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. We all know
how the ministers of the various European governments with their
wives and children, the customs officials, missionaries, business
men, and tourists who happened to be in Peking at the time, with
all the Chinese Christians, were confined in the British legation
and Prince Su's palace. We know how they barricaded their
defense. We know how they were fired upon day and night for six
weeks by the Boxer leaders and the army of the conservatives
under the leadership of their general, Tung Fu-hsiang. But the
thing which we do not know, or at least which has not been
adequately told, is the most interesting secret plot of the
liberal progressives, under the leadership of "Prince Ching and
others," to thwart the Empress Dowager and the Boxer leaders, the
conservatives and their army, and protect the most noted company
of prisoners that have ever been confined in a legation quarter.
The plot was this:
When Prince Ching and his progressive associates in Peking
discovered that they could not vote down the Boxer princes, they
dared not openly oppose them, but they secretly decided that the
representatives of the Powers must not be massacred else the doom
of China was sealed. When they discovered that Yuan Shih-kai and
the other great viceroys had decided by stratagem to foil the
Boxers even though they must set all the imperial edicts at
naught, they decided, for the sake of the protection of the
legations and the preservation of the empire, that they would do
the same
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