Beleaguered

I'm reading Robert Coltman's Beleaguered in Peking about the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. It was written by an ex-pat eyewitness, an American doctor, and published a year later. He was one of hundreds of Westerners and Chinese Christians, holed up in the foreign legation quarter in Beijing, while the Boxers ran amock outside. Lots of arson, looting and worse, and not just in the capital, but in cities across the country. Not too unlike what's going on in Britain right now. Except of course the motives.