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Yuxian | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Provincial Governor of Shandong | |
| In office February 1899 – February 1900 | |
| Preceded by | Zhang Rumei (張汝梅) |
| Succeeded by | Yuan Shikai |
| Provincial Governor of Shanxi | |
| In office February 1900 – 26 September 1900 | |
| Preceded by | Deng Huaxi (鄧華熙) |
| Succeeded by | Xiliang |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1842 |
| Died | 22 February 1901 (aged 58–59)[1] Lanzhou, Gansu |
| Clan name | Yanja (顔扎氏) |
| Courtesy name | Zuochen (佐臣) |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  Qing dynasty |
| Battles/wars | Boxer Rebellion |
| Yuxian | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | 毓賢 | ||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 毓贤 | ||||||||
| |||||||||
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]".[2][3]
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.
- ^ "Spider Manchu: Duanfang as Networker and Spindoctor of the Late Qing New Policies, 1901-1911" (PDF).
- ^ Anthony E. Clark (2013). A Voluntary Exile: Chinese Christianity and Cultural Confluence since 1552. Lehigh University Press. p. 99. ISBN 978-1-61146-149-7.
- ^ Robert A. Bickers; R. G. Tiedemann (2007). The Boxers, China, and the World. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-7425-5395-8.