SIEGE OF THE LEGATIONS, PEKING, BOXER REBELLION, CHINA, 1900

David Oliphant, Interpreter, British Legation
St. Nicholas' Cathedral, Newcastle-upon-Tyne


The Man

Scottish genealogy can be a complicated affair. Take the Oliphants. There is a Chief of the Clan Oliphant, who is also Chieftain of a subsidiary branch of the family, the Condie branch. In addition there is the Kellie branch, which currently does not have a chieftain, and then three other subsidiary chieftains, those of Gask, Bachilton and Rossie. We are concerned with the Rossie line, of whom the current Chieftain is John Philip Oliphant. In the late 19th Century his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Truman Oliphant, was the 6th Chieftain of Rossie, and he had four sons.

Rossie House is in Forgandenny, four miles south of Perth, but Thomas Truman lived in St. Andrews, in Queen Mary’s House - a house which still exists as the library of St. Leonard’s School - and all six of his children were born there. Thomas himself was a J.P. and landowner, the country squire living in the town, but his sons did not follow in his footsteps. The boys moved into the professions (the house was sold in 1926), which is why two of them found themselves in the British Legation in Peking in the summer of 1900, when war broke out between the Chinese and the foreign powers.

Nigel had been an army officer, but by 1900 he was working for the Imperial Bank of China (a Chinese bank created in 1897, based on Western banking principles). David had graduated from the College of Science in Newcastle, then an offshoot of Durham University, and had trained for three years as an interpreter in Peking before being appointed a Consular Assistant at the Legation.

The Background

The summer of 1900 was not the best time to be a foreigner in Peking. China, under the Dowager Empress Cixi, and the various foreign powers were at odds, and on the verge of war. From the foreign powers’ point of view the ostensible reason was China’s failure to control the movement and activities of the Boxers, an anti-foreign organization who were in turn angry at what they perceived as the high-handedness and intrusive behaviour of the foreign powers, especially the Christian missionaries, a perception shared by many in the higher echelons of the Chinese Government. The foreign powers wanted the Boxers suppressed, and in April the British minister, Sir Claude Macdonald, issued an ultimatum to the Chinese – either they got rid of the Boxers themselves, or the foreign powers would do it for them. To back up this threat warships were sent into positions off the Taku Forts, at the mouth of the Hai River, the gateway into the region.

This was a problem for Dowager Empress Cixi. She did not want to accede any further to foreign pressure, feeling that they were becoming too demanding and presumptious, and the naval force was a clear threat of invasion. However, she was sure that if it did come to war China would lose, unless, as some (but not all) of her advisors advocated, she used the numerically-strong Boxers as a military force.

Then, at just the wrong time (as if there is ever a right time), China’s rains failed. The Boxers, the majority of whom were peasants from the regions around Peking, began to flood into the city in large numbers, fleeing the effects of drought and famine. To the foreign powers their ultimatum appeared to have been ignored, and in late May a call from the legations for aid was answered by the dispatching of four hundred troops, gleaned from all the nations present. They arrived at the legations on the 31st; six days later the Boxers cut the railway to Tientsin, which lay between Peking and the coast.

The Conflict

On the 10th June Admiral Seymour set out from Tientsin with a force of two thousand men. This course of action is understandable, given the threat of the Boxers, but as yet no war had been declared, and the advance of Seymour’s force on Peking had not been agreed with the Chinese Government. In effect it was an invasion. As yet Cixi had not decided on whether to use the Boxers, but events were moving quickly out of her control.

Seymour’s force left Tientsin on the 10th. On the 11th a Japanese diplomat was killed in Peking, Boxers began to burn Christian churches and attack Chinese Christians, and rescue parties sent out from the legations to protect Christians opened fire on and killed a number of Boxers. With Peking simmering Cixi called a meeting of her advisors; should they use the Boxers or not? The decision was postponed, but on the 19th the Chinese gave all foreigners twenty-four hours to leave Peking, disregarding the fact that the railway link had been destroyed.

On the 20th June the German ambassador, Baron Clemens von Ketteler, set out for a meeting with the Chinese to negotiate safe passage. En route he was killed by a Chinese officer, an event that Cixi and her ministers had been fearing; they knew that the killing of a European diplomat would mean war.

Von Ketteler’s murder prompted the ambassadors to summon all foreigners in the city to the Legation Quarter. The Austrian and Italian Legations, which were in isolated locations, were abandoned, and all withdrew into the remaining six (American, British, French, German, Japanese and Russian), a collection of buildings covering an area of three by one and a half kilometres. The four hundred and seventy-three civilians were housed in the British Legation, with over two and a half thousand Chinese Christians in the adjoining Fu palace and its park. Defending them were four hundred and nine troops, supported by one hundred and fifty civilian volunteers, with three machine guns and two cannons. Meanwhile, five kilometres away, those who could not reach the Legations took refuge in the North Cathedral, which now held thirty-three priests and nuns, over three thousand Chinese Christians, and forty-three French and Italian troops.

On the 21st China declared war against the foreign powers. The Boxers were given legal status, and organized alongside the army as a military force, though not with everyone’s approval. General Junglu, overall commander of the Chinese forces in Peking, disapproved of the Boxers, and did not support the siege of the legations, even though he was in charge of it. Under his command the Boxers, who formed the bulk of the besieging force, were not armed with modern weapons, and usually attacked with knives and spears.

On the 23rd the Hanlin Academy, which adjoined the legations and which contained China’s National Library, caught fire and burned down. Both sides blamed each other, and the siege proper began.

I say the siege proper but, despite all the eventual fatalities, it was perhaps not a proper siege. Cixi herself is quoted as saying, “If I had really wanted to destroy the legations they could not possibly still exist”, and Sarah Conger, wife of the American Ambassador, wrote, “The Chinese often fire high, for which we give thanks”. The Chinese army, for all its faults, was a modern army, with its artillery European-trained. If they had wanted to destroy the Legation Quarter with artillery fire they could have done, so the suspicion has to be that they were ordered not to. Cixi did not really expect to win the war, and when it ended she did not want to have to answer for the slaughter of nearly five hundred civilians, including women and children.

The action

On June 30th, however, things looked different. Chinese army forces attacked the 14 metre high Tartar Wall, on the Quarter's South side, forcing its American and German defenders back and allowing the attackers to erect barricades within feet of the wall. Elsewhere the Boxers attacked in large numbers, but armed only with knives and spears they were consistently repelled by the defenders’ automatic fire.

At the Tartar Wall the situation looked grim, but on July 3rd an assault on the Chinese barricade under U.S. Captain John T. Myers drove the Chinese back and allowed the defenders to re-establish their position on the wall.

Despite the over-shooting the Legations still took hits from the Chinese fire, and had to respond to the threat. On July 5th a British officer, Captain F. G. Poole of the East Yorkshire Regiment, took a working party beyond the defensive line into the garden of the destroyed Hanlin Academy. The objective was to chop down trees in the garden which were obstructing the defenders’ line of fire whilst also providing the attacking forces with cover. When they eventually came under fire Poole ordered his men to retire but one, David Oliphant, shouted that the tree he was working on gave him cover and so remained to complete his task. A soldier would have obeyed Poole’s command automatically, but Oliphant was a civilian. Hearing a cry Poole turned to see Oliphant lying on his back, wounded, with a sailor, Leading Signalman Harry Swannell of H.M.S. Orlando, kneeling over him and attempting to shield him from the shooting. With two marines coming out to cover him Poole ran back, and he and Swannell carried the injured man back to the defences. Oliphant had been shot through the liver, and died within a few hours. If you believe his brother’s diary he “passed quietly and peacefully away”; if you believe another witness he died “in agony”. He was clearly a loss to the defenders, as survivors eulogize him as “clever, keen, active”, and say “since the siege began he had been in the front line of defence”. 

The siege continued for another nine days. On the 13th, the penultimate day of the fighting, a Chinese attack drove Italian and Japanese in the Fu gardens back to their last defensive line, and a mine destroyed most of the French Legation, forcing the French and Americans out, but it was a final flurry. The following day news arrived of coalition forces landing en masse on the coast, and of the siege at Tientsin being lifted, and the Chinese Government decided to start preparing for the aftermath. An armistice was declared, and the Chinese sent food and supplies into the Legations (and the Cathedral), signalling the end of a siege which saw sixty-eight foreigners killed, including thirteen civilians, an uncounted number of Chinese Christian deaths, and unknown thousands of Boxer casualties. The International Force arrived in Peking, staying there for a further year, and the Chinese Government’s role was greatly reduced, setting the scene for a few decades of virtual internal anarchy covered elsewhere in these tales.

Afterwards

Signalman Harry Swannell survived the siege, earning more praise by being one of two men to expose themselves when running up a new Union Flag after the first one was shot to pieces. For his role in rescuing David Oliphant he was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal. He served throughout the First World War, becoming a Chief Signals Bosun before retiring from the service in 1920. I don’t know which ship he ended on, but in 1911 he was on the armoured cruiser H.M.S. Devonshire, and he may have been lucky, as the Devonshire never saw action. His previous ship, the Orlando, was scrapped in 1905, but a bell captured from the Taku Forts can be seen as part of a memorial in Portsmouth’s Victoria Park. Swannell’s medals covering China and the First World War sold for fifty thousand pounds in 2012.

Nigel Oliphant stayed in the East after the siege. He was transferred to Japan, and died in Hong Kong in 1905. His father had died three years previously, and the Chieftainship of Rossie had passed to the eldest son, Stuart, a solicitor. He died in 1918, soon after the birth of his daughter, Nancy Elizabeth. She grew up to be celebrated in Canada as Betty Oliphant, founder of that country’s National Ballet School.

After Stuart’s death the title of Oliphant of Rossie passed to the last surviving son, John Ninian. He worked for the Works and Forest Service in India, and died in London in 1960. His grandson, John Philip Oliphant is now the 10th Oliphant of Rossie. Rossie House is no longer in the family’s hands, but is still there, offering bed and breakfast, with gardens that are open to the public.


DAVID OLIPHANT KILLED AT PEKING JULY 5 1900 AGED 24 YEARS. "THE QUEEN HEARD WITH FEELINGS OF ADMIRATION AND PRIDE OF THE MANNER IN WHICH MR DAVID OLIPHANT FOUGHT SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE MARINES IN THE DEFENCE OF THE LEGATION DURING THE FOUR EVENTFUL WEEKS, AND HOW HE SACRIFICED HIS LIFE IN DEVOTION TO OTHERS." EXTRACTED FROM A LETTER SENT BY QUEEN VICTORIA TO HIS FATHER. STUDENT OF THE COLLEGE OF SCIENCE IN THIS CITY 1894-1897

Sources
Photos
'The graveyard in the British Legation during the siege' - from digital collections.anu.edu.au.  David Oliphant's grave is central, in the corner of the walls.
"St Nicholas Cathedral, Newcastle - East end - geograph.org.uk - 974201" by John Salmon - From geograph.org.uk. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Nicholas_Cathedral,_Newcastle_-_East_end_-_geograph.org.uk_-_974201.jpg#mediaviewer/File:St_Nicholas_Cathedral,_Newcastle_-_East_end_-_geograph.org.uk_-_974201.jpg

Military
Empress Dowager Cixi: the concubine who launched modern China (Jung Chang, Jonathan Cape, London, 2013)
The I.G. in Peking: letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868-1907' (Robert Hart & James Duncan Campbell, Harvard University Press, 1975)
Diary in Peking by Captain F. G. Poole (viewable online at https://www.spink.com/lot-description.aspx?id=13003000007)
The Siege of the Peking Legation, being the Diary of the Rev. Roland Allen, M.A. (Roland Allen, Smith, Eldee & Co., London, 1901) - viewable online from the archives of Cornell University
www.dnw.co.uk - site of auctioneers Dix Noonan Webb

Genealogy
www.ancestry.co.uk
www.redbookofscotland.com
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1468075/Betty-Oliphant




ⓒ Jon Dewhirst August 2014