the Siege of the International Legations and was invaded by a coalition of foreign armies, the Eight Nation Alliance. The greatest loss of missionary lives was in Shanxi where, among others, all 15 members of the Oberlin Band were executed. The Eight Nation Alliance imposed a heavy indemnity on China which Hudson Taylor of the CIM refused to accept. He wanted to demonstrate "the meekness and gentleness of Christ" to the Chinese. In the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, the foreign residents in northern China, especially the missionaries, came under attack in their home countries for looting. Missionaries, such as William Ament, utilized United States Army troops to confiscate goods and property from Boxers and alleged Boxers to compensate Christian families for their losses. Critics of such actions included the writer Mark Twain, who called Ament and his colleagues the "reverend bandits of the American Board." The Boxer Rebellion had a profound impact on both China and the West. The Qing government attempted reform and missionaries found the Chinese more receptive to both their evangelical and their "civilizing" message, but the West lost the certainty of its conviction that it had the right to impose its culture and religion on China. The China Centenary Missionary Conference in 1907 affirmed that education and health were of equal importance with evangelism although traditionalists complained that "education and health are no substitute for preaching." Missionary activities after the Boxer Rebellion became increasingly secular. Abolition of the opium trade Opium was Britain's most profitable export to China during the 19th century. Early missionaries, such as Bridgman, criticized the opium trade—but missionaries were equivocal. The treaties ending the two opium wars opened up China to missionary endeavor and some missionaries believed that the opium wars might be part of God's plan to make China a Christian nation. Later, as the social message of the missionaries began to compete with evangelism as a priority, the missionaries became more forthright in opposing the opium trade. In the 1890s, the effects of opium use were still largely undocumented by science. Protestant missionaries in China compiled data to demonstrate the harm of the drug, which they had observed. They were outraged that the British Royal Commission on Opium visited India but not China. They created the Anti-Opium League in China among their colleagues in every mission station, for which the American missionary Hampden Coit DuBose served as the first