THEME

The I-ho ch’üan (“Righteous and Harmonious Fists”) practiced boxing and other calisthenics, believing this would make them impervious to bullets. It did not. They started the Boxer Rebellion anyway, and the British and Germans and French all machine-gunned them down in clouds of coal and pipe smoke. There was too much money to be made from opium to let a few flashy but deluded quasi-nationalists get in the way. Even then, the markets were everything.