s quarter with all its invaluable stores of silks,
curiosities, furs, &c. The retribution which overtook Peking after its
capture by the international forces was scarcely less terrible. Looting
was for some days almost universal. Order was, however, gradually
restored, first in the Japanese and then in the British and American
quarters, though several months elapsed before there was any real
revival of native confidence.

Flight of the Chinese court.

So unexpected had been the rapid and victorious advance of the allies,
that the dowager-empress with the emperor and the rest of the court did
not actually leave Peking until the day after the legations had been
relieved. But the northern and western portions of the Tatar city had
not yet been occupied, and the fugitives made good their escape on the
15th. When the allies some days later marched through the Forbidden
City, they only found a few eunuchs and subordinate officials in charge
of the imperial apartments. At the end of September, Field Marshal Count
von Waldersee, with a German expeditionary force of over 20,000 men,
arrived to assume the supreme command conferred upon him with the more
or less willing assent of the other powers.

Restoration of order.

The political task which confronted the powers after the occupation of
Peking was far more arduous than the military one. The action of the
Russians in Manchuria, even in a treaty port like Niu-chwang, the
seizure of the railway line not only to the north of the Great Wall, but
also from Shan-hai-kwan to Peking, by the Russian military authorities,
and the appropriation of an extensive line of river frontage at Tientsin
as a Russian "settlement," were difficult to reconcile with the pacific
assurances of disinterestedness which Russia, like the rest of the
powers, had officially given. Great anxiety prevailed as to the effect
of the flight of the Chinese court in other parts of the empire. The
anti-foreign movement had not spread much beyond the northern provinces,
in which it had had the open support of the throne and of the highest
provincial officials. But among British and Americans alone, over 200
defenceless foreigners, men, women and children, chiefly missionaries,
had fallen victims to the treachery of high-placed mandarins like Yue
Hsien, and hundreds of others had had to fly for their lives, many of
them owing their escape to the courageous protection of petty officials
and of the local gentr