Peoples of Europe, preserve your most sacred goods!

is a picture made by the history painter Hermann Knackfuß after a design by Emperor Wilhelm II in 1895, as a gift from the German Emperor to the Russian Tsar Nicholas II Depicted is Archangel Michael (as patron saint of the Germans), who, surrounded by a number of women symbolising the peoples of Europe as national allegories (Germania, Britannia etc.

), points to a Buddha hovering in dark storm clouds over a European landscape from the east.

With this allegorical Wilhelm II wanted to call on European Christendom to fight together against the Yellow Peril or godless Buddhism.

Kaiser Wilhelm presented this painting to the Russian Tsar with the request to keep the influences from the East under control (the imminent danger of a Chinese onslaught mobilised by Japan).

The female figures, seen from right to left, are personifications of France (Marianne), Germany (Germania), Russia (Mother Russia), Austria-Hungary (Austria), Italy (Italia) and Great Britain (Britannia).

Kaiser Wilhelm II used the allegorical lithograph Peoples of Europe, Preserve your most Sacred Goods! (1895), by Hermann Knackfuss , to promote Yellow Peril ideology as geopolitical justification for European colonialism in China.