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History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth

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Cohen's book analyzes a particularly notorious (for Chinese and Western commentators) historical event--the Boxer Rebellion in North China (1899-1900) from an extremely fresh perspective. It is hardly poststructuralist to assert that people live history one day at a time, rather than according to some grand plan, and that is how Cohen treats the Boxer Rebellion. Most Western scholars merely see the Boxers as a manifestation of an irrational, bloodthirsty xenophobiba, while Chinese scholars seem to fall into two categories: (1) those like the early twentieth century modernizers who saw the Boxers as an embarrassment to the cause of national unity and freedom, and (2) those like Communist Chinese historians who see the Boxers as a precursor of their own victorious struggle in 1949. Cohen masterfully demythologizes the Boxers and puts them into the context of (gasp!) their own lives. Working from a combination of secondary and primary sources, Cohen reconstructs the domestic situation in China during the late nineteenth century and argues that domestic issues (particularly famine and floods) more than anything else prompted the Boxer uprising. This thesis, of course, turns on its head the idea that the Boxers were an instrument of the evil Dowager Empress Cixi in order to prevent Westerners from disturbing China's ancient and corrupt culture. Cohen is especially interesting in examining the mechanics and experience of mythmaking, applied in this case to the Boxers but which could be applied to just about any event or experience that has emotional or subjective importance for a group of people. This book is extremely useful for anyone, history students or otherwise, who are interested in Chinese history, or perhaps more fundamentally, how we reconstruct the past in order for it to make sense.

I enjoyed this book immensely. The book is split into three parts, each covering the same events from different perspective.

The first part is covered just like most any other historical book. Mostly facts and dates, and reasons as to why certain things turned out the way they did.

The second part of the book, by far the most interesting to me, was the history of the events as seen through the eyes of those who lived through it: the missionaries, the rebels, and the townsfolk. Mostly derived from writings of people that were living in China at the time, it shows their feelings and thier thoughts.

The third part involves the use of the boxers in the agendas of political and social parties in subsequent years. It is very possibly one of the best history books that I have read.

Not only does it cover this particular historical event, it also is a study of historians and their craft. It looks into how historians decide what is to be recorded and what is not and shows you how this affects the way people in the future perceive the event.

"History in Three Keys" is an excellent history of the Boxer Rebellion in northern China in the late nineteenth century. Even more than that, however, it is a look at the historian's craft, how history is experienced and related, and how history is used in the present. The book is divided into three parts, which discuss the Boxer Rebellion as Event, Experience and Myth. The first consists of standard historical writing, a brief survey of the Boxer movement. It relates important names, dates, ideas and events in a narrative history constructed by the author.

The second section, The Boxers as Experience, is more interesting. Cohen attempts to analyze the experiences of the Boxers, to form a picture of the past. He looks at various themes, discussing how they shaped the Boxer movement and the attitudes and beliefs of those involved. Making extensive use of primary documents, he tries to determine their thoughts and feelings regarding foreigners, magic, gender and death. Of course, Cohen realizes that he cannot fully recount or recreate the experience of the Boxer rebellion, and spends many pages discussing ways historians and writers can approach history to try to understand and explain it.

These themes become more fully developed in the book's final section, The Boxers as Myth. Here Cohen explores the various ways the Boxers have been used as myths in twentieth century China, serving "the political, ideological, rhetorical and/or emotional needs" of the moment. While foreigners and the New Culture movement mythologized the Boxers as symbols of Chinese superstition and backwardness, anti-Imperialists cheered their anti-foreignism and nationalism, and cultural revolutionaries idolized their rebelliousness and the mythical role of women in the rebellion.

Cohen explores the difference between historians, who attempt to understand and explain the past, and mythologizers, who try to use history to advance an agenda in the present. He discusses the process of myth-making, in which contexts and inconvenient facts are ignored and a one-dimensional 'history' in created through distortion and oversimplification. Still, Cohen has some respect for mythologizing the past, and notes that experience itself is "processed" in terms of culture and myth. "Mythic constructions are ubiquitous in the world of experience and form an inseparable part of it."

I was assigned part of this book in a history course on nineteenth century globalization, but ended up reading the whole thing - and I'm glad I did. In addition to giving an excellent history of the Boxer Rebellion, "History in Three Keys" contains valuable insights into more recent Chinese history and development. Even more valuable are the discussions about the nature of history, myth, historical writing and the historian's craft. It is well written, clear and engaging, with extensive notes, index and bibliography. I enjoyed it immensely and recommend it to all interested in Chinese history or historical writing in general.

Cohen's books is one of the few reference works I have found that explains not only the Boxers (the Yihequan) but also goes into significant detail regarding the Red Lanterns (the Hongdengzhao, -- the female Boxers). It even includes a handful of contemporary representations of the Red Lanterns I have yet to see anywhere else, along with an in-depth analysis of how these Chinese females fit into the Boxer Rebellion. Given how little contemporary Chinese males thought of women, the very existence of the Red Lanterns as a powerful supportive force in the uprising against the foreigners and the Christians is all the more remarkable, yet their role is all but ignored in most historical treatments of the Boxer Rebellion, so this book is a welcome addition to the history of the Boxers. The book covers the original events of the Boxers as well as their cultural aftermath in China up until the modern day, has many interesting photographs and period Chinese illustrations, as well as over 70 pages of notes explaining points in the text. For people used to reading about the Boxer Rebellion as seen through Western eyes, Cohen's work -- of the Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth -- is an interesting counterpoint, and one worth studying.

I bought this book for its China centered content, and I was not let down, but what I liked best about this work is that Professor Cohen weaves in a fourth component; a discourse on what historians actually do. Just as he divides the Boxer Movement into the above noted three parts he does so as well with the historical craft itself, in the process explaining his development as a historian and seriously examining in what ways history itself can have value greater than myth and commonly held beliefs. Cohen approaches history in a modest, human, and clear thinking way which makes this highly academic work also highly enjoyable to read. I enthusiastically recommend this wonderful book to anybody that is interested in Chinese society, Chinese history, or the art of making history.

This interesting book is a combination of history and historiography. Cohen sets out to explore the Boxer Rebellion as a historic event and also to use it to explore the relationship between historical reconstruction, the actual experience of participants in historical events, and mythological use of historical events. The book is divided into 3 parts; a concise narrative of the Rebellion, a more extensive description of the experiences of participants, and a historiographic section looking at treatment of the Boxer Rebellion by Chinese intellectuals in the course of the 20th century. Each section is interesting, with some limitations. The narrative section is solid but does leave out some important aspects. We get no idea, for example, of why the Qing court elected to support the Boxers. This may be so well known as not to require comment but its a limitation, both for general readers and other scholars not specializing in Chinese history. Cohen's emphasis is generally on the Boxer's themselves, a sort of history from below perspective.
In the second section, Cohen explores the actual experience of individuals involved in the Boxer rebellion, including both Boxers themselves, to the extent possible by the documentary record, and other participants like Western missionaries and soldiers. Cohen draws on a good deal of ethnographic and sociologic literature to discuss these experiences in terms of general human characteristics. While Cohen distinguishes this discussion from conventional historical analysis, I'm not sure that the distinction is as sharp as he makes out.
The final and perhaps most interesting section deals with the Boxers as myth in the context of 20th century Chinese history. By myth, Cohen means the use of historical material in the service of contemporary preoccupations. Cohen has a series of very interesting discussions of who the Boxer Rebellion was treated by a series of Chinese intellectuals from early 20th century reformers to the official historiography of the Cultural Revolution. A consistent theme is the ambivalent relationship between Chinese intellectuals, the West, and their own historical inheritence. This book is written clearly but in a somewhat discursive manner which at times is wordy. Some of the points Cohen wishes to make about historical reconstruction and historiograpy are fairly obvious.