The 'New I-Style Town': From Italian Concession to Commercial Attraction

More than a century ago Italian troops participated in the repression of the Boxer Uprising during which impoverished local vigilantes in North China, outraged by the Qing court and its supine attitude to the Western imperial powers, rose up in armed rebellion. In retaliation for their attacks on foreigners in the northern provinces, and Beijing in particular, a massive foreign army, known as the Eight-Power Allied Expeditionary Force, invaded. The fighters of the `Righteous Harmony Society (Yihe Tuan ???), as the Boxers were generally known in Chinese (although the court originally called them `Boxing Bandits, or quanfei ??), were finally defeated on 14 August 1900 as 20,000 foreign troops entered the imperial capital of Beijing. With the signing of the Final Protocol that brought the conflict to an end on 7 September 1901, Italy received 5.91% of the Boxer Indemnity paid by China to the foreign powers, extraterritorial privileges and the concession of a small area of 447,647 square metres on the northern bank of the Haihe River ?? in the nearby city of Tianji