Background Research & Eye-Opening Facts: A Little-Known Siege
“And as threatened, fun or not, I’m probably going to share some of those other facts with you, so ‘watch this space.’”
Yep, that’s what I said way back in August, in a post called Background Research.
I mentioned a number of subheadings in that post, one of which was “siege warfare generally.” And I did a lot of reading about famous sieges during the course of writing Daughter of Blood.
Examples include the Defence of Rorke’s Drift (1879, South Africa—although I believe this was, more correctly, an “assault” rather than a siege), the British Residency in Kabul (also 1879), the Siege of (the) Lucknow Residency (1857), and the Siege of the International Legations in Peking (1900) during the Boxer rebellion.
Most of these sieges or assaults that I have mentioned are famous, but in reading up on the Peking Legation siege, which lasted for 55 days (ca. 2 months, as opposed to Lucknow, which endured 6 months) I discovered a fact that was eye-opening, for me at least. During the same period, there was a second siege ongoing in Peking (now Beijing), one which is mentioned so rarely that even a history buff like me had never heard of it.
Known as the “Siege of Beitang”, the Roman-Catholic Church of the Saviour was besieged by approximately 10,000 Boxers. Although the latter may well have been poorly armed and equipped, those besieged inside the church comprised approximately 3500 people, all but 80 of whom were Chinese converts—mainly women and children.
They were defended by only 41 French and Italian marines, commanded by two French officers.
The defense was led by Bishop Favier, who later described it in the following terms:
“He said that of the eighty Europeans and 3,400 Christians with him in the siege, 2,700 were women and children. Four hundred were buried, of whom forty were killed by bullets, twenty-five by one explosion, eighty-one by another and one by another. Of the rest, some died of disease but the greater part of starvation. Twenty-one children were buried at one time in one grave. Beside these 400 who were killed or who died, many more were blown to pieces in explosions so that nothing could be found to bury. Fifty-one children disappeared in this way and not a fragment remained.”
A grim account, but also an amazing story—yet one that has been overshadowed by the larger Siege of the International Legations, taking place at the same time, approximately two miles away.