Why were the Boxers unable to defeat heavily-outnumbered, surrounded Westerners in the Beijing Legation Quarter?

by fiftythreestudio
EnclavedMicrostate

More can of course be said, especially by someone who has read up on the Boxers in more detail more recently and can thus remember the details better, but as I note in passing in this past answer, the siege of the Legations was primarily an effort of the Qing regular army overseen by Ronglu, who was an anti-Boxer with reformist sentiments and seems to have been reluctant to prosecute the siege to the fullest extent.