The Boxer rising and the Qing court's declaration of war on the powers in 1900 brought an Eight-Nation expedition to Beijing and a Russian invasion of Manchuria. In early July 1900 the military governor of the Amur province, General Gribskii, ordered the removal of the Chinese population of Blagoveshchensk; the Chinese were marched to the river and driven into it by Cossacks who fired on those who hesitated, and, as the Smith College study records, most drowned in three successive operations. Russian Cossacks and settlers then attacked and burned the villages of the Qing enclave on the left bank, ending Chinese settlement there. The Boxer Protocol of September 1901 imposed a vast indemnity on China, permitted foreign garrisons and required the execution or punishment of officials, and the occupying armies looted Beijing and its palaces. Russia retained Manchuria after the protocol, and the territory then became the battlefield of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, after which the southern part passed into Japanese control.
Russian troops and Cossacks expelled and drowned the Chinese population of Blagoveshchensk and the Amur left bank and occupied Manchuria; the Eight-Nation Alliance occupied Beijing and imposed the Boxer Protocol on the Qing
Russian administrative estimates put roughly 30,000-35,000 Chinese and Manchu inhabitants in the Sixty-Four Villages enclave on the Amur left bank, with several thousand more Chinese residents and labourers in Blagoveshchensk itself. The Russian occupation of Manchuria that followed covered a far larger population, put at 8-14 million.
Estimates of Chinese deaths in the Blagoveshchensk drownings and the destruction of the Sixty-Four Villages run from about 3,000 to 5,000 in Russian-based accounts and higher in Chinese ones; the Smith College study records that most of the assembled Chinese perished and that thousands of Chinese residents of the city died. Deaths in the Boxer war as a whole, including Chinese Christians killed by Boxers, foreign missionaries, and Chinese killed in the punitive expeditions, run into the tens of thousands and are counted separately.
The forced river crossings, the shooting of those who refused and the burning of the Sixty-Four Villages are documented in Russian provincial and military records and in the Qing protests examined in the Smith College study.
Russia, China