The Butcher of Shanxi and What Followed the Taiyuan Killings

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

After the Boxer Protocol of September 1901, the Qing court, under Allied pressure, ordered Governor Yuxian's own execution for his role in the Taiyuan killings, a rare instance in this atlas's record of a persecuting official punished by his own government rather than by an outside power alone. The victims are commemorated among the "China Martyrs of 1900" by the churches whose missionaries died at Taiyuan, and the forty five deaths there sit within a wider Shanxi death toll historians place between forty five, the documented Taiyuan figure, and as many as two thousand once the summer's further attacks on Chinese converts are counted.

The victims were killed specifically as Christian missionaries and their families at the height of the Boxer movement's anti-Christian campaign, but the Taiyuan killing itself was driven by Governor Yuxian's own anti-foreign convictions and the Qing court's war declaration rather than by a popular Boxer mob, distinguishing it from the more diffuse village-level anti-Christian violence the Boxer Rebellion's own record describes in Shandong and Zhili.