Yuxian (Qing dynasty)

Yuxian
Provincial Governor of Shandong
In office February 1899 – February 1900
Preceded by	Zhang Rumei (张汝梅)
Succeeded by	Yuan Shikai
Provincial Governor of Shanxi
In office February 1900 – 26 September 1900
Preceded by	Deng Huaxi (邓华熙)
Succeeded by	Xi Liang
Personal details
Born	1842
Died	1901 (aged 58–59)
Military service
Allegiance	Qing dynasty
Battles/wars	Boxer Rebellion

Yuxian (1842–1901) was a 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]".^[1][2]

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. Because of his doings, he was executed in 1901.