Indiscreet Letters from Peking: Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness, Which Set Forth in Some Detail, from Day to Day, the Real Story of the Siege and Sack of a Distressed Capital in 1900—the Year of Great Tribulation

These are not official reports. They are indiscreet letters, written in the blood and dust of a dying capital, by someone who watched the world burn from inside the Legation Quarter. In the summer of 1900, as the Boxer Rebellion swept through China, foreign diplomats and civilians found themselves trapped behind the walls of Peking's diplomatic quarter, surrounded by hostile forces and cut off from the outside world. What follows is a day-by-day account of the siege: the panicked council meetings, the desperate fortifications, the rivalry between legations that persisted even as shells fell around them, and the strange, almost accidental salvation that came when Chinese internal divisions saved them from total destruction. The author knew everything. They saw the generals negotiate, the diplomats lie, the missionaries pray, and the city burn. This is that story, finally told as it actually happened, stripped of official denials and diplomatic euphemisms. A vital historical document that reads like the juiciest gossip from the edge of apocalypse.