Boxer Rebellion Project - Too long in the making

Hello to all and I hope that your Holidays were happy and pleasant!
I have decided to start posting a brief history of my ongoing Boxer Rebellion project that focuses on the 55 day siege at Peking. I have always been interested in the historical events where one side no matter how heavily outnumbered or unlikely to survive, manage to pull out the victory and live to fight another day. Examples are of course Roarkes Drift, The Alamo (even though they did not make it) Major Dundee crossing the Rio Grande (oh wait, that's not historical).
So about 20 years ago I decided to do the siege of the Legations in Peking. Over the course of the years I have drawn up maps of the Legation area and translated them onto tables. I have collected books on the subject and even obtained a copy of the official report written by a British officer. I acquired figures from wherever and whenever I could and even have most of them painted!
As you can see from my first picture, I had the grand idea of presenting this game on two tables using the canal as the dividing line (this was actually dry during the time of the siege).

The larger table was to be 5'X12' and the smaller one was to be a ping pong table about 5'X8'. Populating this size of an area would have been a tremendous task and I began to lag behind in completing this project.
But urged on by Bill, one of the 'Gang of Four', our war gaming group, I have begun the process of finishing this project.
First I will compress the Legations onto one table, the 5'X12'. After having done this and added the dry canal to the layout, I will paint up any lacking buildings(about 3 or 4) and add more Boxers to my forces.
Here you can see the table with many of the building just placed anywhere just to get an idea of space. The base for this project are multiple tiles of 3/4" dense foam painted and flocked in grass ground and road surfaces. There are about 32 of these and I will need to modify the center ones to accommodate the canal.
More on the details of this later.

Soon to follow will be pictures of the general layout of the Legations without all the details. Here though are pictures of most of the figures for the game. As mentioned earlier, I have been working on this for many years. The figured are made by Falcon (the old 25mm ones from Medford Massachusetts), Foundry, Richard Houston and Old Glory. There are about 400 Imperial Chinese and 100 Boxers. The Legation forces are naturally much smaller but I think all told there are about 120 of them. Not all figures are shown in these pictures but here is a preview.

Thanks for looking and I will update you as I go along. Special rules and some notes on scenery and figures will also be included.
Take care and good gaming.
Greg