At the end of 1909 probably no part of the Empire seemed more peaceful.
Two months afterwards the heads of the Europeans were demanded;
missionaries were guarded by armed soldiers in their homes inside the
city walls, and forbidden to go outside; native Christians were brutally
maltreated and threatened with death if they refused to turn traitor to
their beliefs; thousands of generally law-abiding men, formed into armed
bands, were defiantly setting at naught the law of the land, and the
whole of the main road over which I had passed from Sui-fu to
Tong-ch'uan-fu (a distance of over four hundred miles) was blocked by
infuriated mobs, who were out to kill,--their motto the famous
ill-omened Boxer motto of 1900: "Exalt the dynasty; destroy the
foreigner."

"Kill, kill, kill!" ran the cry for miles around the countryside, and a
fearful repetition of the bloody history of ten years ago was daily
feared. Providential, however, was it that no foreigner was traveling at
the time in these districts, and that those who, ignorant of the
troubles, desired to do so were stopped at Yuen-nan-fu by the Consuls and
at Sui-fu by the missionaries. It is a matter for gratitude also that
throughout the riots, specially safeguarded by the great Providence of
God, no lives of Europeans were lost; and owing to the praiseworthy and
obvious attitude of the missionaries in this area in endeavoring to keep
the thing as quiet as possible, and the notoriously conservative manner
in which consular reports upon such matters are preserved in
Governmental lockers, practically nothing has been heard of the
uprising.

At times during the four slow-moving months, however, the situation
became, as I shall endeavor to show, complicated in every way. The
escape of the foreigners was made absolutely impossible by the fact that
the whole of the roads, even those over the rough mountains leading
south, were blocked successfully by the rebelling forces, and, when the
deep gloom settled finally over the city, the fate of the Westerners
seemed sealed and their future hopeless. All round the foreigners'
houses the people, infected with that strange, unaccountable, national
hysteria, so terrible in the Chinese temperament, rose up to burn and
kill. Mayhap it means little to the man who reads. Massacres have always
been common enough in China, he will say; and there are thousands of
people in Europe to-day who know no more about China than what the
telegrams of m