The Fall of Tungning

The Kingdom of Tungning did not so much collapse as unravel from within. When Zheng Jing died of illness in March 1681, he was barely forty and the failed Fujian campaigns of the previous decade had drained both his treasury and his political capital. The succession was immediately contested. A palace faction led by the general Feng Xifan murdered Zheng Jing's designated heir, the competent and popular Zheng Kezang, within days of the king's death, and installed Kezang's twelve-year-old half-brother Zheng Keshuang on the throne. The coup fractured the court: loyalist officers defected, Chen Yonghua's reform apparatus went into eclipse, and intelligence of the disarray traveled quickly across the strait.

The Qing court had waited two decades for such an opening. The Kangxi Emperor, having suppressed the Revolt of the Three Feudatories in 1681, now turned his full attention to the offshore kingdom that had embarrassed his father and grandfather. In an audacious bureaucratic decision, he entrusted the invasion to Shi Lang — a former Zheng lieutenant who had defected to the Qing after Koxinga executed his father and brother. Shi Lang knew the Zheng fleet from the inside, and he had been campaigning in Beijing for twenty years for a chance to return. Appointed Admiral of Fujian in 1681, he spent two years rebuilding a fleet of three hundred warships and training coastal crews in the waters around Tongshan.

The hammer fell in the summer of 1683. On the sixteenth day of the sixth lunar month, Shi Lang's armada engaged Liu Guoxuan, the kingdom's finest admiral, in the waters off Penghu. The battle lasted seven days. Superior Qing numbers, tighter signal discipline, and the exploitation of seasonal wind conditions that Shi Lang himself had charted as a youth proved decisive. Liu's fleet was shattered; some two hundred Tungning ships were destroyed or captured, thousands of sailors perished. With Penghu lost, Taiwan lay open. On the twelfth day of the seventh month, Zheng Keshuang submitted a formal memorial of surrender. He shaved his head in the Qing fashion, dispatched his royal seal, and consented to relocation to Beijing, where he was granted a nominal Chinese title and quietly retired from history. Twenty-one years of Zheng rule, and twenty-two of Han-Chinese sovereignty on the island, came to an end.

This volume reconstructs the fall of Tungning through the documents of its ending: the murdered heir's court rolls, Feng Xifan's coup correspondence, Shi Lang's battle memorials to the Kangxi Emperor, Liu Guoxuan's defeat dispatch, and Zheng Keshuang's surrender memorial. It traces how the first Han-Chinese polity on Taiwan, founded in haste by a father and refined in substance by a son, was undone in a single summer — clearing the way for Taiwan's incorporation into the Qing Empire and more than two centuries of imperial frontier rule.