From the “Official Account of the Military Operations in China, 1900-1901” (PRO WO 33/284) compiled by Major E.W.M. Norie, Middlesex Regiment, page 113:
Between the 21st and 23rd July eleven English and American members of the China Inland Mission were murdered at Ch’u-chou by the local train-bands, which had been organized to defend the town against a rising of the secret society of Vegetarians.
Italics original.
The Edge of the American West 
14 comments
April 22, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Buster
I am strongly resisting the urge to make a joke about the legacies of the Chow Dynasty.
Mainly for fear of getting called out on transliteration issues.
April 22, 2009 at 1:59 pm
ari
Vegetarians
We’re a cutthroat lot. Don’t mess with us.
April 22, 2009 at 2:04 pm
rea
A little googling makes me wonder if the “vegetarians” were the White Lotus Society, a Buddhist secret society that led rebellions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
April 22, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Vance
Further googling leads to the Kucheng Massacre.
Buster, we’d squid you for that, but Ari’s a vegetarian.
April 22, 2009 at 2:58 pm
JPool
We’re a cutthroat lot.
All that blood-thirstiness has to go somewhere. It’s an iron deficiency thing.
April 22, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Anderson
DEATH TO MEAT!!!
April 22, 2009 at 6:06 pm
kid bitzer
well but wait a sec.
the murders were not committed by vegetarians.
they were committed by people organized to *defend* against vegetarians.
extremism in defense against vegetarianism is no vice.
anyhow, the real question to my mind is why they mistook the “English and American members of the China Inland Mission” for vegetarians. did they look like vegetarians? i mean, we can take it as read that all westerners look alike. but do they all look anemic?
April 22, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Jason B.
People ask me how I can live a happy life as a vegetarian, and I always answer, “As long as I can kill some missionaries from time to time, I’m alright.”
April 22, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Vance
Eric, how did you get mixed up with Steve Sailer? I was going to comment there, but TPM’s flaky software frustrated my effort to log in (my profile still calls me “Some Guy”) — and then, looking at his debating style in another thread, I realized I was better off locked out.
April 22, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Michael Turner
did they look like vegetarians?
All vegetarians look alike.
April 23, 2009 at 4:15 am
glowb
I’ll bet the vegetarian nickname came from their being both practicing Taoists and Buddhists. Most of the sects that revolve around local religious sect name and groupings that are next to impossible to decipher and pigeonhole meaningfully into actual romanized verbage. So probably some non-understanding foriegner simplified it to something he could actually perceive…Vegetarians.
The Taoists and Buddhists have all sorts of combinational aspects that change by season, locale, ceremony.etc much like our astrology has cycles. You know all those wheel like diagrams with chinese characters looking like a constellation map…whelp those are mostly for keeping track of all the meaningful possibilites.
April 23, 2009 at 11:41 am
Erik Lund
Major Norrie is off-message from the Committee of Inquiry. It was the Vegetarians that done it, not the militia. (“Trained bands?” What’s next, the Apprentice Boys?)
Perhaps he’s a denialist.
April 24, 2009 at 1:11 pm
herbert browne
Pardon me, boy… was that the China Mission chou-choos? Local train-bands, vegetarian chew-chew choo-choo SILBEY! Ya gotta STOP this…
or we’ll all be off-track, without a salad in the rack… (mercy!) ^..^
April 25, 2009 at 7:02 pm
wu ming
A good place to start on understanding how the Chinese government understood the millennial Buddhist White Lotus groups – which “vegetarianism” is being used as shorthand for here – which were occasionally involved in massive rebellions in the 19th century, is Barend ter Haar’s The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History. Well worth reading, if you’re studying the Boxers.