Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 302 - The Boxer Rebellion Part 2: Eunuch Fumes

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

Part 2/5 Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. What if there was a war raging for a million years, but it was kept a secret? It's a question that Sarkis never considered. He was born as an upper-middle class man living in Prime City during the so-called millennia of peace. As far as he knew, or as far as anybody knew, humanity has no army, no weapons, and no wars. The people of Earth had been expanding into the stars as long as anyone remembered,

free of conflict, while the Techno King and his royal cabal enriched themselves in the backs of their labor. It was as it always had been. Then, Sarkis died. Unbeknownst to him, an app he used every single day of his life hijacks his consciousness and uploads it into a synthetic engine of war known as a sleeve. Along with countless others, he's been conscripted into the Undying Legion, charged with fighting a secret, unending war in the name of humanity. Their minds stolen, uploaded into war machines. They fight a secret war to preserve humanity. My new book, The Invisible War, is now available wherever it is that you consume books. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can get it for free with your subscription that you already have, or order a paperback from whatever local bookstore you use. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash linesledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early,

access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audio book read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Lions, led by Donkeys Podcast. I'm Joe, and with me, stalking Archduke Franz Ferdinand in his fursuit, pistol in hand, is Tom. There's not many podcasts where the text exchange four minutes before recording says, I'll be with you in a sec, currently wet and naked.

It's not nice to talk to my people about our personal lives, Tom. I am recording from home today, so if there's a slight different sonic quality, it's because I'm using my own stupidly expensive microphone in my own sitting room surrounded by my laundry. I keep telling you and Nate, the only people that will notice these things are you guys when you produce it. makes little to no difference to me it's like i could probably listen to a random episode and tell and be able to tell you exactly where you were when you recorded it i have no doubt of that um though to be fair the last year and a half two years has made that game a little bit more difficult than usual where in the world is joe kasabian i hate this game um personally i'm not a fan um i'm currently so i'm in an airbnb in tbilisi uh i will i assume by the time this episode comes out i will be home but i don't want to say that for sure yet um but i'm in an airbnb in tbilisi and you know how all airbnbs are right like the furniture in them are is never

really that good no it's always dog shit yeah and this like i understand like nowhere i rent is going to have like a workspace i've made peace with that though i have been you know making kitchen tables work and stuff for a very long time um like when i when i was living in armenia my recording space was a converted like dining area yeah because i live alone at the time you know i didn't use the kitchen that's like i cooked but then i would just eat on the couch watching tv like a fucking slob so like i'm like oh this is perfect i can just record here um so i've been making kitchen tables work for a long time beer pong tables before then you know yeah um legendarily so and uh so i get to my airbnb in tablisi and i'm like oh cool there's a kitchen table perfect i

can just use that it is weird in that weird middle ground where it's not high enough, but also not so low. I can't fit underneath it. And all of the chairs, they're like, you would expect to see them like on a porch somewhere. So they're all really, really uncomfortable, but also super loud.

Like if you shift even slightly, it creaks like it's going to fucking collapse. So I cannot use them for, for recording. So I am instead on the couch um which is also not comfortable because i have a laptop on so i have a my work laptop is not a good laptop it's one of those laptops that's a laptop in name only so it's very heavy, and it's very, very hot. It's just good stuff, man, all around. I just hope that the sirens stop soon.

Hey, listen, there has never been any sirens put through on this show, regardless of where you've been recording. That's good, because some places really, really test that out. Because I'm not exactly in city center but you know i still hear a lot i think the funniest incident was you leaning out the window to shout at some kids in a park that was the funniest one yeah like there was did you did you leave that in no no no i cut that out okay okay so i used to live next to a park that had like a playground in it which is totally fine and normal like it was a normal like soviet era apartment block so there's a like a playground

in the middle and it had been since turned because yurvan has since independence turned into like car armageddon because there's public transit's terrible um so you'd have like this competition between kids and cars who could make the most noise because people would pull up in cars and you know when they're like picking someone up or what they just lay on the horn um and it always happened and like kids would play which again is totally fine um i'm not gonna be like the old man yelling out my window at children. But at one point, they literally did come over to the window and start yelling at me. Despite the fact I do not know who these kids are. But they decided that they needed to yell at me.

And I had to tell them, like, be quiet, I'm working. They're like, look at this loser recording a podcast yeah fair enough um speaking of a podcast tom transition king smooth the silk baby now we are on the boxer rebellion part two so when we left you last time a peasant revolution of period blood-hating magical martial arts experts in northern china murdered a british missionary and began the boxer rebellion and god damn count that amongst the

sentences i never thought i was gonna have to read aloud yeah martial arts wizards fucking shit up starting an entire thing where millions of people will die look you had me until the millions of people die um like i feel like anybody you know at a certain part of their life would 100 accidentally join a cult if they promised magical powers hey i've been in one so wait what i would save that for another time that's what hell of a cliffhanger To throw at me

If you want to hear the full story of that Subscribe to the Patreon And you can probably hear me tell it at one of our Live show episodes That's still on my list of things to do Join a magical cult I feel like if I really hit a midlife crisis At like 40, 45 i could pull

it off i got like five to ten years left yeah mine would have been cooler if it had been like a magical cult instead it was like a insane wolf of wall street business called so that's significantly less cool you gotta at least like promise me promise me to be able to levitate or something to get me on board am i gonna be able to throw a hadouken what's the point here like i will say that this golden involved ringing a gong so i could go for some good gong ringing gong ringing's good i mean unless it's nefarious gone ringing that's that's the worst guy well uh tune in to find out, you'd think murdering a missionary would ruffle, you know, a few feathers of the international diplomats in Peking. You know, you'd be wrong. During this period, the foreign diplomats were very, very aware of how anti-foreigner the Empress Dowager Xi Xi was.

she she was and more than one little birdie and more than one back room talked about how she was kind of sort of indirectly but also directly involved with these anti-christian groups spreading across northern china and burning down churches and shit so nobody was really that surprised right it's like how you know muammar gaddafi simply hated the color orange and hence gave loads of semtex to the IRA. That's actually exactly why. Many people don't know this. Politics had nothing to do with it. He had this very specific orange phobia.

Yeah. Which is also why he has an undying hatred towards the Dutch. I was waiting for that. Now, American minister, Edward Conger, I need to point out here, minister back then, I meant like ambassador. But back then they were called, you know, like the American minister for China. It's the ambassador. Edward Conger, who was a Civil War veteran, and was weirdly married to one of the founders of the U.S. temperance movement. That's not surprising at all you know it's

really not um especially because you know he's in an elevated political position she is from you know a well-to-do family with obviously political goals that would eventually be reached um you know for a little bit i mean america was founded on by people who one hated fucking and two hated booze and hated fun so oh and the puritans were you know kind of a cult of their own uh if you believe the british government and you should uh it's the only time ever gonna say that in my life sometimes you gotta hand it to them damn it you, in fact, have to hand it to the British government. No, you don't. I hope it collapses and crumbles beneath my very feet.

Gaddafi's smiling down from the clouds. I'm conducting my own against the British government. I feel like I might have to bleep that. You might have to. I'm not sure how the laws work work there but i'm on your side of the bleep here um now conger was trying to warn his government that you know shit here is getting kind of weird and that's when the news of the missionary's murder reached peking conger didn't much care and didn't want to piss off the Chinese. So he told his government about the murder,

but also told them that, you know, these things happen. It's really nothing to worry about. You know, occasionally you just get murdered by a gang of dudes with swords who are like riding on the back of like flying women. Fuck yeah.

We love a good cavalry, don't we? New cavalry unit dropped. Flying women. is it a cavalry or air force but we need to parse this one out now the head of the British mission was a guy named Sir Claude

McDonald a man thought to be so unfit for the job that people joke that he must have had evidence that the Prime Minister and Jack the Ripper were the same man in order to get it actually and who's to say who's to say he wasn't exactly before you go

on question if the u.s military starts using hovercrafts are those infantry or air force airborne perhaps yeah because they're not that far off the ground so you could kind of think of them as cavalry I mean you could just give them to like the airborne units to make them relevant again instead they're just holding on to the fact they jump out of planes for no good reason

and they'll never be used for that yeah you just have Marty McFly flying around on his hover skateboard with an M16 you hear that maroon berets i'm coming for you fucking losers uh now surely the british would be mad about the murder the man was british after all right nope that's not surprising at all i mean modern day yes i would agree with you but back then this is a great excuse for the British government to be like, ha ha, now we have a reason to fuck up the Chinese more, right?

Nah. In reality, what they should have done is exported, like, hundreds of thousands of XL bullies into China and wait for one of them to inevitably die and then be up in arms about it. And you're going to get a whole bunch of, like, middle-aged dudes with no necks in white work vans saying that we must take peking yeah now mcdonald was doing pretty much the same thing that conger was doing noticing the wave of anti-christian vibes sweeping across shantung

and complaining to the chinese government that they weren't doing anything in fact mcdonald's second in the mission had previously met the dead missionary and dismissed his murder, saying he was, quote, rather a weakling, I suppose. He really just said, like, fuck that guy. Dude's catching strays of the afterlife. He's sub tweeting him from heaven. None of the diplomats had a direct line to the empress if they wanted to complain or ask questions they had to go through at a government office as effectively the administration for dealing with foreigners for lack of a better explanation uh called the sung lee yemen which was headed by prince ching now prince ching's entire job was to drive the diplomats insane

he did he He went so far in doing so. He made sure to hold all of their meetings in a rundown warehouse that was incredibly hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. He never passed on what the diplomats were saying and would do his best to shoot down any proposal they gave

him whatsoever. Because that's exactly the job the Empress Dowager gave him. It was like, your job is to be a bureaucratic asshole. And he excelled at that job. Yeah, he's just doing Charlie work. He's showing up to meeting, huffing spray

paint out of a sock. He's like making crow's muscle milk. I mean, to be fair, since this is the Chinese imperial court he's probably spraying paint onto the back of a eunuch and then inhaling it get me my get me my spray paint eunuch getting absolutely waxed off eunuch fumes no no that that that's my that's my Huffin eunuch. That's not my administration eunuch.

Give me my Huffin eunuch. The office went so far as to say they would punish the people responsible for killing the missionary, but they framed it in such a way that it protected the boxers because they blamed the murder on bandits and said bandits should be brought to justice and said, quote, should be brought to justice and said, quote, on the other hand, when peaceful and law abiding people practice their skill in the martial arts for their preservation of themselves and their families, or when they combined in village communities for the mutual protection of the rural population, this is in accord with public spirited principle of keeping watch and giving mutual help and therefore will not be punished. Meaning the boxers are totally cool to murder missionaries. They're doing mutual aid

and by mutual aid, they're aiding their neighbors by killing all the Christians. Because like, yeah, kind of. That's how they framed it. And like the self-preservation and protection of the community was murdering Christians

without saying as much, right? So like the wording was so confusing that the German minister, Baron von Kelter, had to send two different interpreters to try to figure out just what the hell it said before finally giving up. Pretty much everyone other than McDonald saw it for what it was. And like we point out, McDonald is kind of a dumbass. Seeing as everything was wrapped up and perfectly fine with this new government edict, he sent word back to the British government via mail, which would take over a month to get there, rather than telegram, because he didn't think it was an emergency. Ah, I see. other ministers that, no,

something is seriously off. And they all lodged a formal complaint with the Empress Dowager to suppress the boxers, who then promptly ignored their complaint for a month. Yeah, the briefs legion is coming in now. We must fight. Our tidy whiteys will block out the sun.

Military tidy whiteys? They're tan, in case anybody's wondering i had them issued to me in basic training and i did not wear them those things were like tourniquets for your ball sack oh so you were like raw dogging like your dpms i have one of the like you either had to wear the underwear they gave you or nothing at all and i chose nothing at all because it was more comfortable god damn i think you raw balling fucking afghanistan was like way fucking worse than actually being in the war in the first place hey man it's one less piece of laundry to have to

clean by hand too i need to breathe i need to be able to move yeah it's tactical ball movement tactical free balling though eventually the Chinese government did capture and execute two men they said were responsible for the missionary's murder. But they probably weren't. Most of the stories surrounding this episode tell of a Chinese government official in the north simply snatching up a couple of opium addicts, paying their families a few hundred dollars to shut the fuck up, and then cutting their heads off. Meanwhile, nobody in the international diplomatic group knew what the fuck the boxers were or what they wanted and to be fair the chinese government was kind of in the same boat it's not like they had an emissary or something remember they have no leadership and they also don't really have like any stated like goal other than getting rid of the missionaries and the christians pretty much um and for the

foreigners they had no they had virtually no knowledge of china to begin with and even the germans who should have been the most understanding of the situation in shandong because that was where they were just kind of shrugged and said i don't know these guys just love kung fu and villages and shit fuck if we know They had no intelligence on the situation at all. They had no intelligence in general. I mean, they're the German Empire. I mean, surely

the state of Germany can't get worse. Oh, wait, I'm getting a letter in the mail here. I have bad news. Is it a letter from 1939 or from 2024 all this was happening while the boxers numbers were continuing to grow a fact helped somewhat wildly by a continuing drought one american engineer said of the region quote the country is barren and brown crops that should be ready for

the market were only a few inches above the ground and had shriveled by the heat and the lack of water. God knows that people looked poor enough in this part of the country

at any time, but now they seemed poverty stricken on the verge of starvation. So, the people that would be busy working the fields had no fields to work.

Yeah. So, they joined with the local boxers instead i mean yeah devil finds work for idle hans and not to mention like one of the things that the boxers was telling us like if we kill the christians we will be rewarded with rain and people like that that checks out let's do it makes sense yeah why not nothing else has worked why not kill the german missionary though. Why not kill the German missionary? Though after the murder of the missionary, they didn't immediately blow up into a revolution like you'd think.

Instead, they stalked around Chinese Christian communities, hanging up signs, blaming them for everything that was happening. One said, quote, their aim is to engulf our entire country. There are no talented people in sight, but dirt and garbage. to engulf our entire country. There are no talented people in sight, but dirt and garbage. They waited around and set upon any Chinese Christians they caught wandering out of their communities. It seemed at first their goal was to convince the Chinese Christians

the error of their conversion by beating their ass until they recanted it. I mean, like, this seems like a reasonable tactic you know a good ass weapon like work goes a long way i mean like we've talked about on the show before if you inflict me with pain i'll give up all my convictions once again joe was in the american military like i'm fine like i think me and nick made this joke years ago you just to threaten me with torture and I'll tell you everything. Just like lay the tools out in the table. Like,

fuck, I know how this is going to go. I'm going to break anyway. I might as well tell you now. They just show you a picture of a black site. That's enough for me. Yeah. Like I,

at least I'm honest with myself. People are like, Oh, I can withstand torture. The fuck you would. The only difference between me and you is I'm going to have all my fingernails at the end of it. Yeah, true, true. Now, the boxers would also burn down churches, but they always waited to nighttime when they knew they would be empty.

They weren't trying to murder Chinese Christians yet. Missionaries, all the way, because they're foreign. because they were foreign. But the Chinese Christians themselves, it was more of a scare, like a terror tactic mixed with getting jumped in the alley. Outside of the murder they committed, and remember,

that was a group of like 30 or so dudes and something that could barely be considered a coalition of people numbering in conservatively the tens of thousands at this point. It didn't seem like as a whole yet they were threatening any kind of war or any kind of open rebellion i mean they were still just letting people go after beating their asses and this story arc could possibly be seen as the ramping up self

radicalization to go further bit by bit yeah like when you have a group that big it's like with no actual like centralized leadership it's like obviously like one guy talking to another's like wouldn't it be great if we did this and then it's just like a game of telephone where it's like oh suddenly we're gonna overthrow the entire state yeah pretty much and you know it only takes one like you know vanguard of zealots to really shift a movement even conger had to admit as much he said they were dicks they're aggressive towards christ much. He said they were dicks, they were aggressive towards Christians and abusive,

but they were committing no actual attacks. However, when a large group of people decided another group of people need to be purged from a place in order to save it, not killing people will only last for so long. Remember, they're trying to convince the Chinese to recant their Christian conversions, but they weren't exactly being successful, and I'm sure we can all imagine why.

So with everyone still stubbornly sticking to their god of choice, the boxers began some good old-fashioned horrific murder. Oh, here we go. I was waiting for this. Made it one and one quarter episodes. New podcast record. Chinese Christians were snatched off the streets, out of their homes, and anywhere else they happened to be found. They were tied to trees, had their arms and legs chopped off with swords, and then before they died, they were disemboweled and their guts were thrown everywhere. Jesus fucking Christ. Yep.

Things escalated rather quickly. Oh, and just knowing that this is part two of five episodes, I am slowly getting more depressed. If that was even possible. Oh, you just, you wait. This sparked the first real stage of the coming rebellion. Not the war that the world probably knows now but rather a regional civil war between boxers and chinese christians who also quickly began to arm themselves as well

so soon gangs of boxers and christians were ambushing one another in towns and on roads leaving their enemies in literal pieces on the side of the road or sometimes literally strewn amongst the trees like tinsel also like it's just a quick question like I assume the prominent denomination of most of the converts is probably to Protestantism or like some form of Protestantism

it's a lot of Catholics actually there's Catholics and there's Protestants but like the in Shandong the Germans had a Catholic mission that was doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but different denominations were kind of spread throughout the North,

and it didn't seem like the Boxers hated one more than the other, and the missionaries all kind of worked together. Yeah, they aimed about that Christ life, and that wasn't me being sectarian. It's more so that missionary work functions very differently depending on what denomination

even within like uh proselytism like the different kind of uh denominations act very differently abroad you know it's a shame that the mormons couldn't get there in time to take part oh my god just a load of 19 year olds in a white shirt and tie showing up to your door is a you know the boxers go running by with like their red sashes and swords on and like chanting and doing their breathing exercises and then two 16 year old boys in white shirts and ties like hi

can I help you with anything no the real denomination you need to descend was the Jehovah's Witnesses because they're very famously have a big aversion to blood well then the boxers of them will get a lot great yeah exactly you need to send in a paramilitary group of jehovah's witnesses to fight on the side of the boxers the scientologists cannot be reached for comment would you count scientology is like a christ denomination? No, they're just a cult.

They're like a almost like a secular cult. I mean, they do have religious belief, but I mean, the leadership are just, it's a real estate scam. Yeah. Forming a naval blockade

of Hong Kong purely made out of Scientology ships. That would have worked in the 70s. That's how they get Taiwan and Hong Kong back to China, is they enlist the Scientologists. Scientology would do it for a certain amount of money. Now they only have one boat, so they're past their prime, and it's like an asbestos-ridden nightmare. Now, this conflict was hardly equal. The Christians knew exactly the power that their elevated social status would bring them,

and they would often kill a group of boxers and then run for protection inside of churches and missions, where they knew a direct attack on them meant a direct attack on international powers that the church represented. This radicalized the boxers even further. If the church was protected by foreigners and people worked for the foreigners to represent their interests in the country that let them continue to be there, they would also need to be attacked. Soon, missionaries were being captured and chopped into ground meat while other groups of boxers began to attack railways, telegraph stations, and the Chinese people who worked on or near them. But these weren't the most organized attacks on Earth, as you would imagine, of a group of people with no military training whatsoever. up the river, a group of boxers appeared and began to rain down a hail of bricks

and clods of dirt at them because they didn't have firearms and they couldn't exactly swim out into the middle of the river to hit them with their swords. Getting brained by a fucking clod of dirt. Getting hit, falling into the river and drowning. He died gloriously for king and country.

And also, when the British fired back with the few rifles that they had the entire attack broke off and ran so like they're not they're not there yet they're they're ramp they're ramping up when another group of british people were cornered by hundreds of sword-wielding boxers the lead boxer told the rest of his men that if the foreigners were killed rain would come to the valley and the rest of the region one of the Brits was with them actually spoke Chinese and managed to convince

the boxers like actually that isn't true that isn't how rain works and somehow this worked there's just like a this times version of like a guy on Reddit who's like a meteorologist here that's not how rain works

and here's a 14 000 word post about it like somehow that guy saved all of these people's lives because the boxers are just like huh yeah right and just let them leave unharmed yeah doing blood for the blood god shit is like defeated by facts and logic god i hate that so much corn would be so upset with these boxers the boxers are the boxers are converting to be acolytes of zing this is when the chinese authorities decided to actually get involved i guess once the boxers went from threats to sword ambushes they figured that they'd finally gone too far. Like, alright boxers, pack up your gods and get the fuck out of here. And like I said, the Chinese government didn't

really get the boxers. And by the time they decided to try to rein them in, they were fucking everywhere. Spreading across the north, then out of the region, then nationally, as bands of boxers brought their magical martial arts show on the road. Everywhere they went

was ripe for recruitment because the entire country was effectively in the same situation as the north. And so they continued to spread unopposed. The government really seemed to think that this was just another group, like small peasant movement that could just like,

get out of here y'all go home uh but they they vastly underestimated that i like it's really interesting and like not to just bring it back to saigo takamori first again but like when you look at the it's just because we did those episodes recently when you look at like the satsuma rebellion like it was generally contained within one region because their grievances weren't very relatable to everyone else whereas like you have a nation full of peasants who are starving and like you know extremely dehydrated it's like oh you hate this too let's go kill these guys and everyone uh has like bits and pieces of like foreign intervention directly impacting their life.

So also, it's important to point out that the boxers were not telling people, like, fuck the empress or fuck the emperor. Only fuck the foreigners. Remember, the saying was, kill the foreigner, protect the throne, effectively. And it wasn't just in rural areas either. Soon, boxers are preaching their kill the foreign devil sizzle reel in the middle of major cities tens of thousands of boxers were flooding into the zhili providence home of peking without anyone really seeming to care or do anything about

it the boxer sizzle reels just edited like one of those ISIS videos. Oh god. It just looks like a Michael Bay movie with dudes like flying through the air. I like to think it's like shot like a Mr. Beast video but everybody dies. I'm here in China to destabilize the nation

and get rid of the foreigners. And I'm here to recruit 10 million people. Hi foreigners and I'm here to recruit 10 million people. Hi, guys. I'm here in Chile, Providence, and I have a goal of selling 500 million dollars worth of opium in the fastest. Oh, God. Oh, God. So many swords.

Mr. Pizza. I'm here in Chile, Providence, and I'm here to kill 10,000 Christians. He, like, straps on one of the red banners around his arms. He's like, I hate period blood. Welcome, brother beast. Doing a YouTuber face as he hacks through the population. do we get youtuber faces he hacks through the population the youtuber pointing face at a guy strapped to a tree with no limbs and no bells

i mean jake paul kind of did that like a decade ago but yeah jake paul would be the most uh like he'd have to like retire from the wwe WWE and then join the boxers. I'm just thinking of RIP Tom Scott. I know he's retired from making YouTube videos in his class. I'm here in mainland China. I'd really like to think it's like that Xiaoma guy whose entire bit is going to Chinese restaurants as a white man and speaking Chinese and making everybody like, oh, wow. But now he just works for the boxers white man kills christian in perfect mandarin white man blows uh like american minister's mind by speaking fluent chinese now the real rogue option of youtubers to drop into this conflict is rich piano rest in peace big dog thoughts are always with you oh you caught me

cookie on the way to the gym now if anybody had been paying attention i mean anyone from the foreign delegations and you kind of have to leave the imperial government since huge parts of it were fully on the side of the boxers they would have understood that the boxers could have only made it that far because it's like the beating heart of like chinese christendom if you want to call it that uh it's the most converted area of the country if the government was involved it's also the center point of the foreign population centers uh and in all of china between the cities of peking and xie sin so like there's hints that something isn't right maybe Maybe the government is helping.

Yeah. It was also the natural focal point that the Boxers would go to. By April of 1900, the foreign delegations were so ignorant about what was happening that they were surprised when one of their own servants, a houseboy, regaled them with stories about

how 8 million spirit soldiers were going to liberate China from the period blood chugging devils that inhabited Peking and the guy like the foreigners just like well that's that's funny that's cute run along now kid like nobody took any of this seriously

yeah big mistake on their part yeah yeah and again like the government like the Chinese government, mostly on board. Cause remember, like we pointed out last episode, the Imperial courts kind of always in a state of tearing itself apart and

being held together by the Empress. And there's parts of it that are fully on board with the boxers. And there's parts for the absolutely or not because they realized like, yo, we can't control these guys. They're eventually going to come after us which is you know a decent warning to have yeah

so like but even the parts of the government who were fully on board with it saw it as a little more of a side than a sideshow they did not realize that there was so many of them everywhere yeah like I think they probably thought that like oh we have like bigger problems

to solve like you know solving the piss unix and people trying to kill each other and political intrigue and getting you know loads of opium from the dutch and the the empress was also attempting to find a new emperor because remember she chucked the other one on an island. I wonder what he got up... Was he doing animal crossing stuff? He must have got really into animal crossing's a good bet because he's out there alone. He couldn't really get into war hammering.

There's nobody to play with. He just refrains a raccoon called Tom Nook. Also owes him debt. I'm up to my fucking eyes and bells debt. This is bullshit. He's just out there catching bugs all day. So the boxers marched on into May, killing and burning as they went.

And they weren't against threatening or attacking members of the imperial government either if they stood in their way. When a few officials tried to stop or warn them away from a church in a local village, they were butchered along with everybody else. Eventually, the imperial military would have to get involved. I should point out here, much like during our Taiping series, the imperial military was still pretty much operated as a decentralized feudal warlord type organization. Commanders would pretty much do whatever they wanted and governors acted as lords of over a fiefdom rather than a unified government. The idea was that the empress would call the bannermen or whatever during a time of conflict and they would all send their militaries. So in Northwestern Shandong, one commander named

Yang Futong got sick of the boxers wandering around and acting like a death squad in his area. It's bad for business. And when he came across them, he would order his men to shoot at them to scare them off, which they would run off. So to the boxers, they had become an agent of the foreign devils standing in their way. Armed with largely farming tools, they launched an ambush against Yang and his men, slaughtering them as they marched through a dry riverbed. Yang's body was cut into hundreds of pieces and

pretty much lightly sprinkled over the entire area. While his men were disemboweled, their innards strung up in trees, along with their tattered uniforms. Getting turned into a can of tuna chunks. And remember, this isn't even like swords. This is like

scythes and gardening hoes and shit. The hoes have turned against me. This is a warning to any other commander who thought that they could stop the divine boxers from completing their mission. Then they cornered a group of 60 Christian Catholics and killed them, only 90 miles

from Peking. The village that they lived in was burned to the ground, and the remains of the Catholics inside were strewn about in pieces or chucked down the local well, ruining the water supply for anybody who may have survived in the local village. Then another mission was hit 40 miles from Peking. Still, somehow at this point, nobody outside the missionaries in Peking was taking any of this seriously. They were begging for any of the international diplomats to ask for help, either within China or back home, but nobody seemed to care. One British diplomat, after being told of yet another killing of a missionary and a Chinese priest, instead of even bothering to write about it in his diary, instead wrote about the curious spread of the clap throughout

the foreign delegation and wonder if he had given it to his wife yet oh listen he has his priorities that's all I'm gonna say I mean in case you're wondering of how they pass their time and while they're on a foreign mission that's that's it's just a fuck fest

I mean like listen to be honest if you go to Brussels today, it's the exact same thing. Yeah, that's what I've heard. I've heard pretty much every embassy is still like this. Loads of different people from different countries

swapping fluids to pass the time because it's not like they do any real work. No, of course not. Also, they're planning a very important party in the honor of Queen Victoria's birthday. During said party, one of the deleg very important party in the honor of Queen Victoria's birthday.

During said party, one of the delegations remarked that the boxers were not to be taken seriously. The only person who opposed any of this lax attitude was the French minister, who chastised everyone for not taking this shit seriously and not being worried. I mean, like, the French being very knowledgeable about how quickly a grassroots kind of movement could fuck everything up. You guys don't understand. We've done this to ourselves once. Once?

Then came the attack on the 1st Chinese Regiment. The 1st Chinese Regiment was not a unit of the Imperial Military but rather a British Army colonial unit made up of Chinese soldiers led by British officers and NCOs. They were posted to an area of Shandong, and everything seemed to be going fine. Locals were friendly to them, they didn't see anything

weird, and things are actually so safe they cut to patrols from 30 men to 12, since they have seen exactly zero boxer activity in the region. This is what we call foreshadowing. Oh no. Joe, tell me. It's surely going to get better. I have some bad news. Yeah, it's not like we have another three episodes of this series left. Once the British let their guard down,

a patrol was hit as again crossed through a dry riverbed. The boxers, despite not having any leadership at all, knew their disadvantages, namely the lack of guns. So they knew if they had hoped to do any real damage to the British, they would need to get close. The riverbed offered them ample cover in the form of trees and elevation. Once the Brits were inside, the boxers charged down at them already at point-blank range, mostly armed with farming tools and rocks they'd picked up along the way. Now, the initial shock wore off and the British were able to get the rifles and pistols up, and they began to shoot them to pieces. Each charge was fought off, but the surviving British officers noted that not a single one of the boxers went down for good, mind you, because they'd get

shot and pop back up. Then not a single one of them went down for good without being shot multiple times. They would blast a guy who would pop back up and then a single one of them went down for good without being shot multiple times. They would blast a guy who would pop back up and then I'd keep attacking them with a garden hoe, a scythe, a knife, or a brick. It's not looking good, Joe. It's not good

to shoot a man directly in the chest and him just like immediately kung fu your ass into the ground. The British ordered a retreat up a nearby hill where they would have higher ground and be able to use their rifles better. Only to discover another group of boxers was lying in wait for them,

who then began to make it hail with rocks large enough to kill a man. Jesus Christ. The patrol was now completely surrounded and it was almost certainly going to be annihilated but the boxers despite their tactical wiles here because they did make a lot of good choices fucked one important thing up they hit the brit so close to their own base that the rest of the soldiers could hear the fighting oh that sounds like a mistake. Yeah, they heard the gunfire and rushed out to help.

This broke the attacking boxers, or at least what was left of them. And also, not really, because the Brits launched a counterattack and they were lured into yet another close range ambush, which resulted in a captain being speared through the goddamn throat with a pitchfork. Oh, that sounds like it would really fucking hurt. I don't think he's going to walk that one off. Nah, that's more than a flesh wound. Dear madam, we regret

to inform you, your heroic son, Sir Hubert Fallingsworth was felled by the most savage of enemies, a pitchfork. Yeah, Jesus, getting throat in the worst kind of way. Throat goat,

that boxer right there. Like the old people who have to have the little robot thing at their throat like, I ain't got no pitchfork through the throat. I used to be an adventurer like you until I took a pitchfork to the throat i used to be an adventurer like you until i took a pitchfork to the throat though eventually again superior weapons won the day and the boxers did finally break off the attack

even after the attack on the first regiment the fat rich well-fucked foreign aristocrats of peking didn't seem to care and they only really began to notice the threat of boxers when their own personal servants stopped coming to work. They had either been killed or threatened into leaving their jobs. Meanwhile, Christian refugees were flooding into Peking, running from the constant attacks. The refugees brought with them horror stories of mass killings and burnings. They told people that the railways had been torn up, telegraph wires were being cut down, and an entire Belgian

construction company had been surrounded and besieged in their company office in Chiang Tzu 16 miles away from Peking. The rescue would come in the most unlikely form possible. Oh god. Is it Gaddafi? No, he's not born yet.

If this would have happened while Gaddafi was alive, yes. Suddenly the boxers would have plastic explosive. Selling a sound missile to the boxers. Auguste Chimot. Now he was the local hotel manager.

He enlisted the help of a few other Frenchmen. A couple Aussies. they armed themselves to the teeth got some horse carts and wagons which they then armored with random bits of metal they could find and stormed off in that direction the host the hotel manager built a technical they're still better assembled in the bob tank, that's all I'm gonna say. Yeah, probably. Now, seeing this strange, well-armed

hotel manager bearing down at them, the boxers simply let them pass and pluck all the Belgians to safety without firing a shot. Other isolated groups of foreigners were not so lucky. One group had to run through a collection of swamps for 10 miles, all while under attack by

boxers before making it to the relative safety of Peking. The guards sent to protect them by the imperial government had actually just joined in with the boxers and started shooting at them. Imagine you just get like blown to pieces by a Belgian hotelier and like the last thing you hear is

your reservation has been cancelled. Boo. We've invented the lamest action hero of all time, a Belgian. Yeah, he's definitely going to be played by Jason Statham in a very mid budget action movie. It's going to be called the Hotelier. You know, I'm willing to bet without looking at that Jason Statham is probably already done or is getting ready to agree to doing a script exactly like this i mean he's currently promoting a movie where he plays a beekeeper yeah yeah that's it

no he's so like he's and he weaponized the bees like it's far cry so he's like this kind of like clandestine network of like i don't know like secret agents called the beekeepers but he is also an actual beekeeper and talks in like beekeeping metaphors oh god he shoots something like that's got a sting i i guarantee there is a fucking line and i'm going to see this movie i will tell you if he does and you know i assume he also shares intelligence with the bees so he has to like rub his ass against the tiny insects while buzzing yeah he like checks his like super secure laptop and like the fucking network that he logs onto is called the hive mind or something i've just realized that my version of this movie is just the episode of

futurama where they pretend to be space bees to get space honey. I like my version better. Jason Statham, call me. I do too. With railways burning, engineer companies chased out and cut down, and British soldiers impaled with pitchforks, the Peking diplomatic corps finally decided to get concerned. Or, as one reverend put it, quote, so long as the boxers plundered native houses and murdered converts, the ministers did nothing. Now that a few yards of railway lines have been destroyed, they must act.

Yes, the church is like new urbanist transit, you know, yimbies. How did you make the church worse? Oh, Joe, people are going to be so mad at you for saying that i'm just fucking with you all the foreign powers had fleets off taku or the the coast off of tietzen the fleets would have marines and soldiers on board as you know guards and all these other things that's the closest thing that any of the powers had to an actual garrison nearby whatsoever. Peking and Tietzen were connected via railway,

which the guards would then have to take in order to get where they needed to be, like help in Peking. The diplomats worried that if they waited any longer, the boxers would simply tear up that railway line, isolating them from their only source of help. The French and the Russian ministers point out, I don't know why

you guys are only talking about this now. We've already sent for help. Once again, the Russians be like, we will help ourselves and not let anyone else know. Okay, that happens a couple times, but we have to hold on to that one. Fuck's sake, I hate

when this happens. The American and British ministers rushed out to do the same thing. However, according to treaties in place, the diplomats would have to request the presence of foreign troops in the capital to be approved via the Yamen, who, of course, immediately refused, because remember, that's

its job. The British ministers snapped, screaming that the troops were coming whether you liked it or not and if they did anything to stop them more troops would come the yamen decided you know what that threat is good enough for me and approved the request but only for 30 troops per foreign delegation the delegations then promptly decided fuck that and ignored it the The Russian, British, Japanese, and American soldiers left for Peking on May 31st, 1900, though this did not stop good old-fashioned geopolitics from immediately getting involved on the ground.

Each country decided to send 100 men apiece, but the Russians did not have that many men immediately available, so when the Brits showed up with their full force of 100, theians got pissed and demand they scale back their forces lest they make the russians look bad the brits refused which led to a full-on fist fight between the two sides until finally an order came down to only send 76 men to appease the russians i wonder how they came to specifically 76 because it's like a weird number. I assume that's the exact amount that the Russians had. Probably. Yeah, that makes sense. Meanwhile, the Americans only have like 50.

They're like, I don't know what you guys are bitching about. Yeah, it's the only time the Americans wouldn't send like 50,000 soldiers into somewhere. Yeah, it's a little bit before that time. By then, the mood in Peking had changed rapidly. The delegations, once having free reign over the city, didn't dare leave their own offices, which had been condensed down to a complex known as

the International Legation Quarter. Boxer signs encouraging the foreign delegation's murder began to pop up in the city, and blacksmiths hung signs outside their shops in chinese advertising that they would make swords out of any metal brought to them just making an aluminium sword that just like flops in the wind blacksmith surge pricing bring bring me your shit ass metal from home and

i'll make you the most useless ass blade you've ever seen since you've looked at a bud k calendar it just like blunts as you swing it through the air once the soldiers arrived on june 1st they marched the legation quarter and began digging in trenches were dug barbed wire was installed around machine gun nests and they began to stockpile food and water even with that there was only 495 soldiers from eight different countries behind the walls and the guards did not exactly go there with an extended siege in mind. They brought with them only the ammo they had on them for the rifles, no reserves, and one piece of artillery in the form of one ancient Italian cannon that they only brought a couple dozen shells for and only three machine guns. that they only brought a couple dozen shells for, and only three machine guns.

The Russians were actually supposed to bring more artillery, but had been so busy bitching at the British back at the train station, they had completely forgotten it. So some dude just rocking up is like, hmm, here's all these munitions, what will I do with them? Well, what is even funnier is they remembered to bring the ammo and the gunners but no cannons like how do you lose a cannon in a train station look look tom don't be judgmental it happens to the best of us listen if there's anyone that's going to do it it's going to be russian logistics

yeah i'm actually surprised they even had ammo for the cannons in the first place they were just cutting off their own hands and shoving them down the cannon. We will kill them with our bone shards. Making flechette rounds out of bones. Soon the boxers destroyed the rail link out of the city and set fire to a racetrack right outside of Peking. The track was so close that a group of European men

rode out to watch for funsies. However, because they still didn't quite grasp the seriousness of the situation, they were confronted by a group of European men rode out to watch for funsies. However, because they still didn't quite grasp the seriousness of the situation, they were confronted by a group of boxers in the streets of Peking, leading to one of the men drawing his pistol and shooting a boxer dead in the middle of the street. It became clear that the legation would probably need more guards. On June 11th, when Japanese Minister Tsukuyama Akira went out to greet these proposed Japanese reinforcements who were supposed to be coming in,

Chinese government soldiers from a Muslim majority unit called the Gansu Braves, who were known for really hating foreigners way before the boxers showed up on scene, turned on him and killed the minister and his guards on the street. Oh, Jesus. turned on him, and killed the minister and his guards on the street. Oh, Jesus. His heart was cut out and sent back to the Gansu commander, who was now acting as the personal guard of the Empress. Listen, if you want to send a message, a good old heart in a box will do that.

Yeah, I mean, it's one step above a horse head in the bed, you know. Then, the last telegraph line linking the legation to the outside world was cut. On June 13th, the first boxer appeared within the legation corridor itself. A young boy was just sitting on a cart, wrapped in red cloth, which had come to signify the rebels. He was sharpening

a knife and seemingly just watching the foreigners. At this, the German minister Clemens von Kettler, seemed just infuriated that all the soldiers were just letting this happen uh rather than like he did they were doing nothing to shoo off this boxer who was like you know a young teen let's say so kettler said fuck this i'll take care of it myself he advanced on kid, slapped the knife out of his hand, and began to beat the shit out of him with his walking stick,

which caused the boxer to run off, at which point Kettler discovered another young boxer, again, teen, preteen, hiding in the back of the cart the kid was sitting on. He grabbed the boy, dragged him back into the German legation, and executed him with a pistol. Jesus fucking Christ.

This turned out to be a very, very bad idea. Oh god, no, this is where it really fucking gets bad, I assume. And that is where we will pick up next time. Fuck! I'm not looking forward to recording the next episode.

It's, uh, let's say oh von kettler made a bad choice as oftentimes you know executing young children the basement of your embassy tends to be yeah it's going to create a series of cascading events aka history i have some good news when it comes to von k kedler though and you'll just have to listen to the next episode to find out oh i'm excited tom how you feeling two hours into the boxer rebellion um i feel like all the goofs and gaffes we've gotten out of the way and it's uh it's i feel like the ratio of misery to fun is going to shift very, very rapidly towards misery. You are correct. I hate when that happens. So comfortable saying.

Yeah. Nobody likes it when either of us are right, to be fair. That is the Boxer Rebellion Part 2. Tom, you have another podcast. Please tell us about it. I have multiple other podcasts. Beneath Skin, show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. I talk about it at the end of every episode.

If you don't know it, check it out. It's fun history stuff. And I am also the producer for the newly launched Glue Factory podcast. It's a video comedy podcast. You can find it on YouTube episodes on Wednesdays. comedy podcast you can find it on youtube episodes on wednesdays and this is the only podcast that i do because

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