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Years of Adventure 1874-1920
In the winter and spring of 1900 we began to hear of the new secret society directed against foreigners. 
It was named the I Ho Tuan--the mailed fist. The foreigners called it "The Boxers." Their avowed purpose was to expel all foreigners from China, to root out every foreign thing--houses, railways, telegraphs, mines--and they included all Christian Chinese and all Chinese who had been associated with foreign things. They believed they had supernatural protection from foreign bullets and other great powers.
This, however, is not the place to recite the history of China in these times. It would take volumes and I am here concerned only with the personal contacts of two young Americans with the forces in motion.
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Rumors of Boxer attacks upon missionaries and others rumbled all about us. Foreign-drilled Chinese troops were brought up to protect the foreign settlement. On Sunday morning, June 10th, however, we were rudely awakened by shells bursting over the settlement from modern artillery--the foreign-drilled army. At first we thought it was poor firing from gunners trying to reach groups of Boxers on the other side of the settlement. They reported that the troops had killed several of their European comrades. The alarm bell on the town hall was rung and we expected the worst. Tientsin had no consequential defense works, but there were about 1,100 sailors and marines of various nationalities in the settlement who, during the few days previous, had been sent up from war-vessels in the Port at Taku, sixty miles away. They were on their way to Peking to protect the foreign legations. They had no artillery except two small cannon and only a dozen machine guns. It was a small force to oppose some 25,000 foreign-equipped Chinese troops. Had those troops attacked that day they could easily have overwhelmed the settlement. We learned later that, though urged by the Boxers, they had no stomach for attack and that there were great disputes as to a command because of the absence of the foreign officers.
Quickly the settlement pulled itself together. A Russian, Colonel Wogack, outranked the other foreign officers. All the troops, American, Japanese, German, Russian, French, and Italian, accepted Wogack's command, except the British under command of a navy bully named Captain Bailey, who was his own law. Learning of my engineering staff, Wogack sent word to us to organize the Christian Chinese who had fled to the settlement for safety to build barricades. The settlement was about a quarter-mile wide and a mile long, protected by the river on one side. In hunting material for barricades, we lit upon the great godowns (warehouses) filled with sacked sugar, peanuts, rice, and other grain. Soon we and other foreigners whom I enlisted had a thousand terrified Christian Chinese carrying and piling up walls of sacked grain and sugar along the exposed sides of the town and at cross streets. By morning we were in a better state. The big attack came the second day, but the marines and sailors repulsed it from behind our bags.
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The acute dangers came from two sources--the first, the possibility of mass attack; the second, the incessant and furious artillery fire. Some 60,000 shells were fired into the settlement from first to last. The first attacks proved to be sporadic, though sometimes there were concentrated attacks directed mostly against the spot where the settlement joined up with the Chinese city of Tientsin...We soon found the best protection against rifle bullets and shells was to keep in the lee of walls when moving about or trying to snatch a moment of sleep.
I soon had an additional anxiety. The Boxer movement, as I have said, was directed against Chinese who had relations with foreigners as much as against foreigners themselves. The day of the first attack Chang Yen-mao and Tong Shao-yi came into the settlement with their families. They found quarters in a compound across the street from our house, belonging to the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company. Here they were quickly joined by 500 or 600 other minor Chinese officials and foreign educated Chinese in similar plight.
Their first need was food and water. With the help of some of the Chinese men, I transported each morning a supply of water and rice and such other food as we could get from the godowns to their compound. In the main, however, my staff and I were preoccupied with strengthening the barricades and boiling water in the boilers of the municipal water plant for distribution to the soldiers and civilians. The waterworks was outside of the barricades and with an outpost we operated it at night and in the morning brought the boiled water back in the municipal street-sprinkling carts...
An increasing number of foreigners--soldiers and civilians--were wounded. We had only one Army doctor and our settlement physician. Similarly, there was only one professional nurse.
Colonel Wogack turned the settlement club into a hospital and soon all the floors were covered with wounded. Mrs. Hoover volunteered at once and I saw little of her during the first period of the siege, except when she came home occasionally to eat or catch a little sleep. She became an expert in riding her bicycle close to the walls of buildings to avoid stray bullets and shells although one day she had a tire punctured by a bullet...The stray bullets fired from a long distance outside came near developing a major tragedy. A number of foreign civilians already in near hysteria mood concluded they were being fired from within the settlement. They quickly picked upon the 600 Chinese of whom I had charge in the Compound across the street. The first I knew of it was when a messenger came in while we were at supper after a totally exhausting day, to say that Chang Yen-mao, Tong Shao-yi and others had been arrested and were being given a drumhead trial by Captain Bailey. I rushed to the place, to find a so-called trial going on under torch-lights with Bailey a pompous judge and various hysterical wharf-rats testifying to things that could never have taken place. I attempted to intervene and explain who these Chinese were but Bailey ordered me to get out. I made for the Russian headquarters a few blocks away on my bicycle and Colonel Wogack, quickly appreciating the situation, returned with me, accompanied by a Russian platoon. He stopped the trial instantly and the Chinese were turned over to me for return to their compound.
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The siege lasted about a month. It was not altogether a fight between soldiers. It was a group of civilian men, women and children fighting for very life against a horde of fanatics with modern arms...Truly, we were fighting under the courageous protection of a few hundred soldiers of a half dozen nationalities without whom we would have been lost. But we were fighting without artillery (except the two small cannon) against tens of thousands with modern arms with only two things in our favor--inside lines and more intelligence. In the midst of all this we did have one intermediate day of exaltation. A Chinese messenger got through in the night of about the fifteenth day with word that relief armies were on their way from Taku and would be in the next day. We were warned not to fire on them by mistake. During the morning the Chinese stopped firing on us. Soon someone said he heard cannonading in the distance. How we strained our ears! Then it came plainer and plainer. We climbed on the roof of the highest warehouse to get a glimpse. We saw them coming over the plain.
They were Welch Fusiliers and American Marines. I do not remember a more satisfying musical performance than the bugles of the American Marines entering the settlement playing "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight."
They proved to be only a few hundred soldiers added to our force--but they had machine guns and some artillery and we felt better for a while. Then the Chinese closed the ring again and with even more violent and more dangerous assaults. Late in July sufficient forces came in to drive the Chinese back far enough for calm if not peace. Most of the wounded, the women and children were evacuated under guard down the river as well as many civilian men. Mrs. Hoover and six or seven other women refused to desert their posts as there were some wounded who could not be moved.
When sufficient forces arrived it was determined to attack the Chinese Army itself. As I was familiar with topographic details from horseback riding about the settlement with Mrs. Hoover, I was requested by Colonel Waller, in command of the American Marines, to accompany them as a sort of guide in their part of the attack on the Chinese city. We came under sharp fire from the Chinese located on its old walls. We were out in the open plains with little cover except Chinese graves. I was completely scared, especially when some of the Marines next to me were hit. I was unarmed and I could scarcely make my feet move forward...
The foreigners in Peking had suffered a longer siege and were without the advantage of food warehouses, but there were no modern troops against them and no modern artillery. Their losses were small. At this time the South African War was raging and the dramatic and much news-commented sieges of Kimberly, Mafeking and Lady-Smith had just been relieved. The total losses of defenders in all three of these put together did not equal our losses at Tientsin...But their publicity arrangements were better.
Memoirs of Herbert Hoover | Lou's Story | Letter to Evelyn
Christmas 1899 | Using Primary Sources with Students
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Last updated: August 15, 2007