Koxinga: Born in Japan, Raised in China, Dead at Thirty-Seven in Taiwan
30-second overview: Koxinga (1624–1662) was the son of a pirate, half-Japanese, a Southern Ming general, and the conqueror of Taiwan—and he lived only thirty-seven years. Before age seven he was called "Fusong" in Japan; at twenty-one the emperor gave him the imperial surname "Zhu"; at thirty-seven he took Taiwan from the Dutch; five months later he was dead. For four centuries, the Qing called him a rebel, Japan called him a mixed-blood hero, the Nationalist government called him the "Sacred King Who Opened Taiwan," and beneath his feet lived the indigenous peoples no one mentioned.
On April 2, 1661, four hundred sailing ships appeared off the coast of Lu'ermen in Tainan.
Frederick Coyett, governor of the Dutch East India Company's Taiwan operation, stood on the walls of Fort Zeelandia watching the island he had defended for five years about to change hands. Inside the fortress were only 905 soldiers; arrayed against them were 25,000 troops of the Zheng regime who had crossed from Kinmen. Coyett later wrote in his memoir Neglected Formosa that the soldiers wore iron scale armor, "bent their heads behind their shields, and charged into the enemy ranks with boundless ferocity and fearless courage … pressing forward ceaselessly, like mad dogs, without even looking back to see if their comrades followed."
The man who led this army had, before the age of seven, been picking shells on a Japanese beach. His name was Fusong.
Son of a Pirate, Born on the Shore of Senrigahama
On August 27, 1624, on the rocks of Senrigahama at Kawachiura on Hirado Island in Kyushu, Japan, a Japanese woman named Tagawa gave birth to a son. Legend has it she was gathering shells when sudden labor pains struck, and she delivered the child right there on the rock—later known as the "Childbirth Stone," still a tourist attraction in Hirado today.
The child's father, Zheng Zhilong, was not present. This Chinese man from Nan'an, Fujian, was busy running his maritime empire—a merchant in name, but in practice one of the largest pirate fleet commanders in East Asia. He monopolized the shipping lanes from the China coast to Nagasaki, and even the Dutch East India Company had been crushingly defeated by him at the Battle of Liaoluo Bay in 1633.
Fusong spent seven carefree childhood years in Hirado. In 1631, his father brought him back to Anping in Fujian and renamed him Zheng Sen. A child raised in Japan was suddenly thrust into China's imperial examination system—and he adapted remarkably well. He passed the county-level examination in 1638 and entered the Imperial Academy in Nanjing in 1644, studying under the great Jiang-Zhe scholar Qian Qianyi. To encourage his student, Qian gave him the courtesy name "Damu" (Great Timber).
If the Ming dynasty had not fallen, Zheng Sen might have become a minor civil servant and left no trace in history.
From Scholar to Warrior: A Nation Destroyed, a Family Shattered
In 1644, everything collapsed. Li Zicheng captured Beijing; the Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself. The Southern Ming established a rump court in Fuzhou, and the Longwu Emperor ascended the throne—propped up by Zheng Zhilong's military power and wealth.
The Longwu Emperor was deeply impressed by the young Zheng Sen and bestowed upon him the imperial surname "Zhu" and the new name "Chenggong" (Success). From then on he styled himself "Lord of the Imperial Surname Chenggong" and never changed it in his lifetime—this is the origin of the title "Lord of the Imperial Surname" (Koxinga). Western sources adopted the Hokkien pronunciation, rendering it "Koxinga," the name by which he is most widely known in international historiography.
But Zheng Zhilong had other plans. In 1646, as Qing armies advanced into Fujian, the pirate-born father accepted the Qing court's hollow promise of "Governor-General of Fujian and Guangdong" and surrendered with his followers. When Zheng Chenggong's pleas to stop him failed, he walked into the Nan'an Confucian Temple, burned his scholar's robes before the altar of Confucius, and swore through tears: "In the past I was a student; today I am a lone minister. Loyalty and betrayal, staying and going—each follows his own path. I respectfully return these scholar's robes and beg the First Master to bear witness." (From Waiji of Taiwan)
He cast aside the pen and took up the sword at twenty-two.
A crueler blow followed. In the spring of 1647, Qing troops stormed the Zheng family's hometown of Anping. Zheng Chenggong's mother Tagawa—the Japanese woman who had given birth to him on the rocks of Senrigahama—refused to follow her husband in surrender. When Qing forces breached the city walls, she took her own life.
This trauma became the core fuel for Zheng Chenggong's sixteen-year war against the Qing.
A Maritime Empire: A War Machine with Xiamen as Its Capital
Zheng Chenggong inherited his father's maritime power, but the beginning was difficult. His first enemy was not the Qing army but his own kinsmen. On the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1650, he arranged a visit to his uncle Zheng Lian in Xiamen, and when the uncle let his guard down, stabbed him to death, seizing Xiamen and Kinmen as his base. Zheng Lian's elder brother Zheng Cai, upon hearing the news, dared not resist and handed over his military command without a fight.
The Zheng maritime empire was more than a military force—it was one of the largest smuggling and trade networks in East Asia. The Zheng family controlled shipping lanes from the Fujian coast to Nagasaki and Southeast Asia, levying "sea route taxes" on passing merchant vessels, with annual revenues in the millions. The Dutch East India Company's Taiwan bureau repeatedly reported that the Zheng fleet's size far exceeded the total VOC naval strength in Asia. This model of funding war through trade and protecting trade through war allowed Zheng Chenggong to maintain a massive army for a decade without fixed territory.
For the next ten years, he used his naval superiority to fight a seesaw war with Qing forces along the Fujian coast. In 1651–1652, the Zheng army won consecutive victories at Cizao, Qianshan, Xiaoyingling, and Jiangdong Bridge. At the Battle of Jiangdong Bridge, Zheng Chenggong exploited his familiarity with southern Fujian terrain, ambushing the Qing commander Chen Jin at the bridge and then besieging Zhangzhou for six months. The horror inside the city was recorded by Qing Fujian inspector Wang Yingyuan: "A picul of rice cost up to 550 taels of silver. Roots, leaves, rats, sparrows, cattle, and horses were all consumed; then came human flesh. Fathers and sons ate each other. For over a month, no cooking fires were lit." (From Wang Yingyuan's memorial)
But victory was not a straight line. In late 1652, the Qing general Jin Li led a force of ten thousand in a counteroffensive, seeing through the same ambush tactics Zheng Chenggong had used at Jiangdong. In the chaotic fighting, five of Zheng's regional commanders and garrison officers were killed. At the Battle of Haicheng in 1653, Zheng Chenggong went to the front lines to rally his troops and nearly took a cannonball—he held on only by judging that the Qing forces' gunpowder was spent, then counterattacking with fire as they crossed the river.
The Shunzhi Emperor twice sent envoys offering to enfeoff him as "Duke of Haicheng." Zheng Chenggong refused. Negotiations broke down again and again.
The Nanjing Campaign: The Closest He Came to Changing History
The 1659 Nanjing campaign was the moment Zheng Chenggong came closest to rewriting history. He assembled his naval elite, launched a surprise attack up the Yangtze from the sea, captured coastal cities including Zhenjiang, and drove straight toward Nanjing, the old Southern Ming capital.
Panic spread through the Qing capital. A French missionary recorded in 1671 that the Manchu nobility briefly considered abandoning Beijing and retreating to the northeast. A Qing official in Beijing wrote to his family in Nanjing that "all news and communications from Nanjing have been cut off," that Zheng Chenggong's "Iron Army is rumored to be invincible," and told his family to prepare to defect to the Zheng forces—he himself was preparing to defect. Zheng Chenggong's troops intercepted these letters.
But Zheng Chenggong made a fatal strategic error. He wanted to replicate his father's triumph at the Battle of Liaoluo Bay, where a single decisive engagement settled everything, and insisted on waiting for a grand decisive battle rather than exploiting the chaos to storm the city immediately. The siege of Nanjing lasted nearly three weeks—from August 24—but the Zheng army could not complete the encirclement, allowing the Qing defenders to receive supplies and reinforcements. When Qing cavalry sallied from the city, the Zheng troops broke and fled back to their ships.
After reading those intercepted letters, Zheng Chenggong may have already begun to regret his delay. But it was too late.
After retreating to Xiamen, the Qing court issued the Great Clearance edict, forcibly relocating all coastal residents thirty li inland, burning homes and boats, and completely cutting off supply lines to the Zheng forces. The southeastern coast was reduced to scorched earth. Zheng Chenggong needed a new base, or his maritime empire would suffocate under the blockade.
Nine Months: From Landing to Founding a Kingdom
In 1659, a man named He Bin fled from the Dutch to Xiamen, bringing a map of Taiwan and a proposal: take Taiwan.
Zheng Chenggong's motivation was practical—the food supply problem. But his ultimatum to the Dutch was couched in imperial language: "Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times; the Dutch were merely permitted to reside there temporarily. Now that China needs this land, outsiders should make way." (From Dutch documentary sources)
On March 23, 1661, the Zheng fleet set sail from Liaoluo Bay in Kinmen. Four hundred sailing ships carrying approximately 25,000 soldiers crossed the Taiwan Strait, passing through a shallow channel the Dutch did not know about at Lu'ermen, and arrived directly at Tainan.
Dutch resistance was far fiercer than expected. On the day of landing, after the Zheng forces passed through the shallow channel unknown to the Dutch, three Dutch warships sortied to intercept—sinking several junks, but the flagship Hector exploded and sank when its powder magazine was ignited by gunfire, and the Dutch lost command of the sea.
Fort Provintia (Chikanlou) had a garrison of only 140 men and surrendered within four days. But Fort Zeelandia was another matter—this multi-walled European fortress was defended by 905 Dutch soldiers armed with numerous cannons. Zheng's iron scale armor and cold steel came at a terrible cost against artillery. The siege lasted a full nine months.
During those nine months, the Zheng army's greatest enemy was not the Dutch but disease. Of the 25,000 soldiers, approximately 12,500 were lost to illness or desertion during the siege—a casualty rate of 50%. A Dutch relief fleet of 12 ships and 700 sailors sent from Batavia was also routed in a naval engagement: one warship sunk, two abandoned, three captured.
On February 1, 1662, Coyett finally signed the surrender treaty. The Dutch ended 38 years of colonial rule in Taiwan.
Zheng Chenggong declared the "founding of a state and establishment of a dynasty," created Chengtian Prefecture, made Dayuan (modern Tainan) his capital, established one prefecture and two counties (Tianxing and Wannian), and implemented a military colony (tuntian) system—soldiers farmed the land where they were stationed to feed themselves. He introduced a Chinese-style administrative system, tax regime, and imperial examinations, while maintaining the maritime trade network.
But the "Kingdom of Dongning" was not limited to Taiwan. According to research by the National Museum of Taiwan History, the Zheng domain at its founding still included islands along the Fujian-Guangdong coast—Kinmen, Xiamen, Tongshan, Nan'ao—Taiwan was an expansion of the kingdom's territory, not its entirety. Nominally the regime still recognized the Yongli Emperor's reign title of the Southern Ming and printed its own "Great Ming Zhongxing Yongli Calendar"—adding the word "Zhongxing" (Restoration) to emphasize the continuation of the Ming legitimate succession and the ambition to restore the Ming. A copy of the 1677 Yongli calendar is preserved today in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, testifying to trade relations when the British East India Company was invited to establish a trading post in Taiwan during the Zheng Jing era.
This Taiwan-centered maritime regime inaugurated three generations of Zheng rule lasting 21 years (as defined by the National Museum of Taiwan History), until its destruction by Qing forces in 1683.
The Page Left Out: The People Beneath His Feet
In the narrative of the "Sacred King Who Opened Taiwan," one group has almost entirely disappeared.
When Zheng Chenggong's army landed on Taiwan, the island was home to hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples. The Zheng regime's military colony system brought a massive influx of Han Chinese settlers, and indigenous lands were systematically requisitioned. According to Dutch and Qing records, the precise death toll from Zheng-era campaigns against indigenous communities is difficult to establish, but more than 2,200 indigenous people perished in conflicts during the siege period alone.
Zheng Chenggong is called the "Opener of Taiwan," but for indigenous peoples, he inaugurated the opening chapter of a long history of dispossession. This contradiction has yet to be fully addressed—the incense burns bright at the Yanping Junwang Shrine in Tainan, and 63 Sacred King temples across Taiwan hold annual ceremonies, but discourse on Zheng-era colonial violence remains marginal.
Thirty-Seven: A Death Without Answers
Five months after founding his kingdom, on June 23, 1662, Zheng Chenggong died suddenly in Anping. He was thirty-seven.
The cause of death remains a mystery. Official records say acute illness. Folk accounts are more dramatic—it is said that upon learning his son Zheng Jing had an affair with his wet nurse in Xiamen and fathered an illegitimate child, he flew into a rage, "stamped his ground, wrung his hands, bit through his fingers, and died screaming." Some scholars suspect malaria or a mental breakdown.
He had been planning something even larger at the time of his death: an invasion of Spanish-colonized Luzon in the Philippines, to avenge the Chinese massacred there (the fourth Chinese massacre, 1662). Had he lived another ten years, Southeast Asian history might have been completely rewritten.
But he did not. After Zheng Jing succeeded him, the Zheng dynasty held on for another 21 years until 1683, when it was destroyed by Shi Lang—the very general whose father and brother Zheng Chenggong had killed—leading a Qing naval force.
Four Regimes, Four Koxingas
The most fascinating aspect is how Koxinga's legacy has been repeatedly rewritten after his death.
The Qing dynasty called him "Zheng Chenggong"—the name itself was a political act. He had styled himself "Zhu Chenggong" (with the imperial surname) his entire life; the Qing court refused to recognize Southern Ming legitimacy and forcibly restored his original surname. He was a traitor, a pirate.
Japan rediscovered this "mixed-blood hero" after the Meiji Restoration. Chikamatsu Monzaemon's 1715 kabuki play The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusen'ya Kassen) is still performed today. The Childbirth Stone in Hirado became a tourist attraction. For Japan, Koxinga proved the superiority of Japanese blood.
The Nationalist government, after retreating to Taiwan, cast Koxinga as a spiritual forerunner of "counterattack on the mainland"—a historical template of withdrawing from the continent to Taiwan and using the island as a base to plan a comeback. The Yanping Junwang Shrine was rebuilt in 1963 in Chinese palace style (it had originally been in southern Fujian style)—even the architecture was politically rewritten.
Contemporary Taiwan faces a more complex situation: Koxinga is the starting point of Han Chinese immigration history and also the starting point of indigenous dispossession history. Is he the "Opener of Taiwan" or a "colonizer"? The incense at 63 Sacred King temples and the demands of indigenous transitional justice coexist on the same island. After 2016, "pluralistic historical perspectives" gradually entered textbooks, and the Koxinga chapters no longer contain only heroic narratives but also mention the Zheng regime's requisition of Pingpu indigenous lands.
Taiwanese historians have proposed rectifying "Zheng Chenggong" to "Zhu Chenggong"—after all, he used that name his entire life and never called himself "Zheng"—but because "Zheng Chenggong" had become established by convention, the Tainan City Cultural Affairs Committee did not accept the proposal.
A man whose very name was decided by his enemies is perhaps the most precise epitaph for his fate. He was born in Japan but never counted as Japanese; raised in China but chose a path opposite to his father's; founded a kingdom in Taiwan but died five months later. Thirty-seven years, three motherlands, none of which fully belonged to him.
Four hundred years later, in Anping, Tainan, the bronze statue of Koxinga in front of the Yanping Junwang Shrine faces west—toward the Chinese mainland he spent his life trying to reclaim but never set foot on again. And the island beneath his feet later grew something he could never have imagined.
References
- Wikipedia: Koxinga — Comprehensive English-language academic sources
- Wikipedia: Siege of Fort Zeelandia — Military details of the siege
- 中文維基百科：鄭成功 — Chinese-language historical sources
- 國家文化記憶庫：鄭成功與台灣 — Official digital archive of the Ministry of Culture
- 中研院台灣史研究所 — Academic research in Taiwanese 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 academic work on the Siege of Fort Zeelandia
- Frederick Coyett, _Neglected Formosa_ — Memoir of the last Dutch governor, a primary source
- 近松門左衛門《國性爺合戰》 — 1715 kabuki play, the Japanese perspective on Koxinga
- 平戶市觀光協會：鄭成功生誕地 — The Childbirth Stone and related historical sites in Hirado
- 延平郡王祠——台南市政府文化局 — Taiwan's most representative site of Koxinga worship
- Wills, John E. Jr., "Maritime Asia, 1500-1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination" — The Zheng family within the East Asian maritime trade system
- 《臺灣外紀》 — By Jiang Risheng, the original source for Koxinga's oath of burning his robes
- 臺史博「臺灣史新手村」：2-4 東寧王國——鄭氏王朝的 21 年 — Official educational resource of the National Museum of Taiwan History
- 大明永曆三十一年大統曆（1677） — Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, testifying to trade relations between the British East India Company and the Kingdom of Dongning