Gengzi guobian is the Chinese name for the catastrophe of 1900, a gengzi year in the sixty-year cycle: the anti-foreign Boxer movement besieged the legations in Beijing, the Qing court declared war on the powers, and an eight-nation force took the capital while the Empress Dowager Cixi fled to Xi'an. The Boxer Protocol of 1901 imposed a huge indemnity. In Chinese memory it marks the low point of the late Qing and the start of its last decade. A Love Never Lost begins in the aftermath of the Gengzi upheaval.
