Xīxún Huíluán Shǐmò 西巡迴鑾始末
A Complete Account of the Western Tour and the Return of the Imperial Carriage by Anonymous (佚名)
About the work
Xīxún Huíluán Shǐmò 西巡迴鑾始末 is an anonymous Qīng dynasty account in 6 juàn recording the flight of the imperial court westward to Xī’ān 西安 following the Allied occupation of Běijīng in 1900, and the court’s eventual return to the capital. The text is structured around imperial edicts (shàngyù 上諭), official memorials, and narrative accounts of events, making it a hybrid of documentary compilation and narrative chronicle.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source.
Abstract
The Xīxún Huíluán Shǐmò documents the critical episode in late Qīng history when the Boxer Uprising (Yìhétuán 義和團, 1899–1901) and the subsequent invasion by the Eight-Nation Alliance (bāguó liánjūn 八國聯軍) forced the court of Empress Dowager Cíxī 慈禧太后 and the Guāngxù Emperor 光緒帝 to abandon Běijīng on 15 August 1900 and flee westward. The opening juàn begins with imperial edicts from Guāngxù 26 (1900), 3rd month, documenting the court’s increasingly strained handling of the Boxer movement, followed by the formal declaration of war against the foreign powers and the subsequent military disaster.
The text’s title refers to two phases: the xīxún 西巡 (the western progress, a euphemism for the ignominious flight) and the huíluán 迴鑾 (the return of the imperial carriage to the capital, which occurred in January 1902). The court remained in Xī’ān for over a year while peace negotiations culminated in the Boxer Protocol (Xīnchǒu Tiáoyuē 辛丑條約) of September 1901.
The authorship is anonymous; the catalog attributes it to yìmíng 佚名. The text opens with verbatim imperial rescripts and memorial texts from the Guāngxù court, suggesting that the anonymous compiler had access to official documents and may have been a mid-ranking official. Stylistically, the work resembles other late Qīng documentary compilations such as the Quánshì 拳事 genre accounts of the Boxer period. A biányán 弁言 (brief introductory note) is present in the text (near line 13,134) but is framed in a narrative rather than bibliographic manner.
The composition date is inferred from the subject matter: the events described run from 1900 through the return of the court in 1902. The work was likely compiled and printed in the first decade of the twentieth century. No precise publication date or publisher is identified in the source text.
Translations and research
Luke S. K. Kwong. A Mosaic of the Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics, and Ideas of 1898. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. (Background context on late Qīng court politics.)
Diana Preston. The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China’s War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900. New York: Walker, 2000. (Standard English-language narrative of the events documented in this text.)
No substantial secondary literature on this specific compilation located.