Besieged in Peking Book

China at the turn of the century--the 20th century that is--was going through the most profound process of change in its lengthy history: internal revolutions and a shift of balance of power on the international stage. Into the flux of these times came the Boxers, a peasant cult whose practitioners believed themselves supernaturally invulnerable and whose slogan was, simply enough, "Destroy the Foreigner". The imperial ambitions of several nations, Britain and America particularly, received a jolt from the rebellion that ensued. There was a great deal of violence and 11 Foreign Delegations were besieged in Peking; the international community eventually asserted control. "This book", Diana Preston tells us, "is about the human experience of living through the Boxer rising"; and she works hard to humanise the enormous historical events of China in 1900. She does this by drawing on extensive and often vivid eyewitness accounts and her own prose frequently becomes almost novelistic ("Then, suddenly, above the clamour of rifle fire the distant boom of heavy guns was heard coming from the east" and so on).Sometimes this works very well: we are, for instance, given a compelling sense of how claustrophobic it must have been to live through the siege. Other times the sheer crush of dramatis personae crowds the narrative out a little. But Preston's great skill is in negotiating a line between extreme interpretations of an extreme event. The perspective is more from the Western side, but nothing is black and white in this complex and detailed account. --Adam RobertsRead More