Zheng Chenggong: Born in Japan, Raised in China, Died in Taiwan at Age Thirty-Seven
30-second overview: Zheng Chenggong (1624–1662) was the son of a pirate, of mixed Chinese and Japanese heritage, a Southern Ming general, and a conqueror of Taiwan — and he lived only thirty-seven years. Before age seven he was called “Fumatsu” in Japan; at twenty-one the emperor granted him the surname “Zhu”; at thirty-seven he seized Taiwan from the Dutch; five months later he was dead. For four centuries, the Qing called him a traitor, Japan a mixed-race hero, the Republic of China a “sacred king who opened the land,” and the indigenous peoples of the land he conquered have all but vanished from the story.
On April 2, 1661, four hundred sailboats appeared off the coast near Lukang, Taiwan.
Frederick Coyett (揆一), the Dutch East India Company’s governor of Taiwan, stood on the walls of Fort Zeelandia and watched the island he had defended for five years slip away. Inside the fortress, only 905 soldiers remained; facing them across the water were 25,000 Ming Zheng troops who had crossed the Taiwan Strait from Kinmen. In his memoir Neglected Formosa, Coyett later wrote of these soldiers, who wore iron scale armor and “bent their heads behind their shields, charging into enemy ranks with indescribable fury and fearlessness… pressing forward without ceasing, like mad dogs, not even glancing back to see if their comrades kept pace.”
The man who led this army had once been a seven-year-old picking up seashells on a Japanese beach, known then as Fumatsu.
The Pirate’s Son from the Coast
On August 27, 1624, in the fishing village of Nagasaki no Hama in Hirado, Japan, a Japanese woman named Lady Tanaka gave birth to a child on a rocky outcrop by the sea. According to legend, she had been gathering shells when she suddenly felt labor pains and gave birth right there. That rock was later named “Childbirth Stone” and remains a tourist attraction in Hirado to this day.
The child’s father, Zheng Zhilong, was not present. A Chinese man from Nan’an in Fujian Province, he was busy building his own maritime empire: by trade a merchant, in reality the leader of one of the largest pirate fleets in East Asia. He monopolized the sea route from the Chinese coast to Nagasaki, and even the Dutch East India Company suffered defeat at his hands in the 1633 Battle of Liaoluo Bay.
Fumatsu spent his first seven years in carefree childhood in Hirado. In 1631, his father brought him back to Anping in Fujian and renamed him Zheng Sen. A child raised in Japan suddenly thrust into China’s imperial examination system, he adapted remarkably well. In 1638 he passed the county-level civil service exam, and in 1644 he entered the National Academy in Nanjing, studying under the great scholar Qian Qianyi. Qian, wishing to encourage his student, gave him the literary name “Damo.”
Had the Ming Dynasty not fallen, Zheng Sen might have become a scholar-official and left no mark on history at all.
From Scholar to Soldier: A Nation’s Collapse
Everything fell apart in 1644. Li Zicheng marched into Beijing, and the Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself. The Southern Ming established their court in exile in Fuzhou, and the Hongguang Emperor took the throne — backed by Zheng Zhilong’s military strength and wealth.
The Hongguang Emperor deeply favored the young Zheng Sen and granted him the surname “Zhu,” renaming him “Zheng Chenggong.” From then on he styled himself “Son of the Imperial Family” (guoxing ye) — the origin of the title “Koxinga.” The Western world adopted the Southern Min pronunciation, spelling it “Koxinga,” which is how he is best known in international history.
But Zheng Zhilong had other plans. In 1646, as Qing forces advanced southward into Fujian, this pirate-turned-warlord accepted the Qing court’s empty promise of a governorship and surrendered. Zheng Chenggong tried to dissuade him but failed. He walked into the Confucian temple in Nanping, burned his scholar’s robes, and knelt before the spirit tablet of Confucius in tears, declaring: “Once I was your son; now I am your orphaned subject. As for loyalty and departure, each must follow his own path. I thank you for the robes, and humbly ask the ancient master to enlighten me.”
He took up arms at age twenty-two.
Even crueler blows followed. In the spring of 1647, Qing troops attacked Anping, Zheng Zhilong’s hometown. Zheng Chenggong’s mother, Lady Tanaka — the Japanese woman who had given birth to him on that rocky shore — refused to flee with her husband. When the Qing army breached the city walls, she took her own life.
That trauma became the core fuel of Zheng Chenggong’s sixteen-year resistance against the Qing.
Maritime Empire: A War Machine with its Capital at Xiamen
Zheng Chenggong inherited his father’s maritime power, but his rise was far from smooth. His first enemy was not the Qing, but his own relatives. On the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1650, he traveled to Xiamen to pay respects to his uncle Zheng Lian, only to ambush and kill him, seizing control of Xiamen and Kinmen. Zheng Lian’s older brother, Zheng Cai, hearing the news, dared not resist and surrendered military command without a fight.
The Zheng family’s maritime empire was more than just military force — it was one of the largest smuggling and trade networks in East Asia. The Zheng clan controlled shipping routes from the Fujian coast to Nagasaki and Southeast Asia, collecting “sea tolls” from passing merchant vessels, generating revenues in the millions annually. The Dutch East India Company’s Taiwan office repeatedly reported that the Zheng fleet’s scale far exceeded the VOC’s entire naval presence in Asia. This model of “trade-fed warfare, warfare-protected trade” allowed Zheng Chenggong to maintain a massive army for nearly a decade without holding any fixed territory.
For the next decade, he used his naval superiority to clash repeatedly with Qing forces along the Fujian coast. Between 1651 and 1652, the Zheng army won victories at Cizao, Qianshan, Xiaoying, and Jiangdong Bridge. At Jiangdong Bridge, Zheng Chenggong leveraged his intimate knowledge of the local terrain, laying an ambush along the bridge and decisively defeating the Qing commander Chen Jin, then besieging Zhangzhou for half a month. The suffering inside the city was recorded by the Qing Fujian surveillance commissioner Wang Yingyuan: “A single stone of rice cost five hundred and fifty taels; even rats, mice, and sparrows searched for food until nothing remained. Fathers and sons ate one another, and households that did not cook fires lasted barely a month.”
But victory was not linear. At the end of 1652, the Qing general Jin Li led a massive force of tens of thousands to counterattack, seeing through Zheng Chenggong’s very same ambush tactic at Jiangdong. In the chaos, five Zheng admirals and commanders fell in battle. At the 1653 Battle of Haicheng, Zheng Chenggong personally rode to the front lines to rally his troops, narrowly surviving an artillery blast. In the end, he judged that the Qing’s gunpowder supplies were nearly exhausted, and launched a fiery counterattack while they were crossing the river, barely holding onto his base.
The Shunzong Emperor twice sent envoys to grant Zheng Chenggong the title “Prince of Haicheng,” but he refused. Negotiations for peace repeatedly broke down.
Nanjing Campaign: The Moment Closest to Reversal
The 1659 Nanjing campaign was the closest Zheng Chenggong ever came to rewriting history. He assembled his naval elite forces, sailed up the Yangtze River by sea, and captured coastal cities one by one, advancing all the way to the Southern Ming’s former capital of Nanjing.
Panic spread through the Qing capital. A French missionary recorded in 1671 that Manchu nobles once considered abandoning Beijing and relocating northeastward. A Qing official in Beijing wrote to his family in Nanjing saying, “All news and correspondence from Nanjing has been cut off,” and that rumors of Zheng Chenggong’s “iron army, invincible wherever they go,” had him preparing to defect. Zheng Chenggong’s forces intercepted these letters.
But Zheng Chenggong made a fatal strategic error. He sought to recreate his father’s glorious victory at the Battle of Liaoluo Bay, insisting on waiting for a decisive showdown rather than pressing his advantage and storming the city in the chaos. For nearly three weeks — beginning August 24 — the siege dragged on, but the Zheng forces could not fully encircle the city, allowing the Qing to secure supplies and reinforcements. When Qing cavalry charged out from within the city walls, the Zheng army fled back to their ships.
Reading those intercepted letters, Zheng Chenggong may have begun to regret his delay. But by then, it was too late.
After retreating to Xiamen, the Qing court issued an edict ordering the evacuation of all residents within thirty li of the coast, burning homes and ships, severing all supply lines to the Zheng forces. The entire southeastern coast became a wasteland. Zheng Chenggong needed a new base of operations, or his maritime empire would suffocate under the blockade.
Nine Months: From Landing to Nation-Building
In 1659, a man named He Bin escaped from the Dutch and arrived in Xiamen with a map of Taiwan and a proposal: conquer Taiwan.
Zheng Chenggong’s motivation was pragmatic: food shortages. But his final ultimatum to the Dutch bristled with imperial rhetoric: “Taiwan has always belonged to China; the Dutch are merely temporary guests permitted to stay. Now that China needs this land, foreign strangers ought to step aside.”
On March 23, 1661, the Zheng fleet set sail from Liaoluo Bay in Kinmen. Four hundred sailboats carrying roughly 25,000 soldiers crossed the Taiwan Strait, navigating the shallow waters near Lukang that the Dutch did not know about, and landed directly in Tainan.
The Dutch resistance proved far stronger than expected. On the very day of landing, after the Zheng forces slipped through the Dutch-unmapped shallows, three Dutch warships charged to intercept them. Several sailboats were sunk, but the flagship Hector exploded when enemy fire ignited its powder magazine, sinking and costing the Dutch control of the sea.
The garrison at Fort Provintia (the Red Lantern Tower) surrendered within four days, with only 140 defenders. But Fort Zeelandia was a different matter entirely: a multi-layered European-style fortress defended by 905 Dutch soldiers and heavily armed with cannons. The Zheng forces’ iron armor and cold weapons proved costly against artillery fire. The siege lasted nine full months.
During those nine months, the Zheng army’s greatest enemy was not the Dutch, but disease. Of the original 25,000 soldiers, roughly 12,500 died from illness or desertion during the siege — a casualty rate of nearly 50%. A Dutch relief fleet of twelve ships and seven hundred sailors from Batavia was also destroyed in naval combat: one warship sunk, two scuttled, three captured.
On February 1, 1662, Coyett finally signed the surrender treaty. The Dutch ended their 38-year colonial rule in Taiwan.
Zheng Chenggong declared the founding of a new state, establishing the “Administrative Office of the Celestial Order” (Chengtianfu), with Dapeng (modern-day Tainan) as the capital, organizing one prefecture and two counties (Tianxing and Wan’nian), implementing a military-agricultural colonization system — soldiers settling the land and becoming self-sufficient. He introduced Chinese-style administrative systems, taxation, and the civil service examination, while maintaining his maritime trade network.
But the territory of the “Kingdom of Eastern Peace” (Dongning Guo) was not limited to Taiwan. According to research by the Taiwan Historical Research Institute, the Zheng domain at its founding still included Kinmen, Xiamen, Tongshan, and Nangan along the Fujian coast — Taiwan was an expansion of their realm, not its entirety. They still nominally used the Southern Ming Yongli era name, and even printed their own calendar, the Great Ming Restoration Yongli Great Sovereign Calendar — adding the word “Restoration” to emphasize their mission to revive the fallen Ming and restore the imperial house. A copy of the 1677 Yongli calendar survives today in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, documenting the trade relations between the Zheng court and the British East India Company, who were invited to establish a trading post on the island.
This maritime power centered on Taiwan governed for twenty-one years — as officially designated by the Taiwan History Museum — until it was destroyed by Qing forces in 1683.
The Omitted Page: The People Beneath His Feet
In the narrative of the “Sacred King Who Opened the Land,” one group is almost entirely erased.
When the Zheng army landed in Taiwan, the island was home to hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples. The Ming Zheng regime implemented a military-agricultural colonization policy, flooding the island with Han settlers and systematically appropriating indigenous land. According to Dutch and Qing records, the exact number of casualties from campaigns against indigenous tribes during the Ming Zheng period is difficult to determine, but over 2,200 indigenous people died in conflicts during the siege alone.
Zheng Chenggong is celebrated as having “opened the land,” but for the indigenous peoples, he opened the first page of a long history of dispossession. This contradiction remains largely unaddressed — the King Tai-su (Jingming) Temple in Tainan thrives with incense offerings, and all 63 “Sacred King Who Opened the Land” temples across Taiwan hold annual festivals, yet discourse on the violence of Ming Zheng colonization remains marginalized.
Age Thirty-Seven: A Death Without Answers
Five months after founding the state, on June 23, 1662, Zheng Chenggong died suddenly in Anping. He was thirty-seven years old.
The cause of death remains a mystery. Official records say he fell ill suddenly. Folk legends are more dramatic — it is said that upon learning his son Zheng Jing was having an affair with a wet nurse and had fathered an illegitimate child, he flew into a rage, “stamping his feet, grinding his fists, screaming until he died.” Some scholars suspect malaria or mental collapse.
Before his death, he was planning something even greater: an invasion of Luzon in the Spanish Philippines, to avenge the massacre of Chinese residents there (the Fourth Chinese Massacre, 1662). Had he lived ten more years, Southeast Asian history might have been entirely rewritten.
But he did not. After Zheng Jing succeeded him, the Ming Zheng dynasty lasted another twenty-one years, until 1683, when it was destroyed by Shi Lang — the very general who had once killed Zheng Zhilong and his brother.
Four Regimes, Four Versions of Zheng Chenggong
Perhaps most fascinating is how Zheng Chenggong’s legacy has been rewritten again and again after his death.
The Qing Dynasty called him “Zheng Chenggong” — a name that was itself a political maneuver. He spent his life styling himself “Zhu Chenggong” (the surname granted by the emperor), but the Qing refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Southern Ming, forcibly restoring his original family name. To them, he was a rebel and a pirate.
Japan, after the Meiji Restoration, rediscovered this “mixed-race hero.” The kabuki play The Glorious Battle of the Kokusen-ya (1715) by Matsuemon Konosuke is still performed today. The Childbirth Stone in Hirado has become a tourist attraction. To Japan, Zheng Chenggong proved the superiority of Japanese bloodlines.
The Republic of China government, upon arriving in Taiwan, shaped Zheng Chenggong into a “pioneer of counter-liberation” — a historical model of retreating from the mainland to Taiwan and plotting a counterattack from the island. The King Tai-su Temple was rebuilt in 1963 as a Chinese palace-style structure (originally Minnan-style), with the architecture itself rewritten by politics.
Contemporary Taiwan faces an even more complex situation: Zheng Chenggong is both the starting point of Han migration history and the starting point of indigenous dispossession history. Was he an “opener of the land” or a “colonizer”? The incense fires of all 63 Sacred King Who Opened the Land temples burn brightly alongside the demands of indigenous transitional justice, coexisting on the same island. Since 2016, “multi-perspective historiography” has gradually entered textbooks, and the chapter on Zheng Chenggong no longer tells only the heroic narrative — it also begins to mention the Ming Zheng regime’s expropriation of land from the Paiwan people.
Taiwanese historians have proposed renaming “Zheng Chenggong” to “Zhu Chenggong” — after all, he used that name his entire life and never referred to himself as “Zheng.” But since “Zheng Chenggong” has become conventional usage, the Tainan City Literature Committee declined to adopt the change.
A man whose very name is decided by his enemies may be the most accurate reflection of his fate. He was born in Japan but never recognized as Japanese; he grew up in China but chose a path opposite to his father; he founded a nation in Taiwan but died five months later. In his thirty-seven years, he belonged to three homelands — and none of them were truly his own.
Four centuries later, in Anping, Tainan, the bronze statue of Zheng Chenggong in front of the King Tai-su Temple faces westward — toward the Chinese mainland he spent his life trying to reclaim but never set foot on. Beneath his feet lies the island that would grow into something he could never have imagined.
References
- Wikipedia: Koxinga — Comprehensive English-language academic sources
- Wikipedia: Siege of Fort Zeelandia — Military details of the siege
- Chinese Wikipedia: Zheng Chenggong — Citations from Chinese-language historical materials
- National Digital Library of China: Zheng Chenggong and Taiwan — Ministry of Culture official digital archive
- Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica — Academic research on Taiwan history
- Tonio Andrade, _Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West_ — Princeton University Press; the most detailed English-language scholarly work on the Fort Zeelandia siege
- Frederick Coyett, _Neglected Formosa_ — Memoirs of the last Dutch governor, a primary source
- Matsuemon Konosuke, _The Glorious Battle of the Kokusen-ya_ — 1715 kabuki play, the Japanese perspective on Zheng Chenggong
- Hirado Tourism Association: Birthplace of Zheng Chenggong — Childbirth Stone and related historical sites
- King Tai-su Temple — Tainan City Government Cultural Affairs Bureau — Taiwan’s most representative Zheng Chenggong shrine
- Wills, John E. Jr., "Maritime Asia, 1500-1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination" — The Zheng family in the maritime trade system of East Asia
- 《Taiwan Waiji》 — By Jiang Risheng, original text of Zheng Chenggong’s oath of burning his robes
- Taiwan History Museum “Taiwan History Village”: 2-4 Eastern Peace Kingdom — The 21 Years of the Zheng Dynasty — Official educational resources from the National Taiwan History Museum
- The Great Ming Restoration Yongli Great Sovereign Calendar, Year 31 (1677) — Held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, documenting trade relations between the Zheng court and the British East India Company