The Twilight of the Boy King

In the golden autumn of September 1683, a suffocating silence fell over the sunset-drenched city of Tainan. The bustling ports of Erhulmen and Anping, once the vibrant crown jewels of the Age of Sail, were no longer filled with merchant vessels. Instead, the horizon was choked with the dense, looming fleet of the Qing Empire, their banners rippling ominously in the sea breeze.

Inside the grand hall of the Chengtian Royal Palace, twelve-year-old Zheng Keshuang sat motionless on a hollow wooden throne. He wore the ceremonial dragon robes of the Ming Dynasty—robes that were far too heavy and wide for his slender, youthful frame. Since the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Penghu, and following the successive deaths of his matriarch grandmother, Lady Dong, and the brilliant minister Chen Yonghua, this overseas bastion of Ming loyalism had run entirely out of time and options.

On this fateful evening, the fierce rhetoric of resisting the Qing and restoring the Ming had vanished. In its place echoed only the helpless sighs of corrupt courtiers and the low, muffled weeping of civil officials.

On the night before he was scheduled to shave his head, change his attire, and formally surrender his kingdom, the boy-king walked into the Zheng Family Ancestral Shrine for the very last time.

Inside, the eternal incense burned low, cast in a dim glow that cradled the wooden ancestral tablets of his grandfather, Koxinga, and his father, Zheng Jing. Looking up at those names—names that had once struck terror into the hearts of Qing emperors—the young Keshuang and the royal clan members kneeling behind him finally broke.

They wept bitterly in the flickering candlelight. They wept for the king's own helpless youth, for the treacherous manipulation of the court factions, and above all, for the tragic reality that this haven of Han civilization, carved out of the wilderness by their ancestors, could not escape the cruel destiny of conquest.

As the sacrificial joss paper turned to ash in the burning braziers, the legitimate royal lineage of the Prince of Yanping, which had reigned over Taiwan for twenty-one years, reached its heartbreaking end.

The next morning, the final curtain fell upon Taiwan’s first Han Chinese regime at the Baoning Temple. Shi Lang, the victorious Admiral of the Qing navy, marched into the royal palace with a heavy, disciplined stride, flanked by his top commanders.

Under the watchful, tearful eyes of the court and the local populace, the twelve-year-old Zheng Keshuang, aided by his attendants, raised his trembling hands to untie the Ming scholar’s cap from his head.

Before the crowd, a Qing military barber took a razor and shaved the front of the boy's head, braiding the remaining hair into the mandatory Manchu queue. He stripped off the silken Han garments that symbolized the orthodox Ming lineage and put on the official robes of the Qing court.

The boy-king then knelt before Admiral Shi Lang, raising the written Instrument of Surrender and the gold royal seal of the Prince of Yanping high above his head. At that exact moment, cries of anguish erupted throughout Tainan. To the scraping hiss of razors against skin, the gears of history turned ruthlessly, burying the twenty-one-year maritime saga of the Kingdom of Tungning into the dust of the past. The fall of the Zheng regime marked a violent turning point in Taiwanese history.

Following his capitulation, Zheng Keshuang, along with the scheming courtier Feng Xifan and other members of the royal clan, were immediately escorted under armed guard to Beijing. To prevent the Han population in Taiwan from ever rising in rebellion under the Zheng name again, the Kangxi Emperor spared the twelve-year-old boy's life.

Instead, he placed him under house arrest in the capital, granting him the empty, hollow title of "Duke of the Han Banners," leaving him to live out the remainder of his days in poverty and constant paranoia. In 1684, the Qing Empire officially incorporated Taiwan into its imperial domain, establishing the Taiwan Prefecture.

Today, when you walk into the ancient Zheng Successor Ancestral Shrine in downtown Tainan and gaze upon the statue enshrined in the main hall, the swirling incense still whispers to every visitor of the sheer helplessness and sorrow of that twelve-year-old boy who untied his crown and surrendered his kingdom in the autumn twilight of 1683.