While European powers were carving China into trading zones at the turn of the twentieth century, the United States devised an alternative to the European plan called the “Open Door” policy, which would ensure the U.S. an entry into the vast Chinese market. China’s dowager empress, Tsu Hsi, saw the obvious danger to her Ch’ing Dynasty and fostered an informal reaction in an imperial message to all Chinese provinces: “The various Powers cast upon us with tiger-like voracity, hustling each other to be first to seize our innermost territories … If our millions of people … would prove their loyalty and love of country, what is there to fear from any invader?”
In drought-stricken Shandong province, a secret society called the Fists of Righteous Harmony recruited thousands of new members. Called by foreigners the “Boxers” because they practiced martial arts, this militant society taught that thousands of “spirit soldiers” would rise from the dead to join their cause.
That cause, promoted by Empress Tsu Hsi as a way to unite her empire, was to rid China of all “foreign devils.” Diplomats fled to a compound in Beijing near the Forbidden City. Missionaries in the outer provinces had few choices. Many wives saw their husbands beheaded, and children their mothers. The Boxers took the lives of adults and children alike — Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant.
The empress, who escaped the city disguised as a peasant, returned a year later but never regained the power of the Ch’ing dynasty.
Out of the 1,000 Orthodox believers in Beijing, three hundred were killed. On the evening of June 11, 1900, leaflets were posted in the streets calling for the massacre of Christians and anyone who dared to shelter them. That night, gangs of Boxers with torches attacked Christian houses, seized believers and demanded that they disavow Christ. Those who remained faithful were brutally killed.
One Orthodox schoolteacher, Ia Wang, died twice. First, the Boxers slashed her with swords and covered her in a shallow grave. Her groans, however, alerted nearby Boxers, and she was exhumed and tortured again.
Although Ia Wang experienced excruciating pain, eyewitnesses reported she died confessing Christ.
Find more accounts of courageous faith in the face of death in this collection of stories about Christian martyrs from church history to today.