CHENG CH'ENG-KUNG

born Aug. 28, 1624, Hirado, Japan died June 23, 1662, Taiwan Pinyin Zheng Chenggong, Western name Koxinga, or Coxinga pirate leader of Ming forces against the Manchu conquerors of China, best known for establishing Chinese control over Taiwan. Cheng Ch'eng-kung was born in a small Japanese coastal town to a Japanese mother and a Chinese father, Cheng Chih-lung, a maritime adventurer who made a fortune through trade and piracy in the Taiwan Straits. Cheng Ch'eng-kung was raised by his mother in Japan until the age of seven, when his father, having been given an official position in maritime defense by the Ming dynasty, recalled him to the ancestral home in southern Fukien. There, separated from his mother, Cheng was given the conventional scholarly Confucian education, entering the Imperial Academy of Learning at Nanking in 1644. With the fall of the southern capital to the invading Manchus the next year, young Cheng retired with his father to Fukien, where Cheng Chih-lung's military power was the basis for setting up the Prince of T'ang as pretender to the Ming throne. It was at this juncture that, as a sign of special favour, the Ming Prince conferred the imperial surname, Chu, upon the youthful Cheng Ch'eng-kung. Thus originated his most commonly used title, Lord of the Imperial Surname-in Chinese Kuo Hsing Yeh, corrupted by the Dutch into Koxinga. When Manchu forces entered Fukien, his father succumbed to their offers of preferment under the new Ch'ing dynasty (the dynastic name of the Manchus) and abandoned the fragile Ming court at Foochow. The Prince of Tang was captured and killed; but Cheng Ch'eng-kung, resisting his father's orders to abandon a lost cause, vowed to restore the Ming dynasty and began to build up land and naval forces for that purpose. Over the next 12 years the Manchu's preoccupation with larger Ming remnants in the southwest, plus Cheng's considerable strategic and organizational talents, allowed Cheng to build a strong position on the Fukien coast, centred on the islands of Amoy and Quemoy. Although this region was in effect his personal kingdom, he continued to use Ming reign titles and to acknowledge the suzerainty of the last Ming pretender-the Prince of Kuei in southwestern China. He also consistently refused blandishments of rank and power from the Manchus, even those supported by personal entreaties from his father. In 1659 Cheng launched his most ambitious military campaign, a maritime expedition with more than 100,000 troops up the Yangtze River. With large Manchu forces still campaigning in the south, he achieved remarkable initial success, smashing through the lower Yangtze defenses to the gates of Nanking. There, however, mistaken strategy and failure to heed his field commanders' advice led to a disastrous defeat. Forced back to his original base of Amoy, Cheng was still unbeatable at sea; but the collapse of Ming resistance in the southwest and the Ch'ing's new policy of forced inland emigration of the coastal population put him in a dangerous position. In these circumstances he hit upon the plan of taking Taiwan from the Dutch as a secure rear base area. In April of 1661 he landed on Taiwan near the main Dutch stronghold at Anping (near the present-day city of Tainan) with a force of more than 25,000 men. After a nine-month siege, the small Dutch garrison capitulated and were allowed to leave Tainan safely with their personal possessions. Cheng followed this military success by setting up an effective civil administration based on Tainan and settling the island with his soldiers and with refugees brought from Fukien. His larger ambitions on the mainland and half-formed plans for ousting the Spaniards from the Philippines, however, were cut short by his premature death on June 23, 1662. His son, Cheng Ching, used the Taiwan base to sustain the anti-Manchu struggle for another 20 years. But after his death in 1681, the Cheng kingdom on Taiwan fell to a Ch'ing invasion fleet in 1683. This defeat ended the longest lived of the Ming restorationist movements. Thus Cheng's plans ultimately failed, but his posthumous reputation has grown to remarkable proportions. In Japan the famous 18th-century playwright Chikamatsu's Battles of Koxinga made Cheng as well known to Japanese audiences as Othello is to the English. In Europe, lurid Dutch accounts of the fall of Formosa (Taiwan) established Cheng as one of the few Chinese historical figures to bear a latinized name. In his own country he soon became a popular deity and cultural hero to the early Chinese settlers of Taiwan-Kai Shan Sheng Wang, the Sage King Who Settled the Country. On the official level, in 1875 the Ch'ing court recognized its old antagonist as a paragon of loyalty and established an official temple to him on Taiwan. The development of modern Chinese nationalism in the 20th century has put Cheng Ch'eng-kung in the front ranks of China's historical heroes. To the anti-Manchu revolutionaries of the early 1900s he was a natural forebear. To Republican-period nationalists he was a symbol of resistance against foreign invaders. And in mid-century he continued to receive the accolade of "national hero" from both Chinese governments-from the Nationalists on Taiwan for his determination to restore proper Chinese rule and from the Communists on the mainland mainly for his great victory over Western (Dutch) imperialism. In his own day a martyr to a lost cause, Cheng Ch'eng-kung became a hero to all sides in modern Chinese politics, although to each for a different reason. Ralph C. Croizier Additional reading Earl Swisher, "Chng Ch'ng-kung," in A.W. Hummel (ed.), Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, 1644-1912, vol. 1, pp. 108-110 (1943, reprinted 1970), is a very brief but reliable biography. See also the articles on Cheng Ching and Cheng Chih-lung. W. Campbell, Formosa Under the Dutch (1903), is still the most detailed English-language account of the Cheng regime on Taiwan.