August 27 marks the 345th anniversary of the birth of Cheng Ch'eng-kung, known to the West as Koxinga, who expelled the Dutch from Taiwan in the mid-17th century.
Cheng Ch'eng-kung was born in 1624 at Hirado in northern Kyushu, Japan. His father, Cheng Chih-lung, was a Chinese seafarer. His mother was the daughter of Weng Yi- huang, a Fukien merchant, and a Japanese woman of the Tagawa family. Until the age of 7, Ch'eng- kung lived with the Tagawas at Hirado and rarely saw his father. When Chih-lung became an admiral in command of coast guard forces, Ch'eng-kung was taken to Chuanchow in Fukien and sent to school.
In 1644, when Ch'eng-kung was a student at the Imperial Academy at Nanking, a bandit named Li Tzu-ch'eng revolted against the Ming court and occupied Peking, the capital. The Ming Emperor Ch'ung Cheng hanged himself on a hill near the Forbidden City. In the following year, Cheng Chih-lung and his brother Cheng Hung-k'uei made Prince Tang the new Ming emperor (Lung Wu). In 1646, with a large part of the Middle Kingdom occupied by the Manchus, Chili-lung and his son Ch'eng-kung were received in audience by the Emperor Lung Wu at Foochow, Fukien. Moved by Ch'eng-kung's plans for national recovery, the emperor said: "I regret that I have no daughter to be your wife. In appreciation of your loyalty, I appoint you Deputy Commander of the Royal Guards and grant you the Imperial surname of Chu." This is why Cheng Ch'eng-kung has been popularly known as the Kou-hsing Yeh (Lord of the Imperial Surname) among the Chinese. From the Amoy dialect of Kok-seng Ya the Dutch derived "Koxinga".
Several months after the audience, the Emperor Lung Wu was taken, prisoner by the Manchus. Chili-lung fled to Anping, the seaport of Tainan in southern Taiwan. Realizing that the greater part of the Ming fleet was still at large and commanded by Cheng Chih-lung, the Manchus tried to lure him into surrender by offering him the governership of Fukien and Kwangtung. Chih-lung was interested but Ch'eng-kung warned his father not to be deceived by the Manchus. Chih-lung was not convinced and sailed to Foochow, where he met an emissary of the Manchus. The admiral-pirate father subsequently was imprisoned in Peking as hostage for his son's surrender.
Following the defection of his father, Ch'eng-kung began his national recovery movement with an army of fewer than 100 men. With Amoy and Kinmen (Quemoy) as bases, his forces grew. He recovered offshore islands and coastal cities one after another.
In 1659, Cheng Ch'eng-kung led an army of 190,000 in a campaign against Nanking. He failed only because some of his men were secretly in league with the Manchus. Two years later Yung Li, the last monarch of the Ming, was captured by the Manchus on the Yunnan-Burma border. Cheng Ch'eng-kung decided to liberate Taiwan from the Dutch and use the island as his bastion for national recovery. In March of 1661, the 25,000 men of the Cheng's army occupied the Pescadores and then moved on Anping. The Dutch garrison was small - only some 2,000 troops. However, it took Cheng Ch'eng-kung nine months to compel their surrender. The Dutch had better weapons and were in command of the local situation after 38 years of colonization. Formal capitulation was on February 1, 1662, at Fort Providentia, now the Historical Museum of Tainan city. Cheng Ch'eng-kung's son, Cheng Ching, remained at Amoy in command of garrison troops.
After the departure of the Dutch, who were permitted to leave in peace, Cheng Ch'eng-kung distributed land to farmers without charge. Free land attracted a sizable number of mainland immigrants via Amoy. Seeking to develop the island's economy, Cheng Ch'eng-kung employed Vittorio Ricci, an Italian friar he had known at Amoy, as adviser. Ricci taught irrigation and was sent to the Philippines as a special envoy to promote trade.
After the death of Cheng Ch'eng-kung in May of 1662, the Ch'ing court made several attempts to per suade Cheng Ching, who was still in Amoy, to surrender. Cheng Ching turned a deaf ear. But in September of 1663, he had to evacuate Amoy in the face of a joint attack by the Manchus and Dutch. He returned to Taiwan. Ten years later, in 1673, he made a comeback at Amoy when mainland remnants of the Ming revolted against the Manchus. His troops remained on the mainland until l679, occupying several coastal cities in Fukien. Cheng Ching died in Taiwan in 1681. Two years later, the Ch'ing government took advantage of the internal struggle among the Chengs to conquer Taiwan and made it a prefecture of Fukien.
Commenting on the personality of Cheng Ch'eng-kung, James Davidson wrote in The Island of Formosa published in 1903:
Cheng Ch'eng-kung accepting surrender of the Dutch at Fort Providentia in Tainan. (File photo)
"Koxinga was perhaps the most remarkable character that modern history exhibits in the Orient. Born in Japan of a Japanese mother and a Chinese father, we may believe he inherited courage and soldierly ability from the former and craft and diplomacy from the latter. At all events he possessed these attributes to a high degree, and was as successful in one as in the other. Holding one of the highest military commands in China at the age of twenty-two and dying while still under forty, his greatest exploits were accomplished during that period of life when others are ordinarily engaged in study and in preparation for the great deeds they hope to accomplish when they have arrived at perfect maturity.
"In his private life he was frugal and modest in his wants. He was proud of the authority vested in him, but does not appear to have used that authority tyrannically; otherwise he could not have secured and preserved the willing loyalty that his immediate followers yielded him. He trained his subjects in various industries and enforced agricultural labor on his officers and men. Even his own family were not exempt. His wives and their female companions were forced to weave and spin and the products of their toil were placed on the market along with those of more humble hands.
"With his own hands Koxinga carved out a kingdom for himself and provided a safe refuge for all loyal followers of the Ming dynasty, against which the haughty Emperor of China, with his boasted nine countries, could not prevail.
"Truly, this was the work of no ordinary man!"
Cheng Ch'eng-kung also is held in high esteem by the Japanese. A few years after Cheng Ch'eng-kung's death, a playwright named Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote Kokusenya Kassen (The Battles of Koxinga), in which Koxinga was represented as having overthrown the Ch'ing dynasty at Nanking and enthroned himself. After their occupation of Taiwan in 1895, the Japanese built the Kaizan Shrine at Tainan in his honor. Some 60 Taiwan shrines are still dedicated to Cheng Ch'eng-kung.