You and your foreign friends are trapped. A place heretofore friendly and deferential to foreigners, Beijing has suddenly decided that all of you are enemies who should be butchered. The government, not wishing to provoke too much international retribution, creates a giant terrorist army of warriors ready to die for China, but not before killing as many of you as possible.

No paranoid fantasy, thus lay the scene a mere 108 years ago. Don’t think that’s ancient history. Many are you who’ve recently muttered, “Oh my god, it’s 2008 already?” In fact, England’s got a platoon of old birds who were wearing Victorian diapers 108 years ago. In a much more antiquated Beijing, infants were wearing assless pants, of all things. The point being that, though the surface may have been a lot less WTO-y, Beijing was still Beijing, and the expats were a lot like you and me.

Then there was Morrison, Ernest Morrison. He wasn’t like you and me. You pat yourself on the back when you walk from Dongsishitiao to Dongzhimen instead of taking a cab. Morrison, an uber-Aussie from back when Aussies still thought they were Englishmen, walked from Sydney to Melbourne, the first person known to have done so, just as a goof. He tried the same stunt in New Guinea a few years later, but had a little incident with a couple of spears, one chucked under his left eye, one into a leg and out the tuchus. Mildly put out, he rode, walked, and dragged himself for six days to the nearest signs of civilization, and a physician who could attend to his mere flesh wounds. That’s the kind of stiff-lippery that puts your carpal tunnel complaints in perspective.

1900 and the eve of the Boxer Rebellion found him in Beijing, China correspondent for The Times, with nary a latte from Starbucks to be had, much less complacent tapping on a laptop. This was the imperialist age of rifles and sneaky trade treaties, not corporations and sneaky trade treaties. Morrison marched to his post in Beijing all the way from Siam [Thailand to you and me, folks], doing double duty as a spy for her Royal Majesty.

Maybe being the first white man to see a sizeable chunk of Xishuangbanna and Yunnan ranks as an adventure for us cab-potatoes, but not for Morrison. He kicked it in Peking a while, whipping up an international reputation for bravery and accuracy in reporting, then decided to walk across the country. Six-foot-two with eyes of blue, his robes and clip-on-queue didn’t fool a lot of people, but he wasn’t really trying to. The trip was more about showing nervous whiteys that the Celestial Kingdom wasn’t a preview of purgatory. He didn’t even pack heat for the trip, relying on a box on the ear here, a cuffed cheek there, and however else people went at it in those Marquis of Queensbury days.

Back in Beijing, the powers represented in the Foreign Legation were waging an ever-more dangerous game of “Lick My Boots First” with a tottering Manchu Dynasty, who played along to loot the store, but at the price of inflaming every Chinese soul with shame and animosity for the Foreign Devil. Once Dragon Empress Cixi… Tzu-Hsi… Sushi [damn you Wade Giles] consolidated her power, she rallied secretly but fiercely nationalist Mandarins to enlist the aid of the long-standing secret societies, particularly the Society of the Harmonious Fist, or Boxers, to rout the foreign menace at one fell swoop. Thank Providence the Chinese had never acted at one fell anything before, or since, otherwise the Middle Kingdom may well have ended a vassal state of Japan, or heaven forbid Russia.

Morrison records that by April 17th of the ultimate year of the 19th century [that’s 1900 – trust me], Boxers were representing by the gang-load on the dusty streets of Beijing. They were helping stir up the sentiment that a long-standing drought could be blamed on the foreigners’ disturbance of feng-shui. Not only was it white hides that risked piercing. Ages before Robin Williams or Tom Selleck might have persuaded them otherwise, the Chinese found hirsuteness officially distasteful, and used it as the basis for classifying devils: Primary Hairy Men, the genetically fur-covered; Secondary Hairy Men, who were Chinese Christian converts (also known as ‘rice Christians’); Tertiary Hairy Men, those callow traitors who indulged in foreign deviltry such as using clocks and watches. Divine retribution, voiced through Cixi, demanded that none survive the imminent Boxer strike.

By mid-May, Boxer punks were emboldened enough to start picking on priests, albeit French ones, in a small village in Hebei, well outside the Imperial City. Perhaps it was because a few started swinging crucifixes that the Boxers turned their anger on the villagers, butchering and burning 61 of their countrymen.

Flushed with pride, the Boxers slunk to Fengtai, 24 kilometers south of Beijing, and set the train station ablaze. Incensed, Morrison rode out with a revolver to set the matter to rights, but found only villagers looting. Morrison returned to the Legation, knowing dire times lay ahead, but not before riding out to the Fragrant Hills for some fresh air, and to escort an American friend’s wife, her family, and retinue from their summer villa to safety, under constant threat of roving mobs of spear and sword -brandishing Boxers.

On June 3rd, the rail to Tianjin was severed, to prevent reinforcement of the Foreign Legation’s motley band of soldiers: 81 British, 75 Russians, 50 Americans, 40 Italians and 25 Japanese. The last royal courtier sympathetic to foreign lives, Prince Qing got sacked on Cixi’s return from the Summer Palace, irresistibly accompanied as she was by a division of fierce, turbaned Gansu warriors. Always ones for theatrics, the Boxers sent one of their heroes down the main street of the Legation Quarter, driving a cart with a sign that read “Good for Eight Foreigners”, and whetting a knife on his boot. Scandalized, German Minister Baron Klemens von Ketteler thrashed him soundly in the street with a walking stick, then took him into custody, despite official Manchu requests for his release. That was just the kind of WMD-fabricated excuse the Boxers needed to go ballistic. The fact that Ketteler and his German troops began killing Boxers as part of their morning drill exercises compounded the matter.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral, the London and American missions, and the Maritime Customs burned the night of June 17th, illuminating a grisly tableau – hundreds of massacred Hairy Men of all varieties, mostly Secondary and Tertiary. Fainter hearts and higher ranks at the Foreign Legation plumped for decamping to Tianjin and the West en masse, under the promised protection of Imperial Guard. Morrison denounced them for the liver-lilied fools they were, and rode off to the aid of hundreds of Christian converts barricaded in Nan-tang church. He took a force of 20 British soldiers, falling in with a band of Germans and Americans on the way. They stormed the church to find Boxers performing human sacrifices with converts. Others were being immolated. Quickly crushing and chasing off the Harmonious Fists, Morrison and his platoon rounded up the survivors and led a growing convoy for converts back to the Foreign Legation, witnessing the most depraved slaughter along the way. In all, they rescued some 3000 rice Christians, and installed them in a recently deserted palace directly opposite the British Legation.

Once back with his own, Morrison played a key role in preparing the desperately outnumbered foreigners for the time-honored British production, So the Natives are Sick of Us and We’re Desperately Outnumbered. Barricading, stockading, even palisading, Morrison proved a knight of the Realm and why one never undertakes scrapping with Brits lightly. While lesser souls wrung their hands, and his translator bemoaned the destruction of the Gay Quarter, he only complained that he couldn’t send his story to The Times.

Meanwhile, the stoutest heart in the Forbidden City, Cixi, openly declared war on all foreign powers on the 21st of June. She sent her royal army to Tianjin to deal with a relief expedition prepared to march on Beijing. She entrusted the Boxers to dispatch with the paltry Foreign Legation resistance, much as one entrusts the Three Stooges with passing a sober afternoon devoid of hijinx. Indeed, to judge by events, it was the Boxers’ unwavering commitment to incompetence as much as foreign gallantry that saw the Hairy Men through.

For instance, the Furry Force made a crucial error early on, one that the Boxers failed to exploit. A contingent of Austrian troops, charged with holding Canal Street, a vital artery that constituted three-quarters of the foreign line, caught a false rumor that the American Legation on their flank had been abandoned, leaving them wide open to any-second attack by a sea of howling Boxers. Schwarzenegger’s antecedents opted for the Running Man role, triggering a stampede of Italian, French and Japanese guards. For reasons only the King of Heaven can explain, the Boxers did not press the advantage.

Instead, they chose to burn Hanlin Academy, Beijing’s most sacred seat of learning, because it bordered the British Legation. Morrison and other defenders watched horrified as the tinder-dry building and thousands of priceless silk-bound volumes kindled an inferno, then organized a volunteer fire brigade of uncommon valor, including wives, who fought the blaze under Chinese crossfire. Morrison’s fey translator took advantage of the fire sale to acquire some volumes of the Yung Lo Ta Tien, an encyclopedia completed by two thousand Ming Scholars in 1408. The Boxers withdrew to the southern wall of the Imperial City, only eight meters from the American barricade.

So began months of siege warfare, with one important difference. Rather than take to the arduous and brain-tickling business of constructing siege machines and digging fortifications, the Boxers contented themselves with sniping and the occasional fusillade. Arson, of course, remained a full-time avocation.

Thus it was that constant vigilance and pluck on the part of the defenders, Morrison serving as an untiring exemplar of optimism and gallantry, managed to stave off a force incalculably larger and better advantaged through that oppressive, perilous Beijing summer. The thousands of Chinese refugees relegated to the deserted palace suffered the worst privations, many succumbing to starvation and disease, a grim testament to the wages of racial segregation. Morrison himself eventually exhausted the extra reserves of luck given the nerveless; he took a bullet that shattered his thigh while strutting around the fortifications on a morning inspection. More willing to die than draw any unwarranted pity or sympathy, he waved off help to assist hauling the corpse of his freshly-sniped friend back to safety.

Once tasted, however, tiger guts are hard to pass up, and Morrison was always ready for a second helping. As soon as his thigh was more than a blood pudding, he took to hob-legging it across no-man’s land every day to assist the stranded Chinese refugees at the now sordid palace. Back in Europe, the papers were full of a Shanghai shyster’s report that all in the Legation had met their ends in a massacre. While he was being eulogized back home, Morrison spent the days’ energies quick limping over to relieve refugees, and resting his leg whilst penning the story of a lifetime.

An Allied Relief Expedition of eighteen thousand had arrived in Tianjin chewing nails for vengeance, but helplessly delayed cleaning up the fallen city. Their arrival alarmed the Dragon Empress to the extent that she sent a conciliatory telegram to Queen Victoria, prevailing on Her Majesty that they understand each other as women. The latter did not deign to reply, but urged the Expedition to make haste to Peking, which it finally undertook to do on August 4th. It was within sight of the outer walls by the 13th, inspiring a last-ditch Boxer surge of Chinese-on-Chinese massacre to wipe out any witnesses to their perfidy.

At 3 a.m. of the 14th, Morrison hobbled up the now abandoned South City Wall to watch the shelling of the Tung Pien Gate by Russian forces. By 2:30 p.m., a British detachment was the first to reach the inner Tartar City, the 1st Regiment of Sikhs and the 7th Rajputs, according to Morrison. Their flowing mustachios and stern falcon eyes were enough to send the Harmonious Fists back to secret socializing. “They passed down Canal Street and amid a scene of indescribable emotion marched to the British Legation. The siege had been raised,” Morrison wrote.

International retribution for the siege was swift, brutal, and predictably, borne most grievously by blameless commoners. Morrison went on to a brilliant journalistic career, and a Beijing expat rep no Bar Street hero could hope to rival, even having a street named after him. Perhaps more than just admire the man, we might learn a lesson from Morrison, and his compatriots’ response to the Boxer siege. Life imitates poker, in that if you can play even a crap hand with unimpeachable optimism and intestinal fortitude, fate will toss you an ace somewhere down the river. In their case, it was the hopeless boobery of their otherwise formidable attackers. May we remember Morrison so that , when we are besieged, we will have the sand to wait for ours.

This article has been a hopefully well-disguised partial book review of “The Man Who Died Twice, The life and adventures of Morrison of Peking”, by Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin.