China: 'Children Aloft on their Spears'... New York Times, July 20-21, 1900, report on Boxer Rebellion

Information on the (mythical) slaughter of the westerners in Beijing appeared in the New York Times of July 20th. The news was carried, according to the Times by a Chinese merchant lately arrived in Shanghai, who was interviewed by a reporter from the London Daily Express. The details were gruesome:

A Chinese merchant who has just arrived from Peking gives horrible details of the massacre. He says he saw European women hauled into the street by shrieking Boxers, who stripped them and hacked them to pieces. Their dissevered limbs were tossed to the crowd and carried off with howls of triumph. Some were already dead when the massacre began, having been shot by foreign civilians. The merchant says he saw Chinese soldiers carrying the bodies of white children aloft on their spears, while their companions shot at the bodies.

He gives other details too horrible to be particularized here. It seems that the Boxer leaders had organized a plan, including the offering of rewards and rich loot, for the annihilation of Europeans throughout China, and that Prince Tuan’s Generals have been emphasizing the opportunity the soldiers have of seizing the bodies of white women. According to The Daily Telegraph’s St. Petersburg correspondent, the Russian Government is in possession of definite news that all the foreigners in Peking were massacred on July 15.

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