Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our

terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello. In the hot summer of 1900, Peaking, the capital of China, was under a heavy siege.

One resident described the devastation. The people in Peaking, he wrote, were suffering.

How the boxes were firing on them from all sides and trying to burn them out.

How each man was limited to a small cup of grain a day while at the same time they were compelled

to labour under a burning sun. Peaking's besieges were no foreign army. They were Chinese,

a group of rebels called the Boxes. And this was the last act of the Boxer Rebellion.

The Boxes came out of the north. They claimed their fists were stronger than fire,

and they were invincible to bullets. But whatever their claims, they were also desperate and starving,

and they blamed foreigners for their plight. The Boxes lost their battles, but the Boxer Rebellion

changed China, and more than 100 years later, the spirit of the Boxer Rebellion lives on.

With me to discuss the Boxer Rebellion are Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics

of modern China at the University of Oxford. Francis Wood, curator of Chinese collections

at the British Library, and Gary Teedman, lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Christianity

in China at King's College London. Francis Wood, in 1898, there was a great drought in China and

terrible hardship, particularly in northern provinces. Can you take us into that time and

just tell us how that was the seedbed for the rise of the Boxes?

It was not just a drought, and the drought, it has to be said, followed a terrible flood,

in which pretty well the whole of the province of Shandong had been devastated. A massive flood

followed, obviously, the consequence was the loss of the harvest, then followed by drought,

so that you have a situation in northern China, which is absolutely deadly for the local

...