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Re: On This Day, June 17 - The Battle of the Taku Forts (1900)
The 1900 Boxer Rebellion is one of my favourite topics. It has all the trappings of "romantic" warfare because of its exotic locations, clash of cultures as well as for the first time ever a large multi-national effort to overcome one enemy. And the movie 55 Days at Peking will remain an absolute classic, despite its poetic license in presenting the Western powers as the good guys... Diana Preston's book on the topic is foundational and anybody interested in the topic should read it. It reads like a novel.
As for the figures I think that today's standards have evolved so much over the past years that we're really ready to have a new version of the Red Box sets. I have the figures at home and, really, they are not a great bunch, for many reasons. The sculpting is poor, the size too small and the details all but absent. One needs a lot of imagination (which we all have I'm sure....) to use them. Conversely, while the figures for the Western powers are quite poor, those of the Chinese boxers are rather OK.
At the same time they are all we have at the moment, and I do hope that either Red-Box themselves or perhaps even Strelets will take the baton and revisit this fabulous period of the world's history.