Koxinga was a pirate warlord who rebelled against the encroaching Manchus, maintaining loyalty to the Ming even after the 1644 suicide of its last emperor, Chung Chen (崇禎). In the years that followed he continued to foment resistance in southern China, but a 1659 defeat forced his 1661 retreat to Taiwan. He landed with an army of 25,000 and immediately contested the Dutch, laying siege to the Dutch fort of Zeelandia at Tainan. The Dutch held out for nine months at the cost of 1,600 lives before signing a treaty that allowed them to leave peaceably with the majority of their possessions.
The treaty, an impressive tome of compiled Dutch records from much of the occupation, is on display, as are the 18 terms of surrender proposed by Governor Frederick Coyett and the 16 eventually accepted by Koxinga. The first of them states that both parties shall renounce hostilities and forget all previous conflicts. Predictably, this never happened. A year later, the Dutch returned with 16 men-of-war in an attack that was repelled, and as recently as the fall of 2001, Taiwanese baseball fans were still waving placards bearing Koxinga's likeness while Taiwan and the Netherlands squared off in the 2001 Baseball World Cup.
Unfortunately the exhibition basically ends with the Coyett's 1662 surrender. There is little mention of the Spanish presence in northern Taiwan at Tamsui from 1624-1642 or the Kingdom of Taiwan, which existed under Koxinga's heirs from 1662-1683, ending with the conquest of Taiwan by the Qing. The absences can be accounted for by scarcity of records from those segments of history, especially in comparison to the abundance of VOC records now scattered throughout the world's museums. Also, as the show makes a case for the birth of Taiwan that was separate from China, it would probably not want to finish off with the actual conclusion of the 17th century, a Taiwan under Chinese rule.
The Birth of Taiwan: Formosa in the Seventeenth Century is on display through April 30 at the National Palace Museum (
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