Koxinga

Koxinga began life far from the Chinese mainland he would spend his adulthood defending. He was born on August 28, 1624, in Hirado, a port town on the Japanese island of Kyushu, and given the childhood name Fukumatsu ^[1]. His father, Zheng Zhilong, was a Fujianese trader and sometime pirate who commanded one of the largest private fleets in East Asian waters. His mother, known in Chinese sources as Tagawa Matsu, came from a local Hirado family ^[2].

The boy spent his first six years in Japan before his father, by then reconciled with the Ming court and holding an official naval commission, brought him to the family base in Fujian province around 1630. There he received a rigorous classical education under the name Zheng Sen. He passed the county-level examinations as a teenager and in 1644 enrolled at the Imperial Academy in Nanjing, where he studied under the celebrated scholar Qian Qianyi ^[1].

That same year the Ming order collapsed. Rebels took Beijing, the Chongzhen emperor hanged himself, and Manchu armies poured through the Great Wall to found the Qing dynasty. Ming loyalists proclaimed a series of refugee courts in the south, and the Zheng family, with its ships and its money, suddenly mattered a great deal to the dynasty's survival ^[3].

In 1645 the young scholar was presented to the Longwu emperor, one of the southern Ming claimants, at Fuzhou. The emperor, impressed and childless, bestowed on him the imperial surname Zhu and a new personal name, Chenggong. From the honorific Guoxingye, meaning Lord of the Imperial Surname, foreigners later derived the name Koxinga ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Koxinga is really asking about this adopted son of a dying dynasty.

The alliance between throne and merchant family did not hold. When Qing forces invaded Fujian in 1646, Zheng Zhilong calculated that resistance was hopeless and defected, expecting rank and reward. The Qing instead kept him as a hostage in Beijing and executed him in 1661 when his son refused to submit ^[2]. Koxinga's mother died during the Qing assault on the family stronghold at Anping, a loss that contemporaries said hardened his resolve ^[4].

Rejecting his father's surrender, Koxinga raised his own banner in 1647 with a small band of followers. Over the following decade he rebuilt the Zheng maritime organization into a hybrid of trading empire and loyalist army, funding his campaigns through the silk, sugar, and porcelain trade with Japan and Southeast Asia. From bases at Xiamen (Amoy) and Jinmen he raided the Fujian coast and defended the maritime corridor the Qing could not close ^[3].

Any honest account of Koxinga achievements must begin with the 1659 campaign that nearly changed the war. That summer he led a fleet carrying an army reckoned in the tens of thousands up the Yangzi River, capturing Zhenjiang and besieging Nanjing, the Ming southern capital. Qing defenders stalled the siege, counterattacked, and inflicted a crushing defeat that destroyed much of his veteran force ^[1]. He retreated to Xiamen, where in 1660 he repelled a Qing fleet sent to finish him, but the mainland cause was plainly failing.

His answer was to look east. Taiwan, held since 1624 by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) from its castle at Fort Zeelandia, offered land, grain, and a defensible base. Guided in part by He Bin, a Chinese interpreter who had worked for the Dutch, Koxinga crossed the Taiwan Strait in April 1661 with several hundred ships and an army of roughly 25,000 men ^[5].

His troops landed through the Luermen channel, overwhelmed the smaller Fort Provintia within days, and settled into a nine-month siege of Zeelandia. A Dutch relief squadron from Batavia failed to break the blockade. On February 1, 1662, Governor Frederick Coyett signed a surrender that allowed the Dutch garrison to depart with personal property, ending thirty-eight years of VOC rule on the island ^[5]. Koxinga renamed the fortress town Anping and set about organizing a government, distributing land to his soldiers under a military colonization scheme and founding what became known as the Kingdom of Tungning, the first Han Chinese polity on Taiwan ^[6].

Koxinga married Dong You, the daughter of a Fujian official, and their eldest son Zheng Jing, born in 1642, eventually succeeded him. Contemporary accounts and later histories describe a large household of secondary consorts and at least ten sons, several of whom held commands in the family organization ^[2].

His dual heritage shaped both his life and his afterlife. Raised in Japan until age six and educated as a Confucian gentleman in China, he moved between the worlds of scholarship, commerce, and war. Observers noted his severity: he enforced discipline through frequent executions, and his rages in the final year of his life extended even to members of his own family, whom he ordered punished over a scandal involving Zheng Jing ^[4].

He was also a man of the examination hall who never lost the habits of a literatus. Poems attributed to him survive, and his insistence on Ming ritual, dress, and calendar on Taiwan reflected a conviction that he was preserving a civilization, not merely a dynasty ^[3].

Victory on Taiwan brought little rest. The new state faced food shortages, and Koxinga pushed land reclamation hard, sending military colonies into the countryside, a policy that provoked clashes with indigenous Taiwanese communities, including a serious defeat of one of his detachments by villagers in the Taokas region ^[6].

He also looked beyond the island. In early 1662 he sent the Dominican friar Vittorio Riccio to Manila demanding tribute from the Spanish Philippines, a threat that panicked the colonial government and contributed to violence against the Chinese community there. Plans for an expedition never matured ^[3].

The blows of that spring came quickly: news of his father's execution in Beijing, the strangling of the Yongli emperor (the last southern Ming claimant) by Wu Sangui in Yunnan, and the bitter dispute with his heir. In June 1662, only months after the Dutch surrender, Koxinga fell gravely ill, possibly with malaria, and died on June 23 at age thirty-seven ^[1]. Zheng Jing won the succession struggle that followed and ruled Tungning until his own death; the Qing admiral Shi Lang finally conquered the island in 1683 ^[6].

Few figures have been claimed by so many rival traditions. Qing emperors, who had fought him for a lifetime, later honored him as a paragon of loyalty to one's dynasty. Japanese audiences knew him through Chikamatsu Monzaemon's enormously popular 1715 puppet play The Battles of Coxinga, which celebrated his half-Japanese parentage ^[4]. In the twentieth century Chinese nationalists praised him as the man who recovered Taiwan from Western colonizers, while in Taiwan he is venerated as Kaishan Shengwang, the sage king who opened the island, with temples such as the Koxinga shrine in Tainan still active today ^[6].

Historians treat him with more caution. His conquest displaced the Dutch but also began an era of intensive Han settlement that transformed, and often dispossessed, Taiwan's indigenous peoples. His regime was a family enterprise as much as a loyalist government, sustained by the trading profits his father had first assembled ^[3].

The basic Koxinga facts nonetheless secure his importance: a Ming loyalist who held the Qing at bay along the coast for fifteen years, the victor of one of the first major defeats inflicted on a European colonial power in Asia, and the founder of the state from which modern Taiwanese history is conventionally dated. Every serious Koxinga biography returns to that improbable arc, from a fishing town in Kyushu to a throne at Anping ^[5].