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War clouds had been in the air since May. The allied foreign troops had taken the fort at the seacoast, but the railway to Peking had been destroyed by the Boxers who had grown in power and popularity and swarmed over the countryside. The Empress Dowager had hesitated between avoiding a war with the foreign powers and using the Boxers, a strange, unknown, frightening force whose one object was to destroy the foreigners in China and who claimed magical powers and magic protection against foreign bullets. The Court issued orders one day for the arrest of the Boxer leaders, and the next day appointed the pro-Boxer Prince Tuan as minister for foreign affairs. Court intrigue played an important part in this reversal of the decision to suppress the Boxers. The Empress Dowager had already deprived her nephew the Emperor of his actual power, and was planning to depose him. She favored Prince Tuans son, a worthless rascal, as successor to the throne. Thinking that a foreign war would increase his personal power and obtain the throne for his son, Prince Tuan encouraged the Empress Dowager to believe that the Boxers magic actually made them proof against foreign bullets. Besides, the Boxers had threatened to capture “One Dragon and two Tigers” to sacrifice to heaven for betrayal of their nation, the “Dragon”, being the reformist Emperor whose “hundred days of reform” two years earlier had shocked the conservative mandarinate, and the Tigers being the elderly Prince Ching and Li Hungchang, who had been in charge of the foreign policy. The Boxers were actually within the capital. A lieutenant colonel who had been sent out to fight them had been ambushed and killed, and his soldiers had joined the Boxers. Highly popular and triumphant, the Boxers had captured Peking, killing foreigners and Christian Chinese and burning their churches. The diplomatic corps protested, but Kang Yi, sent to investigate the Boxers, reported that they were sent from Heaven to drive out the Oceanic Pe