The events that followed are difficult to document, because unlike the Siege of the International Legations in Beijing in the summer of 1900, no Westerners survived to recount them and even some of the official record was clearly altered. The usual account states that Yuxian called 18 Western missionaries and their families a total of 44 or 45 people, including women and children to Taiyuan under the false pretense of protecting them, and that he had them all executed on July 9 in the compound of the provincial government. See for instance , , and . This longstanding account of the "Taiyuan massacre" is based on a detailed document first published on 29 April 1941 that purported to be by an eyewitness: a Chinese convert named Yong Zheng. Historian Roger R. Thompson has questioned this document because it appeared nine months after the events, contains an unusual amount of detail on the individual fate of each victim, and is similar in style and details to "Foxe's Book of Martyrs", a book that was highly influential in British evangelical circles at the time. Using Chinese official documents and missionary accounts written between June and September 1900, he concludes that the "weight of evidence" indicates that the missionaries had been killed by a violent mob rather than on Yuxian's orders.