Koxinga’s Legacy

Known to Taiwanese as Zhèng Chénggōng (鄭成功) and to the west as Koxinga, a romanization of the honorific Guóxìngyé (國姓爺), “Lord of the Imperial Surname”, the future pirate-king was born in Nagasaki in 1624 to a Chinese merchant father and Japanese mother. He was granted the royal surname Zhū (朱) by the last Ming emperor and was later styled as Prince of Yanping (延平王) as he waged a doomed campaign of resistance against the rise of the Qing before retreating to Taiwan in 1661. There his forces lay siege to the Dutch fort at Fort Zeelandia for nine months before finally expelling them. After establishing the Kingdom of Tungning (東寧王國) at modern-day Tainan, he died less than two years later at age 39, but his descendants held parts of the southwestern coast for another two decades before surrendering to the Qing.

Over the centuries his legacy has been reshaped to serve the interests of successive colonial regimes and their respective nation-building projects. The Qing initially branded him a rebel, then rehabilitated him as a symbol of resistance against the West. The Japanese claimed him as a native son through his Nagasaki birth and incorporated his shrine into state Shinto. Chiang Kai-shek, himself a warlord who had retreated to Taiwan vowing to retake the mainland, found in Koxinga a haunting historical parallel. The People’s Republic of China cast him as a liberator who claimed Taiwan for the motherland. For Indigenous communities, however, Koxinga is a more troubling figure: his arrival accelerated large-scale Han Chinese settlement and displacement, making him something closer to a Columbus figure in their historical memory. His contested legacy is still seen today in the form of temples, memorials, and monuments dedicated to him scattered across Tainan and beyond.