At the Italian barricade on Legation Street it was met by the remaining marines of the American guard and escorted to the legation. Although the streets were crowded with Chinese soldiers, Boxers, and citizens, no attempt was made to interfere in any way with the flight of these refugees, and that afternoon they were quartered within the spacious walls of the British Legation compound, where all foreigners, except those already sustaining attack in the Roman Catholic cathedral, were gathered for protection.
Here was a scene to beggar description. Streams of carts, and swarms of coolies laden with provisions, baggage, and household effects, were pouring in from every direction. The numerous low, one-story buildings of the legation were being assigned to different nationalities, or set apart for specific purposes. Men, women, and children, diplomats, soldiers, missionaries, railway engineers, bank clerks, customs employés, servants, and coolies, speaking every language under the sun, dogs and ponies, rapid-fire guns, jinrikishas, carts, and wheelbarrows, furniture, bedding, provisions, cases of wine, barrels of beer, and a thousand other things, all were mixed in apparently inextricable confusion.
At precisely four o'clock General Tung-Fu-Hsang's soldiers from Kwang-su opened fire with a sharp volley of musketry from the city streets, and the siege of the Pekin legations was begun.
Although the heavily walled compound of the British Legation, which during the siege sheltered four hundred foreigners and as many more Chinese Christians, or nearly one thousand persons in all, was the stronghold of the defence, the lines occupied and held embraced a wide outside area, both to the eastward and on the south. Beyond the imperial canal, just east of the legation, stood an extensive collection of buildings enclosed by a wall, forming the yamen, or palace, of Prince Su. On the first day of the siege this was seized and occupied as quarters for the hundreds of school-girls and native Christians whom the missionaries had refused to abandon. It was defended by the Japanese, assisted by the Italian and Austrian marines, and though it was subject to many fierce attacks and an almost continuous bombardment that set its buildings on fire a dozen times, it never was given up.