Qualla: Eight-Nation Alliance

Eight-Nation Alliance: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. They called it the International Gun. Its barrel was British, its carriage Italian, its shells Russian, and its crew American. Cobbled together from scraps during the 55-day siege of Beijing's Legation Quarter in the summer of 1900, it embodied the improvised alliance of eight nations -- Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary -- that had no treaty binding them together and no shared agenda beyond survival. The Eight-Nation Alliance assembled some 45,000 troops to suppress the Boxer Rebellion, relieve the besieged foreigners in Beijing, and punish the Qing dynasty. What began as a rescue mission became a punitive colonial expedition that pillaged one of the world's great capitals for over a year.

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Image: Public domain

Eight-Nation Alliance: Siege and Survival

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Torajirō Kasai, Public domain. The crisis began when the Boxers, a populist peasant movement determined to expel foreign influence from China, attacked missionaries, foreign nationals, and Chinese Christians across the north in 1899 and 1900. The Qing government, under the Manchu general Ronglu, threw its supp...

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Image: Torajirō Kasai | Public domain

Eight-Nation Alliance: The March to Beijing

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit National Museum of the U.S. Navy, Public domain. On August 14, 1900, the allied forces marched from Tianjin to relieve the siege. Japan provided the largest contingent, with over 20,000 troops, followed by Russia with 12,400. The Japanese troops fought aggressively -- at Tianjin, they suffered more than half the allied casualti...

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Image: National Museum of the U.S. Navy | Public domain

Eight-Nation Alliance: The Sack of a Capital

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. What followed the liberation was devastating. Allied troops looted the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, government buildings, and temples with systematic thoroughness. More than 3,000 gold-plated bronze Buddhas were taken from Songzhu Temple alone. Soldiers scraped gold plating...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Eight-Nation Alliance: The Protocol and Its Shadow

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Straitgate, Public domain. Empress Dowager Cixi and the imperial court fled to Xi'an, sending Li Hongzhang to negotiate. The fighting ended in 1901 with the Boxer Protocol, which imposed crushing indemnities, granted foreign powers the right to station troops on Chinese soil, and deepened the humiliation t...

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Image: Straitgate | Public domain