINA can manage to supply.结与国之欢心 translate:Have to try to satisfy foreign nation's desires,and make them happy. Put the two phrase together,we can then work out,that Empress Dowager always put the interests of Aisin Gioro clan at first priority,anything else is secondly.

* (3)宁与友邦,不与家奴 ,was a statement made by Empress Dowager during the siege of Peking by the Eight Nation Alliance. 家奴,private slaves,because Manchu's ancestors was a nomadic tribe 女真 nuchen,or jurchen,there was only two social classes:master,slave.You are either master,or slave.So Manchu rulers called their subjects "slaves" 奴,奴才,which in itself is a Manchu word.In making this statement,Dowager was saying she would give away anythings the foreign nations demanded,and will not give it to her own slaves(her countryman)

[edit] Failure of the Hundred Days' Reform

The Hundred Day's Reform ( 戊戌變法); 11 June 1898 - 21 September 1898) was started. The leaders of the reform were Guangxu Emperor, Kang Youwei ( 康有為) and Liang Qichao ( 梁啟超). Eventually, it ended in a coup d'état led by Empress Dowager Cixi.
Even though Emperor Guangxu was a physically and mentally weak person,he still hoped that the Hundred Days' Reform will turn China into a strong and modern nation.However,with the conservative Empress flexing her powerful political muscle behind,the reform failed in about 100 days.

The Dragon Empress Dowager ,then staged a coup d'etat by putting then young Emperor Guangxu under house arrest in the middle of a lake,and had trusted eunuchs to keep watch,even though the Emperor was her own nephew.However,the western powers preferred Emperor Guangxu to stay at the throne,and kept on pressuring Dowager to cease control of the Emperor.
Dowager refused,and started plotting with some officials to punish the foreign powers by recruiting the Boxer to kill foreign missionaries and Chinese converts,end up causing Peking,an ancient imperial capital,to be sacked and looted by an international army.

[edit] Righteous Harmony Society 義和團

* At the beginning of the 20th century,China,for the past 260 plus years,had been under the rule of a barbaric tribe,Manchu,which had a population of fewer then 500 thousands at the beginning.The conquering of China(the majority of the population was Han 漢族) was through brute force and massacres,resulting in the annihilation of tens of millions of people.
* The barbaric law "To keep your hair,you lose your head" 留髮不留頭,which killed millions of Han,was designed to cow Han people into submission,as Manchu chieftains forced Han male to shave off the hair on their forehead,and grow a pigtail at the back. When Dr.Sun Yat Sen called for a revolution to overthrow the inhuman and primitive Manchu tribal chieftains,he started with cutting off his own pigtail,as a signal of the beginning of the revolution.
* Manchu Emperors,even though they had copied Ming Dynasty's Imperial system to govern the country,in essence they still treated all their subjects as slaves,and Master own everything,including the life of the slaves.When western diplomats came to Manchu palace to see the emperors,all diplomats had to kneel in front of the emperors too,same like the rest of the emperor's subjects.Moreover,Manchu emperors treated all foreigners "Barbarians",even though they themselves were not far from it.

* When hungry peasants from famine area started to form groups with name "Righteous Harmony Society",their initial objectives were to fight the Manchu chieftains.One of the original slogans was "反清復明" "To end the Manchu's rule,To bring back Ming Dynasty"(Which was also the slogan of the present day Chinese underground Triad)
* However,Empress Dowager saw the value in them.She sent her officials to turn this "Righteous Harmony Society" into a mod that began killing foreign missionaries and native christians.She wanted to punish those western powers who supported emperor Guangxu's Hundred Days' Reform.She could not use the Imperial army,she had to find an alternative.Hence the beginning of the Boxer rebellion,with a new agenda,and slogan "扶清滅洋".Literally,it means "To support Qing's rule,To exterminate all the things foreign"

* During the siege of the Peking legation which went on for two months,Empress Dowager did not step in to offer protection for foreign diplomats and their families.And the provision of protection to foreign diplomats is a universal law being adopted by human civilization for thousands of years.In the years of 1900,Manchu tribal chieftains chose to remain ignorant and barbaric by murdering foreign diplomats and missionaries,then they should not be surprised to see foreign soldiers marching into their palace.

[edit] BMS Missionaries Beheaded

By 1900 Baptist Missionary Society, along with many other missioanry organisations, had sent hundreds of missionaries to China's Shanxi province, including Taiyuan, the main city.In August 1900, an article in the mission's magazine Missionary Herald published a letter from Shanxi hinting that there was "[a] terrible cloud that hangs fierce and ominous over China". The news gradually emerged that there had been a massacre at Taiyuan.
Missionary Herald, through letters and telegrams, were able to tell readers and relatives in Britain,what did their loved ones went through during 1900.The suffering and humiliation,and death,endured by the missionaries and their families,was considered "the darkest and most tragic episodes of BMS world mission's history.

One of the telegram on 10/1900 Missionary Herald :"Mission houses in Taiyuan burned…. Missionaries fled there… promised safety, immediately massacred, altogether thirty-three Protestants. "
12/1900 Missionary Herald:"tells of their discovery in a cave, where for five days they had been without food, and how, after promise of escort to the coast, they were cast into prison and afterwards murdered inside the city gate… the entire mission staff in the Province of Shanxi has perished. "
Missionary Herald reported again:The Shanxi governor Yuxian,with the full support of the Empress Dowager, ordered:"Foreign religions are reckless and oppressive, disrespectful to the gods and oppressive to the people. The righteous people(read Boxer) will burn and kill. "
It was very clear that Empress Dowager,the Manchu Dynasty supreme ruler,was giving the orders to both its governor Yuxian,and the Boxer,"it is OK to kill foreign missionaries and christian converts,the Imperial Court will back you up"
Missionary Herald further reported that at Taiyuan,the then governor sent in soldiers to round up missionaries,stripped them to the waist,and beheaded them in front of the governor's residence.It was the same at Xinzhou,another city,where 8 missionaries were put into a dungeon for two weeks before they were beheaded at the gate of the city.

[edit] Orthodox Missionaries burnt to death

Russian orthodox church,had set up mission in China at the end of the seventeenth century.A former Buddhist temple near Beijing was converted into a church dedicated to Saint Nicholas, and church vestments and holy objects were sent from the Imperial Court in Russia.
When Manchu Emperor Kangxi had discovered that local Roman Catholic missionaries followed orders from the Pope,Emperor Kangxi and his successors began persecutions against Christians.Because of persecution,the then Russian Emperor Peter The Great asked the orthodox church to stay low key,not to upset the Ch'ing dynasty or other missionary.
The orthodox church's record has shown:Quote:By June 1900, placards calling for the death of foreigners and Christians covered the walls around Beijing. Armed bands combed the streets of the city, setting fire to homes and "with imperial blessing" killing Chinese Christians and foreigners.Unquoted.
On 10/6/1900,about 70 followers of Saint Mitrophan,and his 8 years old son,were all stabbed and burnt to death.

[edit] Jesuit priests beheaded.

The Jesuit priests,Father Isore and Father Andlauer,were both killed at a chapel,quote:Then they beheaded them and displayed the heads of the Jesuits on the village gates as a brutal warning of what awaited Christians who did not return to their ancestral religion. Unquoted.

[edit] English Professor Henry Hart

Prpfessor's great-grandfather was a larger then life figure.Among many things,he was
(1) a spy and advisor for Chiang Kai-shek,the leader of China's Kuomintang,
(2) advisor on Mongolian affairs for the Chinese president and self-declared emperor Yuan Shikai,
(3) sold 23,000 horses for the Chinese army.
Professor Henry Hart's grandmother,enchanted him with tales about how her father had saved her and numerous missionary families during China's Boxer Rebellion.
During those times,Boxers blamed “foreign devils” like his great-grandparents for causing northern China's drought and famine, exacerbating economic hardships by building railroads and telegraph lines (because such modern conveniences eliminated jobs), undermining the native textile industry with European imports, infecting and killing Chinese children with Christian prayers and for various other real and imagined infamies.
The great-grandfather had left him a journal,into it he wrote a first-person's account,on how, he and some hired Mongols fought off a group of barbaric attacking Boxers with wooden sticks,without firing a single shot from his old Winchester rifle.
Later on he led a group of fleeing missionaries for two months through the Gobi Desert and the rest of Mongolia to Siberia.
The valuable information kept in the journal included the fact that the Boxer uprising ultimately claimed the lives of more than 32,000 Chinese Christians and several hundred foreign missionaries (historian Nat Brandt called it “the greatest single tragedy in the history of Christian evangelicalism”).

[edit] 30,000 Chinese Roman Catholics martyred

Reports on Oversea Missionary Fellowship on Chinese Martyrs
Manchu Dynasty signing of the 1860 Peking Convention,enabled the Roman Catholic Church to build schools,colleges and hospitals,resulting in large number of catholic missionaries to work in China.

The following list complied by the Oversea Missionary Fellowship says it all:
Catholic Chinese Martyrs
30,000 Chinese Martyrs Roman Catholics
2000 Chinese Martyrs Protestants
35 Protestant Martyrs missionaries, 53 children
47 Roman Catholic priests & nuns
CIM losses - 58 missionaries, 21 children

First-hand eye-witness's account.

(1) William S Fleming, an Australian, had become the first CIM martyr. Fleming died trying to protect his friend and assistant Pan Shoushan, a Black Miao convert. Pan Shoushan was also martyred.
(2) At the end of 1899, a missionary from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was murdered.
(3) On 24 June 1900, Empress Dowager issued a decree ordering the destruction of all ‘foreign devils’. The hated barbarians were to be driven out of China.Westerners and Chinese Christians were hunted down, and houses, schools and churches burnt to the ground.
(4) Chang Yuwen, a 17-year-old Chinese Christian, was cut into pieces and his body nailed to a wall in Tangshan, Hebei Province. Others were shot, stabbed, stoned, run over by carts or strangled.
(5)Chen Xikong, another Christian in Hebei Province, had his heart cut out and placed on a stone. Some missionaries died, still kneeling in prayer.
(6)CIM worker Gilbert Ritchie wrote, ‘Alas, only a very few of my beloved fellow missionaries in the province of Shanxi escaped the blood-stained hands of the Boxers.’ One of those martyred was Ritchie’s Chinese helper, a converted Buddhist priest.
(7) The Boxers entered Tianjin waving the heads of murdered missionaries, and were joined by imperial troops.
(8)One missionary, dying on the way to Hanzhou, whispered to her husband, ‘I wish I could have lived, I wish I could have gone back there to tell the people more about Jesus.’
(9)Those who escaped death, but had lost everything else, had only one thought - to return to their beloved Chinese as soon as possible.
(10)The Empress Dowager returned, and died in 1908, having given instructions for Emperor Guangxu to be poisoned. She outlived him by one day, not realising that the Manchu dynasty itself had only three years to live.


* Diana Prestonand "The Boxer Rebellion"

On the Federation of American Scientist web site, Voice of America's reporter Stephanie Mann,had an in depth interview with Diana Preston,a British journalist and writer,who had just published her new book "The Boxer Rebellion"

Diana Preston,through her book,provides a detail examination of a mini war that was fought 100 years ago,and she tries to give it a new perspective.In her own word:"this was the first example of international policing and was the precursor to what has become a common activity of NATO and the United Nations.
Even though 100 years had passed,majority of Chinese still considered it a national shame for China,because an international army had marched into Peking and looted the Royal Palace,burnt the Royal Garden,and then demand huge amount of "war compensation",just because they were the victors.


* Pope Canonizes 120 Killed in China and One American

New York Times's Alessandra Stanley reported on 2/10/2000.Stanley said:"China had no saints before today. By canonizing as martyrs 87 Chinese believers and 33 European missionaries killed between 1648 and 1930, John Paul sought to send a strong signal to China's beleaguered underground Catholics, who are loyal to the pope."
Stanley also said:"Most of the 120 martyrs died in the anti-Western, anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion in the 19th century, which China still reveres as an heroic resistance to imperialists."

Below is the list of the list of martyres canonized by the Vatican on 1/10/2000.
(a)Martyrs of Shanxi, killed on 9 July 1900, who were Franciscan Friars Minor:


Blessed Gregory Grassi, Bishop,
Blessed Francis Fogolla, Bishop,
Blessed Elias Facchini, Priest,
Blessed Theodoric Balat, Priest,
Blessed Andrew Bauer, Religious Brother;

(b) Martyrs of Southern Hunan, who were also Franciscan Friars Minor:

Blessed Anthony Fantosati, Bishop (martyred on 7 July 1900),
Blessed Joseph Mary Gambaro, Priest (martyred on 7 July 1900),
Blessed Cesidio Giacomantonio, Priest (martyred on 4 July 1900).

Of the martyrs belonging to the Franciscan family, there were also eleven Secular Franciscans, all Chinese:

Blessed John Zhang Huan, seminarian,
Blessed Patrick Dong Bodi, seminarian,
Blessed John Wang Rui, seminarian,
Blessed Philip Zhang Zhihe, seminarian,
Blessed John Zhang Jingguang, seminarian,
Blessed Thomas Shen Jihe, layman and a manservant,
Blessed Simon Qin Cunfu, lay catechist,
Blessed Peter Wu Anbang, layman,
Blessed Francis Zhang Rong, layman and a farmer,
Blessed Matthew Feng De, layman and neophyte,
Blessed Peter Zhang Banniu, layman and labourer.

To these are joined a number of Chinese lay faithful:

Blessed James Yan Guodong, farmer,
Blessed James Zhao Quanxin, manservant,
Blessed Peter Wang Erman, cook.

Among these were four French Jesuit missionaries and at least 52 Chinese lay Christians: men, women and children – the oldest of them being 79 years old, while the youngest were aged only nine years.
All suffered martyrdom in the month of July 1900. Many of them were killed in the church in the village of Tchou-Kia-ho, in which they were taking refuge and where they were in prayer together with the first two of the missionaries listed below:

Blessed Leo Mangin, S.J., Priest,
Blessed Paul Denn, S.J., Priest,
Blessed Rémy Isoré, S.J., Priest,
Blessed Modeste Andlauer, S.J., Priest.

Blessed Mary Zhu born Wu, aged about 50 years,
Blessed Peter Zhu Rixin, aged 19,
Blessed John Baptist Zhu Wurui, aged 17,
Blessed Mary Fu Guilin, aged 37,
Blessed Barbara Cui born Lian, aged 51,
Blessed Joseph Ma Taishun, aged 60,
Blessed Lucy Wang Cheng, aged 18,
Blessed Mary Fan Kun, aged 16,
Blessed Mary Chi Yu, aged 15,
Blessed Mary Zheng Xu, aged 11 years,
Blessed Mary Du born Zhao, aged 51,
Blessed Magdalene Du Fengju, aged 19,
Blessed Mary du born Tian, aged 42,
Blessed Paul Wu Anjyu, aged 62,
Blessed John Baptist Wu Mantang, aged 17,
Blessed Paul Wu Wanshu, aged 16,
Blessed Raymond Li Quanzhen, aged 59,
Blessed Peter Li Quanhui, aged 63,
Blessed Peter Zhao Mingzhen, aged 61,
Blessed John Baptist Zhao Mingxi, aged 56,
Blessed Teresa Chen Tinjieh, aged 25,
Blessed Rose Chen Aijieh, aged 22,
Blessed Peter Wang Zuolung, aged 58,
Blessed Mary Guo born Li, aged 65,
Blessed Joan Wu Wenyin, aged 50,
Blessed Zhang Huailu, aged 57,
Blessed Mark Ki-T'ien-Siang, aged 66,
Blessed Ann An born Xin, aged 72,
Blessed Mary An born Guo, aged 64,
Blessed Ann An born Jiao, aged 26,
Blessed Mary An Linghua, aged 29,
Blessed Paul Liu Jinde, aged 79,
Blessed Joseph Wang Kuiju, aged 37,
Blessed John Wang Kuixin, aged 25,
Blessed Teresa Zhang born He, aged 36,
Blessed Lang born Yang, aged 29,
Blessed Paul Lang Fu, aged 9,
Blessed Elizabeth Qin born Bian, aged 54,
Blessed Simon Qin Cunfu, aged 14,
Blessed Peter Liu Zeyu, aged 57,
Blessed Ann Wang, aged 14,
Blessed Joseph Wang Yumei, aged 68,
Blessed Lucy Wang born Wang, aged 31,
Blessed Andrew Wang Tianqing, aged 9,
Blessed Mary Wang born Li, aged 49,
Blessed Chi Zhuze, aged 18,
Blessed Mary Zhao born Guo, aged 60,
Blessed Rose Zhao, aged 22,
Blessed Mary Zhao, aged 17,
Blessed Joseph Yuan Gengyin, aged 47,
Blessed Paul Ge Tingzhu, aged 61,