Ch.17 China’s Troubles
The Boxer Rebellion (의화단 사건)
- This Chinese secret society called itself ˝Yihhe Quai˝ or the ˝Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists.˝ But Westerners just called it ˝the Boxers,˝ because the members were so good at martial arts.
- The Qing dynasty had survived the Boxer Rebellion. Seven years later, when Cixi died of a stroke, the three-year-old prince Puyi inherited the throne of China.
- But China had already been conquered by Western ideas. And Puyi would be the last Qing emperor of China.
The Czar and the Admiral (러일전쟁)
- At the time of the Boxer Rebellion, under Nicholas Il‘s reign, Russia had started to build a new railroad in China. It would run from Harbin, a large city in the northern province of Manchuria, all the way down to Port Arthur on the Yellow Sea. Russia had convinced China to rent Port Arthur to Russia for twenty-five years. This meant that, for almost a century, Port Arthur would belong to Russia- in exchange for a large amount of money.
- War Russia vs Japan
- In September of 1905, the treaty between the two countries was signed in the United States-in the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Over a hundred thousand Russian soldiers and sailors had died, and the war had cost Russia the equivalent of millions of dollars.
- Japan had stopped Russia‘s attempts to expand east, into China. For the first time, a European army had been defeated by an Asian country. And it had become clear to the whole world that Japan, not China, was now the master of the East.
