The Boxer Indemnity represented China’s largest single amount of war reparations, with a devastating financial impact on China and a direct bearing on the financial difficulties that the Chinese government and people endured for thirty-nine years thereafter. But with fortuitous changes in the international situation, China was able to have a portion of the reparations forgiven and to defer compensation to certain countries, so that the actual amount of payments then did not amount to as much as it had in the first years immediately after the Boxer War.