New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable Awakening

by Arthur Judson Brown

This was the situation up to the fateful month of June, 1900. Rumours of impending trouble were numerous, but missionaries in China become accustomed to threatening placards and slanderous reports. Though it was evident that the opposition was becoming more bitter, the missionaries did not feel that they would be justified in abandoning their work. Several, however, were temporarily absent for other reasons. Of the Congregational missionaries, Dr. and Mrs. Noble and Mrs. Pitkin were on furlough in America and Mr. and Mrs. Ewing were spending a few weeks at the seaside resort, Pei-tai-ho, so that Mr. Pitkin, Miss Morrill and Miss Gould were the only ones left at the station. Of the Presbyterian missionaries Mr. and Mrs. Miller were also at Pei-tai-ho, Mrs. Lowrie had sailed for America the 26th of May, and Mr. Lowrie, who had accompanied her to Shanghai, was at Tien-tsin on his way back to Paoting-fu. The missionaries remaining at the station were thus five,—Dr. Taylor, Mr. and Mrs. Simcox and their three children, and Dr. and Mrs. Hodge. The China Inland forwarding agent, Mr. Bagnall, with his wife and little girl, was in his house south of the city wall near the American Board compound, and with him was the Rev. William Cooper, who was on his way to Shanghai after a visit to the Shan-si Mission and whose family was then at Chefoo.

It is impossible to ascertain all the details of the massacre. None of the foreigners live to tell the painful story. No other foreigners reached Paoting-fu until the arrival of the military expedition in October, three and a half months later. The Chinese who had participated in the massacre were then in hiding. Spectators were afraid to talk lest they, too, might be held guilty. Most of the Chinese Christians who had been with the missionaries were killed, while others were so panic- stricken that they could remember only the particular scenes with which they were directly connected. Moreover, in those three and a half months such battles and national commotions had occurred, including the capture of Peking and the flight of the Emperor, that the people of Paoting-fu had half forgotten the murder of a few missionaries in June.

In these circumstances, full information will probably never be obtained, though additional facts may yet turn up from time to time. But from all that can be learned, and from the piecing together of the scattered fragments of information carefully collected by Mr. Lowrie, who accompanied the expedition, it appears that Thursday, June 28th, several Chinese young men who had been studying medicine under Dr. Taylor came to him at the city dispensary, warned him of the impending danger and urged him to leave. When he refused they besought him to yield, and though several of them were not Christians, so strong was their attachment to their teacher that they shed tears.

Dr. Taylor placed the dispensary and its contents, together with the adjacent street chapel, in charge of the district magistrate and returned to the mission compound outside the city. That very afternoon startling proof was given that foreboding was not ill-founded, for the Rev. Meng Chi Hsien, the native pastor of the Congregational Church, was seized while in the city, his hands cut off, and the next morning he was beheaded.

The missionaries then decided to leave, drew their silver from the local bank and hired carts. But an official assured them that there would be no further trouble, and they concluded to remain. It is doubtful whether they could have escaped anyway, for the very next afternoon, Saturday, June 30th, a mob left the west gate of the city, and marching northward parallel to the railroad, turned eastward through a small village near the mission compound, which has always been the resort of bad characters, and attacked the mission between five and six o'clock.

The first report that all the missionaries were together in the house of Mr. Simcox is now believed to have been erroneous. The Hodges were there, but Dr. Taylor was in his own room in the second story of Mr. Lowrie's house. Seizing a magazine rifle belonging to Mr. Lowrie, he showed it to the mob and warned them not to come nearer. But the Boxers pressed furiously on, in the superstitious belief that the foreigner's bullet could not harm them. Then, being alone, and with the traditions of a Quaker ancestry strong within him, he chose rather to die himself than to inflict death upon the people he had come to save. The Boxers set fire to the house, and the beloved physician, throwing the rifle to the floor, disappeared amid the flame and smoke. But the body was not consumed, for a Chinese living in a neighbouring village said afterwards that he saw it lying in the ruins of the house several days later, and that he gave it decent burial in a field near by. But there are hundreds of unmarked mounds in that region, and when the foreign expedition arrived in October, he was unable to indicate the particular one which he had made for Dr. Taylor's remains. Mr. Lowrie made diligent search and opened a number of graves, but found nothing that could be identified.

In the Simcox house, however, the two men were charged with the defense of women and children, and to protect them if possible from unspeakable outrage, when they realized that persuasion was vain, they felt justified as a last desperate resort in using force. The testimony of natives is to the effect that at least two Boxers were killed in the attack, one of them the Boxer chief, Chu Tu Tze, who that very day had received the rank of the gilt button from the Provincial Judge as a recognition of his anti-foreign zeal and an encouragement to continue it. He was shot through the head while vociferously urging the assault from the top of a large grave mound near the compound wall.

The story that little Paul and Francis Simcox, frightened by the heat and smoke, ran out of the house and were despatched by the crowd and their bodies thrown into a well now appears to be unfounded. All died together, Mr. and Mrs. Simcox and their three children, and Dr. and Mrs. Hodge; Mr. Simcox being last seen walking up and down holding the hand of one of his children.

It is at least some comfort that they were spared the outrages and mutilations inflicted on so many of the martyrs of that awful summer, for unless some were struck by bullets, death came by suffocation in burning houses—swiftly and mercifully. No Boxer hand touched them, living or dead, but within less than an hour from the beginning of the attack, the end came, and the flames did their work so completely that, save in the case of Dr. Taylor, nothing remained upon which fiendish hate could wreak itself. Husbands and wives died as they could have wished to die—together, and at the post of duty.

The next morning the Boxers, jubilant over their success of the night before, trooped out to the American Board compound in the south suburb. The two ladies took refuge in the chapel, while Mr. Pitkin remained outside to do what he could to keep back the mob. But he was speedily shot and then decapitated. His body, together with the bodies of several of the members of the Meng family, was thrown into a hastily-dug pit just outside the wall of the compound, but his head was borne in triumph to the Provincial Judge, who was the prime mover in the outbreak. He caused it to be fixed on the inside of the city wall, not far from the southeast corner and nearly opposite the temple in which the remaining missionaries were imprisoned. There, the Chinese say, it remained for two or three weeks, a ghastly evidence of the callous cruelty of a people many of whom must have known Mr. Pitkin and the good work done at the mission compound not far distant. When sorrowing friends arrived in October, the head could not be found, but it has since been recovered and buried with the bodies of the other martyrs.