Instead, the Chinese authorities chose to incite the rebels, providing them with officers and arms. After experimenting with reforms, the court of the Empress Dowager Cixi had swung in a more truculent direction. The Westerners must be eliminated, Cixi declared, or at least thrown into the sea. On June 5, the Boxers cut the railroad from Tianjin to Beijing. The Qing army joined their ranks and five days later, the telegraph lines were severed. The last cable from the US legation read: “We are besieged in Peking.”
