Cao Futian

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Cao Futian was a Chinese mystic, martial artist, and militant who helped mobilize and lead the anti-Christian and xenophobic Yìhéquán (Boxers), which organized militias and pogroms of foreign missionaries, civilians and Chinese Christians in the Qing Empire around the turn of the 20th century. Along with his ally Zhang Decheng, he helped organize a popular mobilization and uprising of peasants around Tianjin as part of the Boxer rebellion, which aimed to support the Qing dynasty, to expel and/or exterminate foreigners, and ultimately isolate China from foreign powers and foreign ideas (such as Christianity). When the invasion of the Eight-Nation Alliance forced the imperial court to change from support of the Boxers to suppression, government troops captured and beheaded him in 1901.

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