Sombras chinescas and Les derniers jours de Pekin: Writing From Within and Without the Eight Nation Alliance

Gayle Nunley has pointed out that one of the things we learn from travel writing is how the authors contribute to the construction of their own national identity while writing about other countries (173). Luis Valera y Delavat’s Sombras chinescas is a unique account of the Boxer Uprising in that Spain did not participate in the Eight Nation Alliance against the Boxers and did not have important territorial concessions to protect. At times, we can see Valera struggle with the lack of power, prestige, and influence that Spain suffered in the political arena of post-Boxer China. At other times in his work Valera tries to claim a fellowship with the rest of Europe, assuming a voice unified with modern colonial powers against a “mummified” China. The French writer Pierre Loti (Julien Viaud) was in Beijing at the same time as Valera, and in Les derniers jours de Pékin [Last Days of Peking] he writes about the same events. Both men came from a European culture that had a particular vision of China created by earlier travel narratives and by popular imported works of art. But one man is writing from a perspective within the Eight Nation Alliance while one writes from without, and this difference profoundly influences each writer’s experience of China and of post-Boxer events.¹

Before proceeding, it may be helpful to provide some background information about the Boxer Uprising. Hostilities between China and European powers had begun decades before with the Opium Wars of 1840-42. That conflict forced concessions of territory to Britain and opened the ports of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tianjin to trade. Further conflicts led to the so-called “Battle of Concessions,” in which Japan, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain all won extensive territorial concessions, to the humiliation of the Chinese. By the late 1890s a peasant movement was forming in Shandong province, a movement that was anti-Christian and anti-foreign. The groups involved, as well as the movement itself, are known to English speakers as the Boxers, in reference to the martial arts the groups practiced. In Chinese, they were known as Yihetuan (義 和 團), “Militia United in Righteousness,” and they adopted the slogan “Support the Qing, destroy the foreigner” (Cohen 23). For various reasons, primarily unemployment brought on by drought and government failure to contain the anti-foreign hostilities, the movement spread over North China between 1898 and 1900 (Cohen 34-6). On December 1, 1899, a Boxer group murdered Sidney Brooks, a British missionary. This initial foreign casualty, followed by more killings of missionaries and Chinese Christians, triggered alarm among foreign consuls, and they began formulating plans for a military response in light of the Qing government’s failure to control the attacks. By early June of 1900 Boxers had entered Beijing and Tianjin, and the Dowager Empress CiXi sided with them definitively, declaring war on foreign powers. Government forces, alongside Boxers, began directly attacking foreign legations in Beijing. Rescue arrived in August in the form of the Eight Nation Alliance, consisting of forces from Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary The Western troops continued the looting of the city which the Boxers had already begun, and the Dowager Empress and her court fled Beijing (Fairbank 636). The Qing’s foremost statesman, Li Hongzhang, stayed behind to negotiate the peace treaty. On September 7, 1901, the Boxer Protocol was signed, stipulating the deaths or exile of several high officials, the extension and fortification of the Legation Quarter, and an indemnity of over 450 million taels of silver or 333 million U.S. dollars, to be divided up among the various foreign powers involved in negotiations (Cohen 56).² Spain had almost no stake in the indemnity, but because the Spanish ambassador, Bernardo Jacinto de Cólogan, was the senior diplomat of the Legation community, he served as chair of the committee of foreign powers negotiating the Protocols, and the treaty was signed at the Spanish Legation.³

Valera had been named Secretary to the Spanish Legation...