Public executions of Yihe Dan by French troops. As fighting continued over the capital Beijing and the surrounding countryside, suspected Chinese secret society Yihe Dan were summarily executed in retaliation.

 　Public executions of Yihe Dan by French troops. As fighting continued over the capital Beijing and the surrounding countryside, suspected Chinese secret society Yihe Dan were summarily executed in retaliation. German and French soldiers set fire to buildings where innocent peasants had taken refuge, shooting and bayoneting peasants who fled from burning buildings. French troops burned down each village they encountered during their 160-km march and planted French flags in the ruins. 

　The last outburst of traditional Chinese chauvinism was the Yihe Dan Rebellion from October 18, 1899 to September 7, 1901. Essentially a secret society, it began attacking missionaries and foreigners in general. They blindly believed that the mystical power of Chinese martial arts could defeat the firearms of the foreigners and drive them out. Although the Yihe Dan originally had anti-Manchu tendencies, the Empress Dowager and her court, hating foreigners and fearing that they would antagonize the Yihe Dan, decided to have them fight together and gave them constant support. The Yihe Dan killed missionaries and Chinese Christians and besieged foreign legations in the capital, Beijing, in a series of Chinese defeats in the early 19th century. The forces of the Eight-Nation Alliance, a joint force of Western powers and Japan, marched in and defeated the Yihe Dan and the Qing government forces that half-heartedly supported the Yihe Dan's attack on foreign legations, capturing Beijing with much destruction and looting and extracting huge reparations from the Qing government.

　 The fighting was limited to northern China, and the major provincial governors of central and southern China understood European power far better than the Empress Dowager. They ignored the Empress Dowager's decision to support the Yihe Dan and maintained the fiction that the Yihe Dan were rebels against the Qing government. They avoided being drawn into hostilities. The victorious Westerners also decided to accept this fiction, and books published in the West often refer to the entire incident as the Yihe Dan Rebellion. The Western powers manipulated and exploited the dynasty.