Tagawa Matsu was from Hirado in Japan. In the early 1620s she married Zheng Zhilong, then trading at Hirado, and in July 1624 she gave birth to their eldest son on the Hirado shore. His childhood name was Fukumatsu; he became Koxinga. She later had a second son who stayed in Japan under her surname, Tagawa Shichizaemon.

In 1630, when Fukumatsu was seven, his father brought him to Fujian to study. She did not go — the shogunate did not let Japanese leave freely — and waited in Hirado for more than a decade. In 1645 she was finally allowed to go to Fujian and joined the family at Anping near Quanzhou.

They had one year. In 1646 Zheng Zhilong surrendered to the Qing and went north, and Qing troops then stormed Anping. She died there; the accounts differ — some say she hanged herself, some that she killed herself after being assaulted when the town fell.

When Koxinga heard, he went to the Confucian temple and burned his scholar's robes, and from then on raised troops in the name of the Ming. Most of what he did afterwards can be dated from that year.