Drone videos are everywhere you look these days. They've almost become commonplace, although some still manage to wow even the cynics.
WATCH: Amazing aerial video high above the Shanghai Bund
Of course, videos like the one above don't give the first aerial views of the country. Before there were drones, there were balloons.
The first aerial photographs of China were taken in 1900 by members of the French Expeditionary Force sent to relieve the foreign legations in Beijing, which were under siege from a combined army of Boxer rebels and Qing imperial troops.
The Yihetuan Movement, known in English as "Boxers" due to their supernatural belief that they were invulnerable to foreign guns, were an anti-Christian, anti-foreign peasant movement that arose out of Shandong Province starting in 1898.
In June 1900, they converged on Beijing with the slogan "Support Qing government and exterminate the foreigners." When the government sided with the mobs and declared war on every foreign powers, foreigners and Chinese Christians sought refuge in the city's Legation Quarter, surviving a 55-day siege that the New York Sun called "the most exciting episode ever known to civilization."
For those holed up behind the embassy walls, however, "exciting" probably was not the first word that came to mind.
Still, they were luckier than most. Roughly 4,000 local Catholics sought sanctuary in Beijing's Church of the Savior, also known as the North Cathedral (Beitang). From June 14 to August 16, 41 French and Italian marines successfully defended the flock from an estimated ten thousand Boxers.
An atmosphere of egalitarianism rare at the time grew up in the church, with Chinese and Europeans receiving the same rations and sharing the same quarters. When the siege was finally lifted by Japanese troops and the world found out about their incredible victory against all odds, it was described as "a Christian miracle."
The flock was far from unscathed, however. Pierre-Marie-Alphonse Favier, the Vicar Apostolic of the Roman Catholic Church's North Chihli Province and architect of the cathedral, led the defense. Of the thousands under his watch, he estimated that he had to bury 400: 40 killed by bullets, 107 by explosives, and hundreds more by disease and starvation.
Meanwhile in Tianjin, forces from Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States formed an Eight-Nation Alliance to advance on Beijing and relieve the siege. After first relieving the foreign concessions of Tianjin, the French forces' used a balloon to survey the destruction suffered by the port city.
The Relief of Peking finally came on August 14-15 when 18,000 Russian, Japanese, British and American troops broke through the ancient city walls and took the imperial capital with the loss of just 30 men.
The assault on Beijing became a race among the Alliance armies to see who would take ultimate glory as the savior of the legations. At the time, no one knew about the second siege at Beitang Cathedral.
Commanders of the four national armies first on the scene agreed that each would assault a different gate. The Russians got Dongzhimen, the Japanese were assigned Chaoyangmen, the Americans Dongbianmen and the British the southernmost, Guangqumen.
Britain ultimately won the race and became the first to relieve the legations, were they were greeted by families dressed up in their "Sunday best" to greet their rescuers. While the Russians and Japanese had to blast their way in and US marines scaled the city wall, Guangqumen was completely undefended and British troops waltzed in, taking the legations without suffering a single casualty - save for one man who died of heatstroke.
The French apparently were left out of the planning; but when the armies all met again and divided the city into administrative spheres prescient of post-war Berlin, they brought their trusty balloon and took these wonderful snaps of occupied Beijing, high over the Forbidden City (abandoned by Empress Dowager Cixi as she fled to Xi'an) and Beihai Park.
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[Images via Sina]
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