Yuxian (Qing dynasty)
| Yuxian | |
|---|---|
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| Personal details | |
| Born | 1842 |
| Died | 1901 |
| Yuxian | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 毓賢 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 毓贤 | ||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Yùxián |
| Wade–Giles | Yuhsien |
Yuxian (1842–1901) was a Chinese Manchu high official of the Qing dynasty who played an important role in the violent anti-foreign and anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion, which unfolded in northern China from the fall of 1899 to 1901. He was a local official who rose quickly from prefect of Caozhou (in unruly southwestern Shandong) to judicial commissioner and eventually governor of Shandong province. Dismissed from that post because of foreign pressure, he was soon named governor of Shanxi province. At the height of the Boxer crisis, as Allied armies invaded China in July 1900, he invited a group of 45 Christians and American missionaries to the provincial capital, Taiyuan, saying he would protect them from the Boxers. Instead, they were all killed. Foreigners, blaming Yuxian for what they called the Taiyuan Massacre, labeled him the "Butcher of Shan-hsi [Shanxi]".
After Allied armies seized control of North China, Yuxian was blamed by both foreign and Chinese officials for having encouraged the Boxers, and at their insistence, he was beheaded. Historians have now shown that while Yuxian was strongly resistant to foreign influence, he was in fact actively involved in the suppression of Boxer groups in 1895–96 and 1899, but that his strategy of killing Boxer leaders without prosecuting their followers failed in late 1899, when the Boxers had changed in nature and their executed leaders could easily be replaced by new ones. They also suggest that the Christians in Taiyuan were killed by mob violence, not by Yuxian's order.
Yuxian was a Manchu whose family was registered in the Bordered Yellow Banner, one of the Eight Banners. His father served in minor government positions in Guangdong. Instead of passing the civil service examination, Yuxian purchased a degree that qualified him to serve as an official. Although he bought a position of prefect in Shandong province in 1879, only in 1889 did he start to serve in Caozhou, an unruly prefecture in southwestern Shandong that was prone to flooding and plagued by bandits. The departure of local troops for the front of the Sino–Japanese War in 1894 led to a sharp increase in banditry in the area. Yuxian managed to keep bandits under control with the help of local self-defense groups like the newly founded Big Swords Society. Having developed a reputation for efficient administration, in 1895 he was promoted to the rank of circuit intendant (daotai 道臺), with several prefectures under his jurisdiction.
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