koxinga’s conquest of taiwan in global history

Koxingas Conquest of Taiwan in Global History: Reflectionson the Occasion of the 350thAnniversary

Tonio Andrade

Late Imperial China, Volume 33, Number 1, June 2012, pp. 122-140 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/late.2012.0003

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Late Imperial China Vol. 33, No. 1 (June 2012): 122140 by the Society for Qing Studies and The Johns Hopkins University Press

Koxingas Conquest of taiwan in global History: refleCtions on tHe oCCasion of

tHe 350tH anniversary

tonio andrade

Three hundred and fifty years ago, the Chinese warlord Koxinga conquered the Dutch colony of Formosa, bringing Taiwan under Chinese rule for the first time. The anniversary is being celebrated widely throughout East Asia, but the event itselfKoxingas difficult conquestis still misunderstood.

Koxinga is a legendary figure, the subject of movies, cartoons, plays, and novels. He is worshipped as a god in Taiwan, so it is inevitable that the public understanding of the event should be mythologized.1 But even some professional historians perpetuate misconceptions, particularly in mainland China, where the Sino-Dutch war is often portrayed as a clash between rapa-cious imperialists (the Dutch) and heroic nationalists (Koxinga). Historians are beginning to relax the dichotomies that have pervaded twentieth-century historiographycolonizer versus colonized, capitalist versus indigenous, east versus westbut errors persist because an alternate narrative has been slow to emerge.

This article suggests one alternative reading, inspired by the exciting histo-riography of the world history movement, which sees the seventeenth century as an age of unprecedented intercultural communication, when Europeans held no overwhelming advantage over most other Old World peoples. This new historiography does not deny the violence of the period, or the conflicts, fought with powerful new weapons like advanced cannons and handguns, that took so many lives. But it shows how the violence took place within a deep context of intercultural communication. The Europeans who sailed to Asia relied closely on Asians. Scholars have been noting this for decades, talking about an Age of Partnership rather than an Age of Expansion, but what is less well understood

1 The classic work on the legend of Koxinga is Croizer, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism. More recent works on this topic are Jiang Renjie, Jiegou Zheng Chenggong; and Chong Wang, Interpreting Zheng Chenggong. See also Xing Hang, Between Trade and Legitimacy, Maritime and Continent, esp. 1 31.

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is the extent to which non-Europeanssuch as Koxinga and his alliesrelied on cooperation with Europeans, even when holding back European incursions.2

In what follows I address some of the most important misconceptions about Koxingas conquest that still pervade the historiography of the Sino-Dutch War, particularly the historiography of mainland China. I am less interested in spell-ing out the metanarrative that informs these misconceptions (it is quite a simple one:Taiwan belonged to China and the Chinese were always itching to overthrow the Dutch and rejoin the motherland) than in using the rich documentation of the war (there are wonderful sources not just in Chinese and Dutch but also in German and Spanish) to correct errors and suggest a new and more accurate narrative: that Koxinga was an embodiment of the fascinating globalizing world of the seventeenth century and that he won the war partly because he was bet-ter at listening to people from the other side than were the Dutch. In a way, his style was more globalmore modernthan the Dutch.

the ConquestKoxingas invasion force reached Taiwan at the end of April, 1661: four

hundred vessels carrying twenty-five thousand men, the largest Chinese over-seas expedition since the Zheng He voyages two centuries before. The Dutch watched in shock and wonder as this thick forest of masts materialized out of the fog.3 Taiwan was one of their preeminent colonies. It had been established in 1624, originally intended to serve as a base similar to Portuguese Macau, a place to partake of the lucrative business of trading Chinese silk for Japanese silver. But whereas Macau was a tiny island, Taiwan was vast. Whereas the Portuguese were virtually under Chinese jurisdiction (when they misbehaved, Chinese officials could simply shut the gate and cut off food supplies), the Dutch had a relatively free hand. China had no claim to Taiwan in those days. It was off the map.4

2 The best overview of this new direction is still the prescient article by Wills, Maritime Asia, 15001800. See also Wills, Was There A Vasco da Gama Epoch?; and Wills, Interactive Early Modern Asia. The first use of the term Age of Partnership was Furber, Asia and the West as Partners before Empire and After. See also Kling and Pearson, eds., The Age of Partnership. Of course the idea of partnership was never uncontested. Boxer, for example, disputed the idea from the outset. Subrahmanyam felt that the term Age of Partnership was less accurate than a term such as Age of Contained Conflict. Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce, esp. ch. 5.3 Herport, Reisenach Java, Formosa, Vorder-Indien und Ceylon, 16591668, 51.4 On Taiwans place in the Chinese imperial cartographic imagination, see the innovative work by Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwans Imagined Geography. It seems that Chinese officials actually suggested that the Dutch open a base on Taiwan and that the Dutch did so only reluctantly (they would have preferred to occupy a base on the Penghu Islands, in the middle of the Taiwan Strait, because it was closer to China). They left Penghu only because Ming officials drove them away with an army. See Bluss, The Dutch Occupation of the Pescadores (16221624); and Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese, esp. ch. 2.

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One of the chief misconceptions of Koxingas conquest stems from the idea that Taiwan was already viewed as part of China during the Ming Dynasty (13681644) and that Koxinga was thus righting a historical wrong by reclaim-ing it. In their published work, mainland historians sometimes conflate Taiwan and Penghu, using the term Tai-Peng (see glossary for Chinese characters) when discussing the early and mid-seventeenth-century period.5 At that time, although Penghu was certainly viewed by Ming authorities as under Chinese jurisdiction, Taiwan was not, something that the work of Emma Jinhua Teng has made clear.6 Careful historians from the mainland tread lightly around this issue, because the sources make fairly clear that Taiwan was not considered part of China. Indeed, there seems to be an increasing willingness to accept the historical situation described in the sources. Deng Kongzhao, the current reigning authority on Koxinga in the mainland, has noted that Koxingas father, Zheng Zhilong, himself played a role in persuading the Dutch to abandon Penghu (they would have preferred it to Taiwan) and establish themselves on Taiwan.7

The new colony flourished, and it did so primarily because of close Sino-Dutch cooperation. This is something that some historians in Taiwan recognized four decades ago. Starting with the doyen of Dutch Taiwan studies, Tsao Yung-ho, historians based in Taiwan began eschewing a strict dichotomy between colonizer and colonized and instead followed the sourcesboth Chinese and Europeanto the conclusion that Sino-Dutch relations in the years of colonial rule were often close and that there was considerable cross-cultural cooperation on Taiwan. Indeed, they go so far as to suggest that Taiwan during the Dutch period can be seen as a sort of plural society, with many ethnic groupsna-tive Austronesians, Fujianese, Dutch, South Asians, even Africans (some free, some enslaved)living together, a sort of potpourri of early globalization.8 This is in keeping with a new view of Taiwan as a sort of global crossroads, which contrasts with an older view of Taiwan as an integral part of China.

Disciples of Tsao Yung-homost notably Cheng Weichung and Han Jiabao, have added to this understanding, using the rich records of the Dutch East India Company. It is not an entirely rosy view. These scholars make clear that Dutch

5 See for example, Yang Yanjie, Hejushidai Taiwan shi, 50.6 Emma JinhuaTeng, Taiwans Imagined Geography.7 Deng Kongzhao, Zheng Zhilong de yi sheng, 177. To be sure, Dengs observation is not particularly original. Zhilongs role has been noted by previous scholars. See especially Boxer, The Rise and Fall of Nicholas Iquan; Bluss, Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan?; and Iwao, Li Tan, Chief of the Chinese Residents at Hirado, Japan, in the Last Days of the Ming Dynasty.8 Han Jiabao notes that his use of the phrase is adopted from his mentor and thesis advisor Tsao Yung-ho. See Han Jiabao, Helan shidai Taiwan de jingji tudi yu shuiwu. My own book, How Taiwan Became Chinese, advances a similar perspective.


Taiwan was no utopia. There was competition and violence. There was a rebel-lion in which thousands of Chinese settlers were massacred. But Dutch rule offered powerful incentives to cooperation, particularly for wealthier subjects, who found that their property rights were guaranteed, that their land taxes were reasonable, and that the laws were generally clear and focused on commerce. Colonial entrepreneurswhether Chinese or Dutchcould make fortunes there, and adventurers could find opportunities as well, as aboriginal hunting fields were converted to Chinese rice paddies and sugar plantations. It was in fact a conscious policy of the Dutch to encourage Chinese immigration, and the settlers came in droves. Whereas in 1624 the island housed Chinese in the hundreds, by 1650 Chinese settlers numbered in the tens of thousands, and their settlement patterns were much denser than those of the native Austronesians, who were increasingly displaced from their hunting fields. The colony was in essence a Chinese settlement under Dutch rule.9

One of the enduring questions is how the Zheng family and the Dutch coex-isted during the thirty-eight years between the founding of the Taiwan colony and Koxingas invasion. Koxingas father, the pirate Zheng Zhilong, had originally worked for the Dutch as a translator and then as a privateer. Sinophone historians have done excellent and thorough work detailing Zheng Zhilongs relationship with the Dutch.10 These and other works show that after Zhilong went out on his own and became the wealthiest and most powerful pirate in the world, he and the Dutch clashed but afterward settled into a long and mutually productive modus vivendi.11 While the Dutch built their colony, the Zheng family focused its attention on southern Fujian province, building powerful fortified bases on the islands of Xiamen and Jinmen. These islands served as the terminal points of trading routes that stretched out across East and Southeast Asia, from Japan to the Strait of Malacca.

Scholars have filled in the structure and workings of this formidable mari-time empire. In a seminal article, Nan Qi detailed the Zheng familys so-called Five Merchants (wushang) administrative system, and its intricate command structure, which stretched out across the oceans and through Chinas provinces, even into areas controlled by the Zheng familys enemies, so that it served not just as a trading network but also as an intelligence network.12 Deng Kongzhao

9 Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese, inspired by the work of Leonard Bluss, particularly his wonderful monograph Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women, and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1986).10 See especially Su Tongbing, Taiwan shi yanjiu ji; and Yang Xuxian, Zheng Zhilong yu Helan zhi guanxi.11 See especially Bluss, De Chinese nachtmerrie; Wills, Maritime China from Wang Chih to Shih Lang; Wills, Relations with Maritime Europeans; Bluss, Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan?; Andrade, The Companys Chinese Pirates; and Andrade, Lost Colony, esp. 21-53.12 Nan Qi, Taiwan Zheng shi wu shang zhi yanjiu.

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describes this administrative structure as a precisely ordered and managed sys-tem.13 Deng and Nan use primarily Chinese sources, but Cheng Weichung has written a dissertation that combines Chinese and Dutch sources to understand the Zheng familys far-flung trading regime in a broader context.14 His work shows that the Zheng familys maritime trading structures were impressive, and bear comparison to those of western European seapowers, such as the Dutch East India Company itself. Indeed, it seems quite possible that the yearly trading income of the Zheng family organization was considerably higher than that of the Dutch East India Company, a conclusion that many western scholars would find shocking.15

For decades the Zheng family and the Dutch colony of Taiwan coexisted. There were tensions, of course, but on the whole their modus vivendi worked, profiting both sides. So why did Koxinga disturb this arrangement by attacking the Dutch in 1661?

The answer lies in geopolitics. When Manchu armies entered Beijing in 1644 and declared China to be under the Qing Dynasty, the Zheng family declared its support for the displaced Ming Dynasty, and Zheng leaders increasingly invested trading revenues in military forces. This was especially true after Koxinga took over his fathers place as leader of the organization. His navy and army grew in power and prestige, until by the 1650s he was seen as Chinas last great hope for a Ming restoration. He launched a Northern Expedition, determined to re-gain Nanjing from the Qing Dynasty. In 1659 his forces sailed up the Yangzi River, winning victory after victory. Local leaders got out their Ming banners and joined him. Alas, his push lost momentum beneath the walls of Nanjing. He was defeated and withdrew to Xiamen. Qing armies marched toward his capital. He needed a new base.

13 Deng Kongzhao, Lun Zheng Chenggong dui Zheng Zhilong de pipan yu jicheng, 27-28. 14 Cheng Wei-Chung, Merchant Prince and Privileged Merchant.15 This is a conclusion that both I and another scholar of Taiwanese history, Xing Hang, came to indepen-dently (see Hang, Between Trade, 102-9). Chinese sources suggest that the Zheng family earned around ten million taels per year just from shipping tolls, and that would represent only one facet of the familys revenues, because the family also earned money from direct trade in Japan and Southeast Asia, perhaps on the order of twenty or thirty million taels per year. (For these figures, see Yang Yanjie, Yiliuwuling zhi yiliuliuernian Zheng Chenggong haiwai maoyi de maoyie he lirun gusuan, 231-33; and Han Zhenhua,Zailun ZhengC henggong yu haiwai maoyi de guanxi.) In contrast, from 1627 to 1640, the annual revenues of the Dutch East India Company averaged about 2.7 million florins yearly (Korte, De Jaarlijkse financile verantwoording in de VOC, 31; and Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company, 132). At 3.5 taels per florin, that would be on the order of nine or ten million taels. Thus, it seems quite likely that Koxingas familys trading empire brought in perhaps three times as much trading income per year than did the Dutch East India Company, a calcula-tion that includes not only the companys Far Eastern income but also its income for the entire network. Cf. Hang, Between Trade, 1029.


One of the most intriguing and controversial figures in the Taiwan War enters the story here: the colorful He Bin. Mainland scholars have portrayed He Bin as a national hero, because he gave Koxinga a map of Taiwan and encouraged him to invade, saying that the Dutch had few troops there. They make much of the fact that He Bins intelligence helped Koxinga plan his invasion and that He Bin sailed with the fleet, serving as a guide and advisor. The late Chen Bish-eng, for example, one of mainland Chinas most prominent Koxinga scholars, called He Bin a hero, a patriotic old man,16 a person of tremendous merit and achievement.17 Such views are reflected in fiction, too. In the movie The Hero Zheng Chenggong (Yingxiong Zheng Chenggong), He Bin is portrayed as a hero whose primary motivation is to reclaim Taiwan for China and save the poor Chinese of Taiwan, whom the Dutch, with their long curly hair and high lace collars, beat and whip.18

But the historical sources suggest a different interpretation of He Bin. Like many wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs who lived on the island, he worked closely with the Dutch. He had business arrangements with many of the wealthiest and most prominent Dutch citizens on Taiwan, and he wove an intricate web of credit throughout the colony, encouraging Dutch men and women to invest in his trading voyages and real estate speculations. I have written at length about him in an earlier volume of this journal, discussing his family background, his role as a translator for the Dutch, his rise to wealth and power, and the structure of his investments and business ventures.19

What is important here is that he was not a simple Han patriot who chafed under Dutch rule but rather a colonial intermediary who made a fortune from his connections to the Dutch. More importantly, there is compelling evidence that he used his affiliation with the Dutch East India Company to cheat and swindle Chinese merchants and settlers. A group of Chinese inhabitants of Taiwan were so frustrated that they wrote an unprecedented letter of complaint to the Dutch, in which they described He Bin as someone who engaged in illegal practices to satisfy his greedy appetite and fill his bottomless stomach.20 They complained that he bribed tax collection officials, stole money from Chinese laborers, lured Chinese merchants to his house and commandeered their goods, providing a long litany of instances of lying, blackmail, stealing, and extortion.21 Such behavior may not have been unusual in this wild maritime world, but it goes against the He-Bin-as-hero trope.

16 Chen Bisheng, Zheng Chenggong shoufu Taiwan zhanshi yanjiu, 20.17 Chen Bisheng, He Bin shiji luekao,106.18 Yingxiong Zheng Chenggong (The hero Zheng Chenggong), directed by Wu Ziniu.19 Andrade, Chinese under European Rule. 20 Cited in Andrade, Chinese under European Rule, 14.21 Andrade, Chinese under European Rule, 1417.

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Whenever Chinese people complained about He Bin, Dutch officials took his side. He Bin knew how to build close connections with Dutch officials. Yet eventually those close relations soured. He Bin ended up fleeing Taiwan, taking with him vital intelligence about Dutch defenses, which he gave to Koxinga. His decision to leave Taiwan and help Koxinga is viewed as a patriotic act by many Chinese historians, who claim that he was motivated by a desire to help his compatriots escape the yoke of Dutch colonialism.Yet historians who argue in this way tend to elide evidence not just from Dutch sources but also from Chinese sources, which suggest that He Bin fled to escape his debts, or because he had embezzled money from the Dutch.22 Dutch records make clear that the story is even deeper, and more interesting.

He fled Taiwan because of a scandal. Dutch officials learned that He Bin had been collecting secret taxes and tolls on exports and imports without their knowledge. There is some evidence suggesting that He Bin levied these tolls with the consent and encouragement of Zheng officials, which aroused consider-able apprehension among the Dutch, because the Dutch were very sensitive to insinuations about their sovereignty on Taiwan. In any case, He Bin was arrested and tried. His fine was small, considering that he was one of the wealthiest men in Taiwan, but once his scheme unwound he could no longer afford his debts. He fled to Koxinga, leaving his debts behind. He had been involved in business deals with scores of people on Taiwanboth Chinese and Europeanwho had invested in his trading ventures and real estate projects. When he fled they lost their money. Some were ruined.

Their loss was Koxingas gain. When the warlord gathered his generals to-gether to discuss invading Taiwan, he specifically mentioned He Bin. In the Cong zheng shilu, a source that Chen Bisheng did a wonderful job of editing, Koxinga is portrayed as saying: He Bins map of Taiwan shows that the island is vast and fertile, its fields and gardens stretching out for a thousand li, its potential tax revenues worth hundreds of thousands of ounces of silver.23 Koxinga noted also that He Bin said fewer than a thousand Dutch troops guarded Taiwan, so it could be captured with our hands tied behind the back.24

Koxingas generals and advisors protested against the risky venture, but Koxinga persevered, and He Bins intelligence about the island does indeed seem to have played a key role in his calculations. Theres also no doubt that He Bin himself accompanied the huge fleet. Chinese accounts that describe him

22 See, for example, Jiang Risheng, Taiwan waiji (Unofficial record of Taiwan), 19091; and Huang Zongxi, Ci xing shi mo (The history of Koxinga), 29. 23 Yang Ying, Xian wang shi lu (Veritable records of the former king), 244.24 Yang Ying, Xian wang shi lu, 244.


sitting on the prow of Koxingas flagship pointing out shallows and sandbars are fanciful, but more reliable recordsboth Dutch and Chineseshow clearly that he did play an important role in the initial campaign.25 He acted as a translator during early talks between the Dutch and Koxinga, helping arrange the surren-der of a Dutch fortress. And he acted as an advisor, accompanying Koxingas financial officer Yang Ying through the island to tally up grain reserves.26

There was not nearly as much food on Taiwan as He Bin had led Koxinga to believe, and Koxingas people began to starve. He Bin began to fall out of Kox-ingas favor. At this pointsome three months into the warChinese records become sparse and laconic. Dutch sources remain verbose but are increasingly disorganized. Why? Because the Dutch secretaries were so busy recording the testimony of a rash of Chinese defectors, who fled to the Dutch side to escape starvation and mistreatment under Koxinga, that the secretaries no longer had time to do the endless copying and collating that their positions entailed.

The testimonies of Chinese defectors indicate with uniformity that He Bin had a fall from grace. Koxinga, who had been assured that this war against the Dutch would be easy, that there would be plenty of food for his men, banned He Bin from his presence, ordering him confined to a small shack.

Thus, He Bin does not seem to have been a patriot-hero, interested above all in the well-being of his countrymen. He was more of a wily, self-interested comprador-type, who took advantage of his virtuosity as a mediator between the Dutch and Chinese to make fortunes, often through underhanded means.

It might not seem important what kind of person He Bin was and what mo-tivated him, but the portrayal of He Bin as hero is part of a general narrative: that the Dutch were defeated on Taiwan because they faced unified opposition from the many Chinese who lived on the island. This, too, is a misconception.

a reification of DifferenceTaiwans people, Chen Bisheng wrote, stood up and in a single night threw

off thirty-eight years of bitter imperial rule by the Dutch East India Company, leaving nary a trace behind, thus providing the basis for [Koxingas] final vic-tory of the War to Recover Taiwan.27 Other historians from mainland China have written in a similar vein. Chen Kongli, for example, writes, The Dutch imperialists were invaders, and they were not on the legitimate side, so they naturally received the peoples resistance. Koxinga, on the other hand, was an

25 For He Bin in the prow, see Jiang Risheng, Taiwan waiji, 194.26 Yang Ying, Xian wang shi lu, 252.27 Chen Bisheng, Zheng Chenggong shoufu Taiwan zhanshi yanjiu, 14.

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anti-invader, and he had the benefit of legitimacy, so it is natural that he received the peoples support.28

According to this view, the Dutch were sitting on a powder-keg. The Chinese they ruled over were just waiting for a chance to overthrow their masters and greet Koxinga as a liberator.

Other historians have increasingly shown that Taiwan under Dutch rule wasif not a multicultural paradiseat least characterized by considerable Sino-European cooperation, and strict dichotomies between colonizer and colonized informed by nationalism are anachronistic. Yet the sources do in fact indicate that Koxingas invasion force was welcomed ashore by hundredsperhaps thousandsof Chinese colonists. To what extent did Koxinga benefit from nationalistic sentiment among the Chinese on Taiwan?

First, we must not overstate the appeal of Koxinga to his own countrymen, even in China itself. By 1661, after fifteen years of civil war, the people of Chinas coastal regions were suffering, especially in Koxingas home province of Fujian. Cities and towns had been ravaged not just by Qing armies but also by Koxingas own forces. He portrayed himself as a protector of the Chinese, but his taxes and levies were heavy, and his soldiers did not always behave themselves when raising contributions to the war effort.

Deng Kongzhao has written about the Zheng familys roughshod attempts to raise revenues for the war effort, showing how even in the mid-1640s, as the long civil war was just beginning, people in Fujian Province were already suffering under Zheng exactions, so that many wished the Qing would hurry and arrive.29 In a similar vein, historian Dahpon Ho has produced a detailed and sad account of Koxingas ravages, based on local records from localities in Fujian province.30 To be sure, Ho does not blame Koxinga alone. Qing forces were just as bad. But Ho contests a popular view of Koxinga as liberator and protector, showing convincingly that his generals and their local agents terror-ized farmers, fishermen, and townsfolk, demanding money and grain, killing, raping, and kidnapping. Koxinga, writes Ho, was quite capable of killing, robbing, and sacrificing the coastal Fujianese to serve his high purpose of re-storing the Ming.31

Chinese people who lived on Taiwan were spared direct effects of the civil war, at least at first, but when they learned that Koxinga was preparing an

28 Chen Kongli, Zheng Chenggong shoufu Taiwan zhanzheng de fenxi, 308. Similarly, Zhang Zongqia writes that the people of Taiwan greeted Koxingas troops as liberators from the Dutch imperialists. Zhang Zongqia,Zheng Chenggong shoufu Taiwan ji,3229 Deng Kongzhao, Zheng Zhilong de yi sheng.30 Dahpon Ho, Sealords Live in Vain. 31 Dahpon Ho, Sealords Live in Vain. 173.


invasion, they panicked. Many appealed for help from the Dutch. One frantic Chinese entrepreneur told Dutch officials that his mother and wife and sister-in-law were crying incessantly from fear and worry, and he did not know what to do to save them.32 The Dutch intercepted letters between Chinese in Fujian and Chinese denizens of Taiwan that warned their brethren to run away as fast as they could: Send my wife and children here [to China] without delay. Trust that I mean it, and do not disregard this letter, as if you do not value my writ-ing, for each night I become frightened, thinking that some tumult or turmoil is taking place there.33 The once-bustling settlements of Taiwan were abandoned, stores and restaurants boarded up.

Were they afraid of the Dutch? Of Koxinga? Of war itself? Doubtless all of the above, but evidence of a spontaneous uprising against the Dutch and in favor of Koxinga is lacking. The sources describe nothing close to the scenario painted by Chen Bisheng, who narrates the early stages of Koxingas invasion as follows: The good news about the landing of Koxingas troops [in Taiwan] spread quickly, at which a peoples uprising of all nations exploded sponta-neously throughout the entire island. The righteous rebels (qi yi) had no leader nor structure nor commander, just huge numbers of people with hoes, sticks, and spears as weapons. Without prior agreement, they broke out from every corner, and the vehemence and scale [of this uprising] was unprecedented in Taiwans history.34

Instead, the sources tell us that by the time Koxingas ships arrived offshore, the settlements of Taiwan were ghostly quiet, and of the Chinese settlers who remained, many fled as soon as they saw Koxingas fleet. It is true that Koxingas troops were greeted as they landed. Advance operatives had prepared the way for the invasion, setting up wagons full of food and weapons. But the detailed and voluminous Dutch sourcesand sparser Chinese sourcescontain no evidence of clashes between Chinese settlers and Dutch forces in the early part of the war, except on one occasion, when a Dutch detachment tried to prevent Chinese from fleeing the main city, Zeelandia City (Anping), and was beaten up by refugees desperate to escape the coming conflict.35

In fact, there is evidence that some Chinese settlers regretted the arrival of Koxinga and, especially as the war dragged on, even began to hope for a restora-tion of Dutch rule. Consider, for example, the case of a Chinese farmer named Sait (Chinese characters unknown).36 He was one of many Chinese who fled

32 Cited in Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese, 235.33 Cited in Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese, 236.34 Chen Bisheng, Zheng Chenggong shoufu Taiwan zhanshi yanjiu, 12-13.35 Bluss et al., eds., De Dagregisters van het Kasteel Zeelandia, Taiwan, 16291662, Vol 4: 16551662, D:516.36 Ive written at greater length about Sait in Andrade, A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a War-lord.

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from Koxingas side to the Dutch side during the war. He had lived in Taiwan before the Dutch arrived and now he said he wanted to help them win the war because Koxinga and his soldiers were persecuting him and the other farmers. He even said that Chinese colonists were preserving their Dutch residency permits so that if the Dutch won the war the colonists could prove their loyalty.

Sait was just one of many Chinese defectors to the Dutch side, and he was not the only one who provided advice. Indeed, the defectors advice was remarkably uniform: they said the Dutch should refrain from using a reinforcement fleet for a direct assault against Koxingas positions in the shallow Bay of Taiwan. Instead, the defectors advised the Dutch to blockade Taiwan. Koxingas forces were starving and needed rice from China. Indeed, defectors said, Koxinga most feared a blockade.

The Dutch ignored the advice. They brought their big ships into the shal-low bay and launched an attack. Their ships ran aground and were battered by Koxingas crack cannon teams. Five Dutch vessels were lost, the rest were damaged, the Dutch lost 131 men, and many others were wounded. Given that the Dutch had in total fewer than two thousand soldiers, many of whom were too sick to fight in the first place, this was a significant setback.

Why did the Dutch fail to listen to Sait and other defectors? Partly it is be-cause the Dutch administrators were riven by infighting. Partly it is because a blockade would have been difficult to enforce, although it was the best remaining option. Partly it is because they simply did not think that the opinions of these Chinese defectors were worth listening to.

Koxinga had a different attitude toward defectors. Whenever soldiers crossed over to his side he took special pains to treat them well, giving them money, silk robes, food, and alcohol. More importantly, he listened to them. His greatest challenge fighting the Dutch was overcoming their main stronghold, a massive artillery fortress called Zeelandia Castle. He had tried early in the war to storm it, but its lethal Italian-style bastions proved too powerful, allowing the Dutch to shoot from multiple angles. After that he had simply tried to surround the fortress and starve it into submission, but the Dutch proved able to relieve it by sea. Koxinga became increasingly frustrated.

When European defectors joined Koxinga, they brought ideas about how to build special fortified siegeworks that could fire on Zeelandias weak points. It is intriguing that his various attempts to attack the castle coincided with the arrival in his court of defectors. The prize defector was a German man named Hans Radij who had served the Dutch as a sergeant. He was the highest-ranking officer to run to Koxingas side. Koxinga fed him, clothed him, paid him well, and gave him all the rice wine he could drink, which, it seems, was quite a lot.


The German reciprocated by helping Koxinga design powerful siegeworks that took advantage of the castles main weakness. Thanks to this help, Koxinga battered the fortress, forced a surrender, and won the war.

In contrast, the Dutch feared and distrusted Chinese defectors and in many cases, treated them brutally. In fact, Sait ended up trying to escape from the Dutch and died a bloody death in a stolen rowboat. The Dutch, fearing that Sait might be a double agent, had banished him from the castle to a ship-at-anchor. Such shipboard captivity could be deadly. Sailors subjected Chinese prisoners to torture and wanton cruelty. A few days before Saits death, a Dutch surgeon vivisected a Chinese prisoner on one of the vessels, strapping the poor man down, cutting into his eyes, drilling into his head, slicing his groin, sawing off his leg and hands, cutting open his chest. Sait was not on that particular ship, but he might well have heard the screams, and he certainly would have heard about the procedure. So we can understand why Sait stole a boat and tried to row away. The poor man was caught and ended up dead at the bottom of his stolen vessel, lying in his own blood. It is possible that Sait was a double agent, as the Dutch feared. Koxinga had in fact sent double agentsfalse defectorsto spy. But whether or not Sait was such a double agent, the Dutch were reluctant to follow the advice of people who had fled from the other side, while Koxinga was more flexible. So whereas Sait ended up dead, the German lived on under Koxingas rule, offering advice and drinking rice wine.

Koxinga had many foreigners in his service: Manchu officers, African mus-ketmen, British surgeons, German and Danish military advisors. Just as the Dutch colony of Taiwan had been based closely on cooperation with Chinese settlers, so Koxingas conquest was aided by European military advisors. The Dutch had managed close cooperation with Chinese settlers during times of peace, but Koxinga managed to make better use of foreigners during wartime.

Conclusion: toward a Deeper understanding of HistoryKoxingas victory cannot be fully understood so long as it is represented in

starkly nationalistic terms. The new historiography of the world history move-ment offers an alternative. World historians have shown that until the nineteenth century European power in Asia and Africa was slight, and that it was based closely on interactions with Asians and Africans.37 To the Dutch and Chinese who clashed in the seventeenth century, the idea of an overwhelmingly power-

37 Wills, Interactive Emergence; Goldstone, Capitalist Origins, the Advent of Modernity, and Coher-ent Explanation; cf. Bryant, The West and the Rest Revisited; and Bryant, A New Sociology for a New History?

134 Tonio Andrade

ful colonizing Europe and a weak Asia would have seemed absurd. The Dutch were bit players in a much larger drama. Koxinga and other Chinese military leaders respected European weapons (they were particularly intrigued by the so-called red-hairs cannons, going so far as to dredge them up from English and Dutch shipwrecks and try to reverse-engineer them), but European power was diffuse and unimposing.38

The imperialists who mattered were the Manchus and their Qing Dynasty. Koxinga saw the Dutch as gadflies, to be squashed en route to a greater end. He was wrong about that. The Dutch were more like hornets, and he was badly stung when he stirred up their nest, but he did prevail, thanks in part to his openness to other cultures.

Koxinga was born in Japan, grew up speaking Japanese, and then was brought as a young boy to a China quite unlike the traditional China of our imagina-tion. The maritime China of his youth was a vibrant, variegated world, where African musketeers guarded his wealthy father under the emblem of Santiago, communicating with him in Portuguese.39 European cannons guarded the fam-ilys huge mansion, which had a special canal so one could sail out to sea at any time, to easily send dispatches to the thousands of merchants who lived throughout East and Southeast Asia. The mansion was the headquarters of an overseas trading empire that was more lucrative than that of the Dutch East India Company itself. When Koxinga became a general, he created a fighting force that was modeled at least in part on Japanese samurai armies. Koxinga owed his success partly to his ability to take these many strands and weave them into an organization of his own.

Scholars are increasingly moving toward this new multicultural understanding of Koxinga. Xing Hang, for example, similarly emphasizes the Zheng familys multicultural bricolage, as does the recent work of Cheng Weichung.40

The seventeenth century was, as historian Timothy Brook writes, a time of unprecedented intercultural communication: More people were in motion over longer distances and sojourning away from home for longer periods of time than at any other time in human history.41 Koxinga embodies this globalizing world as deeply as anyone.

38 On Ming attempts to dredge up European cannons, see Huang Yi-long, Ouzhou chenchuan yu Mingmo chuan hua de xiyang dapao.On the Zheng familys use of such cannons in warfare, see Andrade, Lost Colony, 244-45.39 On the multicultural East Asian maritime realm of the seventeenth century, see Shapinsky, Polyvocal Portolans.40 Xing Hang, Between Trade and Legitimacy; Cheng Weichung, Merchant Prince.41 Brook, Vermeers Hat, 19


To be sure, in wartime ethnic rivalries hardened and societal boundaries became less porous. Can we speak of nationalism or proto-nationalism at such times? Perhaps, although it is probably less anachronistic to use a more neutral term like politicized ethnicity.42 Still, the categories of twentieth-century his-toriography are a particularly poor fit for this seventeenth-century conflict. The type of modern nationalistic self-identification that people attribute to national heroes like Koxinga does not fit when applied to the seventeenth century.

Koxinga will certainly continue to be viewed as a national hero in the Sino-phone world. His legend is firmly established. But he should also increasingly be seen as an embodiment of the wild world of transcultural mixing that was the seventeenth century.

glossary

42 See, for example, the paradigm-founding work of Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vols. 1 and 2.

Anping

Chen Bisheng

Chen Kongli

Cheng Weichung

Cong zheng shi lu , see

also Xian wang

shi lu

Deng Kongzhao

Han Jiabao (aka Pol Heyns)

He Bin

Koxinga . See

also Zheng

Chenggong.

Nan Qi

Penghu

qiyi

Tai-Peng

Taiwan wai ji

Tsao Yung-ho

wu shang

Xian wang shi lu

Yang Yanjie

Yang Ying

Ying xiong Zheng Chenggong

Zheng Chenggong

Zheng Zhilong

136 Tonio Andrade

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koxinga’s conquest of taiwan in global history

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