The Companys Chinese Pirates How The Dut

The Company’s Chinese Pirates:
How the Dutch East India Company

Tried to Lead a Coalition of Pirates to War
against China, 1621–1662*
tonio andrade
Emory University
I n the early seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company

stormed into Chinese waters, intent on doing business in China.
Their demands for free trade, however, were rebuffed by Chinese
officials, who distrusted the “red-haired barbarians” and their power-
ful ships. Yet these same officials often granted prestigious posts to Chi-
nese pirates in order to persuade them to abandon their lives of crime.
As the Dutch watched one pirate after another make the transition to
respectability, they grew frustrated. Why, they wondered, should pi-
rates be rewarded for their crimes while the company was ignored? Rea-
soning that “the Chinese pirates . . . can amply show us how and in
what manner the empire of China might be pressured,” the Dutch de-
cided to implement a cunning plan: to unite the pirates and attack
* Much of the documentary evidence for this article comes from Dutch East India
Company (VOC) sources, which are located in the National Archives of the Nether-
lands in The Hague. To save space I do not indicate the provenance of these sources each
time I cite them but instead identify them with the acronym VOC and then provide an
archival index number and folio numbers (if applicable). The Spanish and Portuguese
sources cited here can usually be found in José Eugenio Borao Mateo, Spaniards in Tai-
wan, 2 vol. (Taipei: Nantien Press, 2001–2002). Most of the Chinese sources cited here
can be found in digital form on the Academia Sinica Web site in the Scripta Sinica ~y
qlÂm, a superb collection of Chinese texts that includes a nearly complete run of the
Taiwan wenxian congkan OWÂmOZ as well as the Mingshi ˙v and Qingshi Mv (as of
6 March 2004, the URL
Journal of World History, Vol. 15, No. 4

© 2005 by University of Hawai‘i Press
415
416 journal of world history, december 2004
China, after which, they imagined, the “mandarins” would agree to grant
them free trade.1
The pirates, however, were a restless lot. Usually organized in small,
competitive cells, they sometimes banded together into large coalitions
to attack shipping in China’s busy sea lanes.2 At times they were happy
to work with the Dutch, but in this rough-and-tumble world an ally might
at any time be replaced by an upstart. The company’s pirate coalition
therefore proved unstable, and the pirate wars were instead won by Zheng
Zhilong (G¤s), a pirate-turned-official who had once worked for the
Dutch as a translator. He, like the Dutch, struggled with pirates, but thanks
to official and local ties he managed to gradually gain control over the
Taiwan Straits.3 When his son, Zheng Chenggong (G®\), inherited
his organization, pirates became freedom fighters, working to restore the
recently fallen Ming dynasty. Zheng fils created a Chinese maritime state
that eventually captured the Dutch East India Company’s colony of Tai-
wan, one of the few European colonies to fall to a non-European power.
Our pirate story thus sheds light on a basic question of global his-
tory: how pirates and their interactions with states may help us to un-
derstand European expansion. From a pan-Eurasian perspective, Euro-
pean states were unusual in their willingness to use privateers to further
strategic and economic interests abroad. European seamen enjoyed state
support and were therefore better able to project a lethal combination
for the Scripta Sinica is http://www.sinica.edu.tw/ftms-bin/ftmsw3). All translations are my

own unless otherwise indicated.
1 Letter from Hans Putmans (governor of Taiwan) to Governor-General Jacques Specx,
5 October 1630, VOC 1101: 412–430, fo. 416.

2 Dian Murray’s excellent study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese pirates
holds lessons for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well. See Dian Murray, Pirates of
the South China Coast, 1790–1810 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), and
Dian Murray, “Living and Working Conditions in Chinese Pirate Communities, 1750–1850,”
in Pirates and Privateers: New Perspectives on the War on Trade in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries, ed. David J. Starkey (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). She shows that pi-
rate cells in southern China in the eighteenth century were usually made up of poor fisher-
men who turned to piracy on a temporary basis. After a week or two of pillaging they would
return to their native villages and take up their old occupations. Evidence suggests that this
was also true for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Taiwan Straits. At certain
times these cells organized themselves into larger groups, as happened in the mid sixteenth
century and again in the 1620s.
3 Leonard Blussé has made an outstanding analysis of the factors behind Zhilong’s rise
to success. See Leonard Blussé, “Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan? The Rise of Cheng Chih-lung
Alias Nicolas Zhilong,” in Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Cen-
turies, ed. E. B. Vermeer (Leiden: Brill, 1990). Blussé has also examined the growth of piracy
during the early and mid seventeenth century from the perspective Sino-Dutch percep-
tions in another article: Leonard Blussé, “The VOC as Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Stereotypes and
Andrade: The Dutch East India Company’s Chinese Pirates 417
of maritime force and economic enterprise than were most of their Asian
counterparts.4 The Dutch East India Company was the largest, best-
capitalized privateering enterprise in the world. It was able to outstrip
its East Asian competitors so long as they had little state support. The
rise of Zheng Chenggong’s maritime state, however, changed the bal-
ance of power, and the company lost out to the former Chinese pirates.
Pirates have long flourished in the China Seas, especially during the
Ming dynasty (1368–1644), whose officials viewed the ocean as they
did the Great Wall: as a barrier to keep foreign barbarians out of China.5
The Ming founder wrote in his ancestral injunction: “Overseas foreign
countries . . . are separated from us by mountains and seas and far away
in a corner. Their lands would not produce enough for us to maintain
them; their people would not usefully serve us if incorporated.” 6 It was
he who issued the famous Maritime Prohibition (Haijin ¸T), accord-
ing to which contact between China and overseas foreigners was to take
place only by means of official diplomatic embassies known as tribute
missions. The tribute system was not new to China, but the Ming pol-
icy was extreme. It stipulated that all intercourse between Chinese
Social Engineering on the China Coast,” in Leiden Studies in Sinology, ed. W. L. Idema (Lei-
den: Brill, 1981), pp. 87–105.
4 The Mediterranean is of course an exception, and the Ottomans made several attempts
to counter Portuguese maritime expansion in the Indian Ocean as well (see Giancarlo Casale,
“The Ottoman Age of Exploration: Spices, Maps, and Conquest in the Sixteenth Century
Indian Ocean,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2004). There were also a few smaller Asian
states that fostered overseas adventurism, such as Oman, Aceh, and Macassar, but in gen-
eral Asian states appear to have eschewed privateering or most state-sponsored maritime ex-
pansion. See N. M. Pearson, “Merchants and States,” in Political Economy of the Merchant
Empires, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 41–116.
For an important overview of European expansion in Asia, see John E. Wills Jr., “Maritime
Asia, 1500–1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination,” American Histori-
cal Review 98.1 (1993): 83–105. Europeans’ projection of maritime violence had its origins
in the Mediterranean, a connection noted by Niels Steensgaard, who bases his observations
on the work of Frederic C. Lane. See Niels Steensgaard, “Violence and the Rise of Capital-
ism: Frederic C. Lane’s Theory of Protection and Tribute,” in Review: A Journal of the Fer-
nand Braudel Center 5.2 (1981): 247–273. See also the classic chapter on the military bal-
ance between Europe and Asia in Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation
and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). A re-
cent article by Ernst van Veen traces the evolution of Dutch East India Company policy from
violence-enforced trade to diplomacy, and his argument largely agrees with the developments
outlined in this article. See Ernst van Veen, “VOC Strategies in the Far East (1605–1640),”
Bulletin of Portuguese/Japanese Studies 3 (2001): 85–105.
5 Indeed, today the South China Sea is an area where piracy is reaching dangerous lev-
els and according to one author may even prove disastrous to world trade. See John S. Bur-
nett, Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas (Dutton, 2002).
6 Quoted in Chang Pin-tsun, “Chinese Maritime Trade: The Case of Sixteenth-Century
Fu-chien,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1983, p. 14.

people and foreigners must take place within formal missions. No

unofficial visits by foreign traders would be tolerated, nor were Chinese
allowed to sail abroad, except on tribute missions. Just as the Great Wall
would keep China safe from northern barbarians, the Maritime Prohi-
bition would keep China safe from overseas barbarians.7
Yet the people of China still sought foreign products and markets,
so the Maritime Prohibition created two problems. First was a tendency
for tribute missions to grow in size and expense. The Ming founder con-
ceived of tribute in noneconomic terms: since China was the superior
power, it would pay all expenses for foreign ambassadors, and its gifts
would exceed theirs in value. Chinese traders and their foreign part-
ners, however, saw tribute missions as their sole avenue for legal trade
and loaded them with goods and people. Tribute missions thus became
more and more expensive, and in the mid fifteenth century Ming officials
began scaling them back to save money. The second problem was smug-
gling. Because tribute missions were too small and too infrequent to sat-
isfy demand, illicit trade took off, especially in the sixteenth century,
when China was switching to a silver economy and Japan was opening
huge silver mines.8 At first, Ming officials maintained elaborate coastal
defenses to prevent smuggling, but by 1500 the number of naval and
7 The Ming state did tolerate some private foreign trade in border and coastal regions,
such as in Guangzhou. Whether the trade was really acknowledged to be private trade or
whether it was carried out under the pretext of tribute is not clear. In any case, it was subject
to strict controls, including restrictions on the size of vessels and on items that could be ex-
ported. Proscribed exports included ironware, copper coins, and silk, all of which were im-
portant commodities for Chinese who wished to trade abroad. Traders who infracted these
restrictions received stiffer penalties than did traders who engaged in domestic trade. See for
example an excellent article by Zhang Dechang (Chang Te-ch’ang), “Maritime Trade at Can-
ton during the Ming Dynasty,” Chinese Social and Political Science Review (Beijing) 19 (1933):
264–282. See also Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming
China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 119–121; and John Lee, “Trade
and Economy in Preindustrial East Asia, c. 1500–c. 1800: East Asia in the Age of Global Inte-
gration,” Journal of Asian Studies 58.1 (1999): 2–26. This limited private trade appears grad-
ually to have been subjected to greater and greater restrictions, as officials’ attitudes against
trade hardened in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In 1524, the Ministry of
Justice began imposing punishments on those who interacted closely with foreign traders. The
following year, two-masted ships along the Zhejiang coast were seized and destroyed, and in
1551 fishing boats, too, were banned. Thus, the system of private trade (if it can be called a
system, for it appears to have been ad hoc and local) thus collapsed by the mid sixteenth cen-
tury. This was the same time that the tribute trade system itself was falling into desuetude,
and the two developments had grave consequences for China’s maritime security.
8 See especially William Atwell, “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy, c.
1470–1650,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, ed. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W.
Mote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 376–416; Dennis O. Flynn and
Arturo Giraldez, “Arbitrage, China, and World Trade in the Early Modern Period,” Journal
guard units had fallen to as little as 20 percent of early Ming levels, and
smuggling increased accordingly. Most smugglers were based in the mar-
itime province of Fujian, where powerful lineage organizations cir-
cumvented trade prohibitions.
At first, officials in Beijing looked the other way, but smuggling
brought piracy. Since smugglers enjoyed no legal protection, they
tended to enforce contracts by force. Selective pressures thus created
armed maritime gangs, which supplemented trading income with ex-
tortion and pillage.9 In the 1540s, the Ming government tried to crack
down. They strengthened the navy, rebuilt coastal and island fortresses,
and began attacking smugglers. But the Ming had merely upped the ante.
After 1540, smugglers banded together in larger, tighter, more bellicose
organizations, taking over military bases, villages, and towns. They also
found supporters in Japan, whose warring lords were eager for new
sources of revenue. Ming attempts to enforce the Maritime Prohibition
simply created the classic “bubble effect”: when they squashed smug-
gling in one area, it was replaced by smuggling in another area.10
In the 1550s, a few Ming officials recognized that demand for for-
eign trade was too strong to be resisted and began to argue for repeal of
the Maritime Prohibition. They argued that if legal trade replaced smug-
gling, then piracy, too, would decrease. In 1567 a new emperor surpris-
ingly took their side and decreed an “Open Seas” policy. Foreign traders
were still forbidden to land in China except on tribute missions, but
Chinese were allowed to sail abroad so long as they obtained licenses
and paid tolls and taxes, and so long as they did not sail to Japan, which
was considered too friendly to pirates.11 The new policy worked: smug-
of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38.4 (1995): 429–448. See also Dennis O.
Flynn, “Comparing the Tokugawa Shogunate with Hapsburg Spain: Two Silver-Based Em-
pires in a Global Setting,” in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, ed. James D.
Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
9 Indeed, some Chinese scholars have adopted a new term for such organizations: pirate-
merchants (¸F”H). Li Jinming (ı˜˙), Mingdai haiwai maoyi shi ˙N¸~Tˆv(The

History of maritime foreign commerce during the Ming Dynasty) (Beijing: Zhongguo she-
hui kexue chubanshe §Í¿|Ï«X©¿, 1990), cited in Ang Kaim ŒŒµ, “Shiqi shiji
de fulao haishang” QC@ˆ∫÷–¸”, in Zhongguo haiyang fazhan shi lunwen ji di qi ji §Í
¸voivÂ◊∞ƒCË, ed. Tang Xiyong ˆ≥i (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1999).
10 Most of the smuggling ended up in Fujian Province. See Chang’s excellent discus-
sion in “Chinese Maritime Trade,” pp. 36–54 and 234–249.

11 The Portuguese at Macao were an exception. Local officials in Guangzhou had al-
lowed foreign traders to call beginning in the early sixteenth century. In the 1550s, the port
had been closed once again to foreign traders, except for the Portuguese, who were allowed
to open a base at Macao.
gling and piracy diminished. Yet there was still a problem. The most lu-
crative trade—that with Japan—was still illegal. Chinese entrepreneurs
found three ways around this problem. The first was the old way: thou-
sands of smugglers continued to sail illegally to Japan. The second was
to meet Japanese traders elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia, espe-
cially in Taiwan. The third was to trade with European intermediaries.
Trade between China and Japan provided a niche for Europeans to oc-
cupy in the competitive world of East Asian commerce. It is what drew
the Dutch and their predecessors, the Portuguese, to China.
Yet Europeans arrived in the East with strange ideas about maritime
trade. Whereas the Ming state saw sea commerce as a necessary evil,
something that might at best be tolerated, European states actively
fostered it, often with military force. Indeed, they supported what Chi-
nese officials would have called piracy, using privateers—state-licensed
pirates—to attack enemy shipping. The Portuguese were the first to ex-
port European manners to maritime Asia, as their heavily armed fleets
began disrupting Indian Ocean trade in 1498. In 1511, they besieged
Melaka, which controlled the main corridor between the Indian
Ocean and East Asia. Chinese merchants, angry at Melaka’s leader, en-
couraged the Portuguese and even loaned them a junk to land troops.
The siege was successful, but when the Portuguese tried to open trade
with China, they met resistance. Ming officials considered the “Fa-
rangi,” as they called the Portuguese, to be usurpers, since the ex-king
of Melaka had been a Ming tributary.12 Portuguese emissaries explained
that they had taken Melaka at the behest of Chinese merchants, who
had been tyrannized by the former king, an explanation that embar-
rassed Ming officials because Chinese were not allowed to trade abroad.
Barred from legal trade, the Portuguese turned to smuggling. In 1542,
one of their ships lost its way in a storm and landed in Japan. The crew
found their hosts most accommodating, and, during the course of their
stay, realized that there were immense profits to be made from Sino-
Japanese trade, if only they could find a means of acquiring Chinese
wares.
In 1552, a Portuguese merchant solved the problem. Canton’s local
officials did not enforce the Maritime Prohibition, and he learned that
foreigners could trade in Canton, “except the Farangi, who were people
12 “Farangi” is the Portuguese transliteration of a Chinese naturalization (Ú¶˜) of
the Arabic and Persian word for Western Europeans, faranjı̄, which itself derives from the
word “Franks.”
with filthy hearts.”13 Working closely with a Chinese official, whom he

cajoled with rich gifts, he arranged for a name change, so that the Por-
tuguese would no longer be identified as Farangi. By 1557, the Portuguese
were established on the peninsula of Macao, with access to the silk mar-
kets of southern China. Cantonese officials kept a careful watch on their
guests. The Portuguese were not allowed past the Circle Gate (Porta do
Cerco) at the top of the peninsula. Since little agricultural land lay on
the Macao side, the city’s residents depended on food supplies from
China, which could be cut off if Chinese officials felt their guests were
misbehaving. Despite such restrictions, the colony prospered. Silk “car-
racks,” or “naos,” departed Macao each summer, arriving in Japan
twelve to thirty days later. In November or December they returned,
filled with silver.14 By 1571 the Portuguese had been given a permanent
settlement in Nagasaki. The Portuguese of Macao had, in effect, been
civilized and had become good citizens, utterly dependent upon China.
They did not attempt to impose on Chinese or Japanese merchants the
aggressive system they instituted in the Indian Ocean, in which Asian
traders were required to buy passes or suffer depredation by Portuguese
patrols.
The Dutch arrived around 1600, determined to wrest trade from
the Portuguese. The United Provinces of the Netherlands had declared
independence from Spain in 1579. For this small country, finding a
source of revenues to resist Spain was vital. They were accomplished
sea traders who dominated large portions of European trade. Many,
however, wanted to expand their enterprises to the East and thereby
circumvent the Portuguese, from whom Amsterdam obtained the
spices sold in its famous wholesale markets. In 1596, Jan Huygen van
Linschoten (1563–1611) published a description of his travels through-
out the Indies as an employee of the Portuguese. His book, Itinerario,
provided detailed sea charts, acquired from secret Portuguese archives.
Itinerario enabled Dutch captains to voyage to the East. When their
13 John E. Wills Jr. believes that the document from which this quote is taken is the most
important document in Sino-Lusitanian relations. See John E. Wills Jr., “Relations with Mari-
time Europeans,” in The Cambridge History of China Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644,
Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 333–375 (quote p. 344).
14 C. R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press,
1968); Charles Ralph Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson,
1969); James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993); and George Bryan Souza, Survival of Empire: Portuguese
Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630–1754 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1986).
first expedition returned to Holland in 1597, it was a tremendous suc-

cess. Only one out of five ships made it back, but its cargo paid for the
entire expedition.
Dutch investors founded dozens of East India Companies, which all
competed to buy the same spices, raising prices and lowering profits. The
competing companies also failed to present a united front against Por-
tugal and Spain. Therefore the Estates General of the Netherlands de-
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cided to create one United East India Company (Vereenighde Oost-

Indische Compagnie, or VOC). It was designed to make money for the
fatherland by attacking the Iberians and therefore received rights usu-
ally reserved to sovereign states: the right to wage war and the right to
make treaties with foreign powers. In the East Indies (that is, everywhere
east of the Arabian Sea) the VOC represented the Dutch state. The
Dutch had created an enormous, publicly traded privateering enterprise.
Indeed, proceeds from privateering were a vital component of its in-
come during the first decades of its existence.15
The company used its military muscle to establish a headquarters in
Batavia (present-day Jakarta), and then launched a series of expeditions
to gain control over Southeast and East Asian trade. Once established
in the Spice Islands, it turned northward toward Macao. In 1622 a com-
pany fleet besieged Macao, but the city prevailed, having been fortified
with Castilian troops.16 So the company went to the Penghu Islands
(ÍÚ), in the strait between Taiwan and mainland China. Because the
islands lie athwart the sea lanes between Macao and Japan, the Dutch
planned to use them as a base both to intercept Portuguese shipping and
to trade with China. Chinese officials, however, demanded that the
Dutch withdraw and, according to Dutch sources, offered them Taiwan
instead, promising to allow Chinese to trade with them there.17 The
Dutch reluctantly moved their operations to “the Bay of Tayouan,” near
today’s Tainan City.18 Here, in 1624, they established a new factory to
trade silk and silver between China and Japan, but trade was slow. Chi-
nese officials permitted a few Chinese traders to go to Taiwan, but the
Dutch wanted trade in larger volumes. They faced a decision: should they
15 See van Veen, “VOC Strategies,” pp. 90–96.

16 An excellent account of the VOC China expedition can be found in John E. Wills
Jr., Pepper, Guns, and Parleys: The Dutch East India Company and China, 1622–1681 (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974). See also Leonard Blussé, “The Dutch Occu-
pation of the Pescadores (1622–1624),” in Transactions of the International Conference of Ori-
entalists in Japan, No. 18 (Tokyo: Toho Gakkai [Institute of Eastern Culture], 1973), pp.
28–44. There is also a brief discussion in Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade,
1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
17 Generale Missiven, P. de Charpentier, Frederick de Houtman, J. Dedel en J. Specx,
Batavia, 25 December 1623, VOC 1079:124–126. Cheng Shaogang has transcribed and trans-
lated into Chinese the generale missiven having to do with Taiwan. See Cheng Shaogang,
“De VOC en Formosa 1624–1662: Een Vergeten Geschiedenis,” Ph.D. diss., University of
Leiden, Netherlands, 1995. The dissertation has been published in Taiwan without the Dutch
transcriptions. See Cheng Shaogang ({–Ë), Helan ren zai Fu’ermosha (¸ıHb÷∏◊Ô)
(Taipei: Lianjing Publishing Company, 2000).
18 Generale Missiven, P. de Charpentier, Frederick de Houtman, J. Dedel en J. Specx,
Batavia, 25 December 1623, VOC 1079:124–126 (in Cheng, “VOC en Formosa,” p. 27).
use diplomacy or force? As they wrestled with this problem, they inter-
acted with the pirates of the Taiwan Straits.19
When the company arrived in Taiwan, the island was inhabited by
Austronesian headhunters, but Chinese interest was growing. Most of
the Chinese who came to Taiwan were fishermen from Fujian, who ar-
rived each winter to catch mullet.20 Fishing junks also brought peddlers,
some of whom ventured inland to trade with the aborigines, exchang-
ing iron pots, salt, and textiles for deer hides and venison. More affluent
Chinese merchants used the island as a base for commerce with Japan.21
Taiwan’s bays and coves also sheltered Chinese pirates. The Dutch found
two Chinese villages on the Bay of Tayouan when they arrived. A Chi-
nese man who lived there described them both as inhabited by pirates.22
The leader of these pirates was an enigmatic figure: Yan Siqi (C‰Ù).
According to the Taiwan wai ji, a colorful but dubious source, he had
lived for a time as a tailor in Japan before coming to the realization
that “life is as fleeting as the morning dew” and deciding to devote him-
self to piracy.23 The story told in this source reads like a martial arts
novel. Yan gathers a trusty band, whose members include Iron Zhang-
hong, a forthright strongman, and a fellow named Deep Mountain
Monkey, skilled with guns and powder. The characters take an oath
before heaven (“though we were born on different days, let us die on
the same day”), accept Yan Siqi as leader of the alliance (˘D), and
eventually establish a base on Taiwan from which to rove the seas. The
story is fanciful, and some scholars have even taken the position that
Yan Siqi did not exist. Yet the name Yan Siqi (or his courtesy name,
Yan Zhenquan) does appear in other, more reliable early sources, albeit
19 For more about Taiwan as a land colony, see Tonio Andrade, “Commerce, Culture,
and Conflict: Taiwan under European Rule, 1623–1662,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2000.
20 For an outstanding overview of the fishing industry in seventeenth-century Taiwan,
see Takashi Nakamura, Helan shidai Taiwan nanbu zhi ziye ¸ı…NOWn°ßœÆ~, in
Helan shidai Taiwan shi yanjiu shang juan ¸ı…NOWv„sW˜ (Taipei: Daoxiang Press
_mX©¿), pp. 121–163.
21 Ts’ao Young-ho distinguishes between two types of traders: poorer traders who bought
animal and plant products, and richer traders who bought sulfur and gold in northern Taiwan
or traded with the Japanese in the south. See Ts’ao Young-ho ‰√M, “Mingdai Taiwan yuye
zhilüe” ˙NOWÆ~x§, in Ts’ao Young-ho, OW≠¡˙v„s (Taipei: Lianjing [pg],
1979).
22 The word he uses is “ladroes.” See Salvador Diaz, “Relação da fortalesa poder e trato
com os Chinas, que os Olandeses tem na Ilha Fermosa dada por Salvador Diaz, natural de Macao,
que la esteve cativo e fugio em hua soma em Abril do Anno de 1626,” Biblioteca Nacional de
España, MSS 3015, fos. 55–62v, fo. 56 (Borao, Spaniards in Taiwan, document no. 21).
23 Jiang Risheng øÈ@, Taiwan wai ji OW~O, Taiwan wenxian congkang 2(60),
pp. 4–6.
without the picaresque details.24 Yan Siqi existed but remains a mys-
terious figure.
We have more information about another pirate: Li Dan (ıπ),
whom the Dutch interacted with extensively as they worked to es-
tablish themselves in the China trade.25 Li Dan was chief of the Chi-
nese who lived in Japan, a group considered illegal by the Ming gov-
ernment, and was known to Westerners as “Captain China.” He also
appears to have controlled the Sino-Japanese trade in Taiwan.26 Some
scholars in Taiwan believe that he was an associate of Yan Siqi’s, al-
though the evidence is inconclusive.27 In any case, Li Dan agreed to
help the company gain free trade with China and went to Fujian Prov-
ince on their behalf, carrying gifts from the Dutch to Chinese
24 Yan Siqi’s courtesy name was Yan Zhenquan (C∂u). Neither name appears in the
Official Ming History (Mingshi). The names do, however, appear in several other early
sources, such as Huang Zongxi ¿v™, Ci xing shi mo ÁmlΩ, Taiwan wenxian congkan
2(25), p. 9; Peng Sunyi ^]M, Jing hai zhi t¸”, Taiwan wenxian congkang 4(35), p. 1; Liu
Xianting Bm?, Guang yang za ji xuan sß¯OÔ, Taiwan wenxian congkan 4(219), p. 79
(in the appendix “Fei huang shi mo” ∏¿lΩ); Xu Xu \∞, Min zhong ji lüe ‘§ˆ§, Tai-
wan wenxian congkan 5(260), p. 44 (in the appendix “Hai kou ji” ¸FO; it is interesting to
note that this source indicates that Yan liked Zheng because he was handsome). These works
are usually in close agreement in the few facts they offer: Yan Siqi was a pirate who was based
in Taiwan sometime in the late Wanli reign (1573–1620) or early Tianqi reign (1621–1627),
and he was joined there by Zheng Zhilong, who succeeded him after his death. A later but
very useful account is found in the work of Kawaguchi Choju tf¯© (see especially his
Taiwan Zheng shi ji shi OWGÛˆ∆, Taiwan wenxian congkan 2(5), pp. 3–4).
25 In Chinese sources, Li Dan sometimes appears as Li Xu (ı∞). He is the same “China
Captain” who caused Richard Cocks and the English so much consternation in Japan. The
best edition of Cocks’s diary is Richard Cocks, Diary Kept by the Head of the English Factory in
Japan: Diary of Richard Cocks, 1615–1622, ed. University of Tokyo Historiographical Insti-
tute, Nihon Kankei Kaigai Shiryo: Historical Documents in Foreign Languages Relating to
Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 1980). See also Seiichi Iwao’s classic article about Li Dan:
Seiichi Iwao, “Li Tan, Chief of the Chinese Residents at Hirado, Japan, in the Last Days of
the Ming Dynasty,” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 17 (1958): 27–83.
26 Iwao, “Li Tan. Ang Kaim, in “Shiqi Shiji de Fulao Haishang,” calls into question some
of Iwao’s conclusions.
27 The relationship between Yan Siqi and Li Dan is the subject of considerable inter-
est. Some scholars have held that Yan Siqi and Li Dan were the same person. See C. R. Boxer,
“The Rise and Fall of Nicholas Iquan,” T’ien Hsia Monthly, 11.5 (1941): 401–439, esp. pp.
412–414; see also W. G. Goddard, Formosa: A Study in Chinese History (Melbourne: Macmil-
lan, 1966), pp. 40–48. This is almost certainly not the case. Ang Kaim believes that Yan
Siqi and Li Dan were close associates. Arguing that Yan Siqi is the man who in Western
texts is called “Pedro China” on the basis of their having died at the same time, he exam-
ines a letter from Li Dan to Pedro China that was intercepted by the company and that shows
close collusion between the two. See Ang Kaim “Shiqi Shiji de Fulao Haishang,” pp. 74–75.
Although the evidence Ang uses is inconclusive, his is a compelling hypothesis that is
accepted by others, for example Tang Jintai ˆAx, Kaiqi Taiwan di yi ren Zheng Zhilong }“
OWƒ@HG¤s (Taipei: Guoshi GÍ Press, 2002), pp. 120–121.
officials.28 Although he gained legitimacy in the eyes of some Chi-

nese officials, perhaps for his role in persuading the Dutch to leave the
Pescadores, Chinese texts often refer to him as “Pirate Li Dan,” and it
is clear that he did sometimes pillage.29 At one point, for example, he
urged the Dutch to sell him a few junks so that he could “rob the Chi-
nese . . . in the name of the Dutch nation.”30 Yet his cooperation with
the Dutch was short-lived. In 1625, company officials learned that he
had kept gifts intended for Chinese officials.31 They also learned that
his men had tried pillaging Chinese junks with trade goods for the
Dutch colony on Taiwan.32
Whoever led them, the pirates of Taiwan were a nuisance for the
company, interfering with their attempts to trade in China. Xu Xinsu
(\fl¿), a Chinese merchant who worked closely with the company,
told the Dutch that he had to make “extraordinary preparations” to de-
fend his junks from pirate attacks and demanded compensation for ex-
tra manpower and military supplies.33 The company sent expeditions
to find these pirates, but they were usually able to escape into coves and
rivers in western Taiwan.34 The Dutch mused that such places must be
controlled so that “the pirates have no foothold on this coast.”35
But some pirates managed to work from within the Dutch East India
28 Journael van Adam Verhult vande Voyagie naer Tayouan, March-April 1623, VOC
1081: 65– 67. See also see Nagazumi Yoko, “Helan de Taiwan maoyi (shang)” ¸ı∫OW
Tˆ]W^, Taiwan feng wu OW∑´ 43. 1 (1993): 13–44, esp. pp. 15–23.
29 The biography of Nan Juyi (n~q), military governor of Fujian, in the Ming-shi
suggests that Li Dan was ordered by the Chinese to negotiate with the Dutch, an office he
made the most of for his own enrichment. See Iwao, “Li Tan,” pp. 61–62.
30 Reijersen’s journal, cited in Iwao, “Li Tan,” pp. 51–52.
31 He had similarly deceived the English, to whom, when they left Japan, he had owed
the huge sum of 70,000 taels. See Iwao, “Li Tan,” p. 68 and Cocks, Diary.
32 Letter from Gerrit Fredricxz. De Witt to the Governor-General Pieter de Carpentier,
29 October 1625, VOC 1087: 385–396, fo. 389.

33 In Dutch sources Xu Xinsu is called “Simpsou.” Since Xinsu himself was a close as-
sociate of Li Dan’s, it appears clear either that Xinsu was double-dealing the Dutch or that
Li Dan was not involved in the piracy that afflicted Xinsu. Blussé believes that Xinsu switched
from his erstwhile associates to working with the Dutch, arousing their ire in the process
(Blussé, “VOC as Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” pp. 99–100). Xinsu, who held the position of a
local Ming military commander (‚`), would later participate in the Ming defense against
Zheng Zhilong and other pirates. Kawaguchi Choju, Taiwan Zheng shi ji shi, p. 4.
34 This was perhaps part of a conscious policy to change the company’s image vis-à-vis
Chinese officials, for they told Xinsu to tell officials that “we tolerate no pirates here, but
on the contrary do our best to keep the seas safe for all merchants and fishers.” Letter from
Gerrit de Witt to Simpsou, Chinese Merchant, 21 November 1625, VOC 1090: 182–183,
fo. 182v.
35 Letter from Gerrit Fredricxz. De Witt to Governor-General Pieter de Carpentier, 29
October 1625, VOC 1087: 385–396, fo. 389.

Company’s own administration. Consider the story of Salvador Diaz, a

Catholic Chinese mestizo from Macao. In 1622, he was on his way to
Manila when his ship was captured by the Dutch, who took him and his
shipmates back to their base. Since Diaz was literate in both Chinese
and Portuguese, he was treated better than the other prisoners. While
they worked, starving, in the hot sun, he sat inside the Dutch fortress
and translated correspondence with Chinese officials. The Dutch even
began paying him wages and allowing him some freedom. He gradually
gained the trust of Dutch officials, including the Dutch lieutenant gov-
ernor, Gerritt de Witt, who revealed to Diaz a shocking secret. He told
Diaz that he was Catholic, showing him a golden reliquary and a papal
dispensation he kept hidden from his Protestant colleagues. From the
privileged position of company translator, Diaz witnessed the establish-
ment and early workings of the Dutch colony on Taiwan. Unbeknownst
to his captors, he kept careful notes “in a book in Chinese letters,” for
he planned to return to Macao, where information about the Dutch
colony would be valuable. In April of 1626 he made his move. Having
bought a small junk from a Chinese fisherman, he and fifteen compan-
ions set sail through the Taiwan Straits. Four days later they landed in
Macao, where Diaz was asked to tell his story many times and provide
details about the Dutch colony. The Dutch were furious at his escape.
They were even more furious when they discovered that Diaz had se-
cretly been working with pirates, telling them where junks leaving Tay-
ouan might best be captured and selling protection to Chinese mer-
chants. Indeed, the Chinese merchant Xu Xinsu claimed to have paid
Diaz 2000 taels to insure his junks against pirate attacks.36
Selling protection, or “water taxes” (¯Ù), was a tradition among
pirate-merchants in coastal China.37 It is possible that Diaz was coop-
erating with Li Dan’s organization, because during the same year that
36 Diaz’s story is told in Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese documents, of which the most
AUTHOR:
important is Diaz, “Relaçao.” Relevant Dutch documents include a resolution of the Coun- What is the
cil of Formosa from 15 August 1624 (VOC 1083: 75) and a letter from Gerritt de Witt to title of the
Governor-General Pieter de Carpentier (15 November 1626, VOC 1090: 196–206, fo. 204v). Blair and
See also “Relación de las Islas Filipinas y otras partes circunvecinas del año 1626,” in Blair Robertson
and Robertson, 22: 141–145. book?
37 John E. Wills discusses baoshui in his article “Maritime China from Wang Chih to
Shih Lang: Themes in Peripheral History,” in From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Region, and
Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China, ed. John E. Wills and Jonathan Spence (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979). See also Leonard Blussé, “Minnan-jen or Cosmopoli-
tan?” pp. 259–260. Dian Murray discusses the practice as carried out by Guangdong pirates
during the nineteenth century (Dian Murray, Pirates).
Diaz made his escape, company officials learned that Li Dan’s son, Li
Guozhu (ıÍU), was selling protection to Chinese fishermen.38 For
10 percent of their catch, they could buy a signed document that, shown
to pirates, would guarantee safety from robbery.39 The discovery
prompted the company itself to enter the protection business. The
Dutch dispatched three war junks to patrol near a recently arrived fleet
of 120 fishing junks. The company’s fee was the same as the pirates’:
10 percent of the catch.40 It was one of the first taxes the company
levied in its new colony.
Yan Siqi and Li Dan both died in 1625 and were succeeded by an
even more effective pirate leader: the famous Zheng Zhilong (G¤s).41
Born in Nan’an (between Xiamen and Quanzhou), Zhilong was by all
accounts a handsome and talented lad, who, possibly after a fight with
his father, left home to seek his fortune in Macao.42 While in Macao
he converted to Christianity, receiving the baptismal name of Nicholas
Gaspard. After stays in Manila (where he appears to have had trouble
with the law) and Nagasaki, he went to Taiwan to join Yan Siqi’s pi-
rate gang.43 He also, and probably concurrently, served as translator for
the Dutch East India Company under his Christian name, Nicholas
Gaspard.44 It is possible that, like Salvador Diaz, he worked for the pi-
38 Li Guozi’s Christian name was Augustine. This is the same Augustine mentioned in
Richard Cocks’s diary, and therefore Li Dan’s son. Company records also indicate that Au-
gustine enjoyed the protection of Japanese traders, who demanded that he be judged in Japan
rather than in Formosa. See Resolution of the Council of Formosa 9 December 1626, VOC
1093: 380v.
39 Resolution of the Council of Formosa 9 December 1626, VOC 1093: 380v.
40 Resolution of the Council of Formosa, 16 December 1626, VOC 1093: 380v-381.
41 European documents frequently refer to Zheng Zhilong as Iquan, from the Chinese
yiguan @x. The people of Fujian Province traditionally referred to the first-born son as yiguan,
usually in conjunction with the surname. Thus, “Zheng Yiguan” meant “eldest-Zheng son.”
On Ming Fujianese naming customs, see the fascinating little aside in Kawaguchi Choju, Tai-
wan Zheng shi ji shi, p. 2. Biographies of Zheng Zhilong are rarer than they should be, given
his importance. One of the best and most recent is Tang, Kaiqi Taiwan di yi ren. See also Liao
Hanchen (˘~⁄), “Zheng Zhilong kao shang” G¤s“]W^, Taiwan wenxian OWÂm, 10.4
(1959): 63–70; and Liao Hanchen (˘~⁄) “Zheng Zhilong kao xia” G¤s]U^, Taiwan wen-
xian OWÂm, 11.3 (1960): 1–15. Works in English are sadly very rare indeed, but see C. R.
Boxer, “The Rise and Fall of Nicholas Iquan,” T’ien Hsia Monthly 11.5 (1941): 401–443; John
E. Wills Jr., Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1994), pp. 222–227; and Leonard Blussé, “Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan?”
42 The incident is recounted in Peng Sunyi ^]L, Jing hai zhi t¸”, Taiwan wenxian
congkan 4(35), p. 3. See also Kawaguchi Choju, Taiwan Zheng shi ji shi, p. 2.
43 On Zheng’s trouble with the law in Manila, see Tang Jintai, Kaiqi Taiwan di yi ren,
p. 60.
44 One Dutch source suggests that he became a pirate after leaving the service of the
company (see Boxer, “Rise and Fall,” p. 412), but Salvador Diaz’s example shows that Chi-
rates from within the Dutch administration, but if he did the Dutch did
not find out about it.45 Around the end of 1625 he left the company to
pursue piracy full time. After Yan Siqi and Li Dan died in 1625, Zhi-
long was well placed to become leader of the Chinese pirates. Some Chi-
nese sources indicate that the other pirate chiefs elected him as leader
thanks to divine intervention.46 In fact, however, Zhilong appears to
have struggled for leadership, gradually gaining more and more power.
His ties with the Dutch helped him, for they were willing to engage
him as a privateer.47 The company’s leaders in Batavia were, to be sure,
concerned about piracy. They were furious, for example, about Salvador
Diaz’s treachery. But they also knew that pirates could be useful. A Chi-
nese resident of Batavia offered them some advice:
Since the Chinese pirates are based primarily in the bays of For-
mosa near Tayouan and are therefore under our authority, the
chief of the Chinese here [in Batavia] has requested that we for-
bid [the pirates] to attack any Chinese junks which sail under
our passes from China to Batavia, or from Batavia to China. . . .
As for junks sailing to other places . . . if they should take any
of those, [they should be informed] that we will not get upset.
The aforementioned chief feels that if the Chinese in China un-
derstand this, then they will be more likely to come to Batavia
with many junks, and avoid going to other places.48
nese pirates were able to work within the company, and Chinese sources suggest that he
joined the pirates around 1624 (see Boxer, “Rise and Fall,” p. 413).
45 Blussé suggests that Zheng Zhilong was “attached” to the Dutch by Li Dan, who hoped
thereby to keep tabs on Dutch plans (Blussé, “Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan?” p. 254).

46 According to fanciful Chinese sources, Zheng came to leadership of Yan’s gang after
a ceremony in which the chiefs prayed for heaven to select their next leader. According to
one version, in order to choose their successor, the chiefs prayed in turn before a pile of rice
into which a sword had been inserted. When Zheng began praying, the sword quivered and
then leapt out of the rice. The pirates therefore accepted him as the leader of the alliance.
See Kawaguchi Choju, Taiwan Zheng shi ji shi, p. 3. Another version appears in the Taiwan
wai ji, pp. 13–14.
47 According to Leonard Blussé, Dutch patronage was a major factor in Zheng Zhilong’s
rise but was certainly not the only one. See Leonard Blussé, “Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan?”
48 Memorie voor de Ed. Pieter Nuyts, raet van India, gaende voor commandeur over de
vloote naer Taiyouan gedestineert, ende van daer voorts in ambassade aen den Keijser van
Japon, 10 May 1627, VOC 854: 51–60, fo. 59. Batavia’s attitude was not entirely consistent.
In 1629, Dutch governor-general Jan Friedericsoon Coen ordered the governor of Taiwan
to ally with the Chinese and clear pirates out of Taiwan altogether. See Instructie [van gou-
verneur generael Jan Pietersz. Coen] voor den gouverneur Hans Putmans ende den raet in
Tayouan, 24 April 1629, VOC 1097: 146–154.
Dutch officials in Batavia accordingly instructed the governor of Taiwan to

refrain from attacking pirates indiscriminately and told him instead to
engage Chinese pirates against the Spanish and Portuguese. Officials
in Taiwan were quite willing to use pirates. In 1625, for example, they
gave licenses to some of Li Dan’s men to allow them to harass ship-
ping around Manila.49 Similarly, in 1626, when Dutch patrols rousted
out bands of pirates who had hidden near the Bay of Tayouan, the pi-
rates were not expelled or sent as laborers to Batavia, as was frequently
done with Chinese prisoners, but were invited to take up residence in
the Chinese village near the Dutch fortress. In this way the company
might use them to help patrol for vessels sailing from China to
Manila.50
Zhilong, too, pillaged under the Dutch flag. In early 1626, for ex-
ample, he maneuvered a large junk with a leaking hull and a broken
mast into the Bay of Tayouan, telling Dutch officials that he had come
from the north, where he had been patrolling with forty or so companion
junks. “From his junk,” the governor of Taiwan reported, “the company
received for its half, as we had agreed with him, about 960 reals.”51 On
another occasion the same year, Zhilong delivered to the company nine
captured junks and their cargos, whose total value was more than 20,000
taels.52 These and other Dutch records indicate that Zhilong was act-
ing as a privateer for the Dutch: the company received a share of his
spoils in exchange for its support and the right to sail under its protec-
tion. Such cooperation was normal practice in the Atlantic and the
Caribbean, where pirates of one nationality often received letters of mar-
que from foreign leaders.
Zhilong’s power grew as he sailed up and down the Chinese coast,
invading coastal towns and attracting new recruits to his organization.
He cultivated the image of the “noble robber,” a seaborne Robin Hood
who robbed the rich to feed the poor ( jie fu ji pin TIIh), and sto-
49 Letter from Governor Martinus Sonck to Governor-General Pieter de Carpentier,
19 February 1625, VOC 1085: 228–233, fo. 232.

50 Letter from Gerrit Fredricxz. De Witt to Governor-General Pieter de Carpentier, 15
November 1626, VOC 1090: 196–206, fo. 202.

51 Letter from Governor Gerrit Frdericxz. De Witt to Governor-General Pieter de Car-
pentier, 4 March 1626, VOC 1090: 176–181, fo. 179. Examples of the company’s complic-
ity in Zhilong’s piracy abound. See, for example, Resolution of the Council of Formosa, 26
June 1627, VOC 1093: 385v-386.
52 Generale Missiven, H. Brouwer, P. Vlack, en J. van der Burch, Batavia, to the Heren
XVII in Amsterdam, 1 December 1632 (Cheng, “De VOC en Formosa,” p. 105). See also
Blussé, “Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan,” p. 255.
ries of his generosity abound.53 He appears also to have been careful to

avoid violence against the common people, preventing his followers
from pillaging those who cooperated, especially near his homeland in
Nan’an.54 The image went over well, and thousands of men joined his
fleets.55 Many joined out of desperation, drought and famine persuad-
ing them to take their chances with the pirates.56 As his power grew,
Chinese officials became concerned. In a report to the Board of War in
Beijing, for example, the governor-general of Guangdong and Guanxi
Provinces wrote that the pirate is “unusually cunning, and practiced
in sea warfare. . . . His ships are built like those of foreign barbarians
[s¤~f], tall and sturdy. . . . His cannons are very effective, shooting
from a distance of ten li and smashing their targets. . . . Our ships, on
the other hand, although numerous, are scattered along the coastline.
They are always on guard but always too few.”57
Officials in Fujian asked the Dutch for help against Zhilong, holding
out the possibility of free trade as an incentive. Dutch officials were in a
quandary. Would it be more expedient to support Zhilong or placate Chi-
nese officials? They tried to compromise. In the summer of 1627 a Dutch
ship captured a junk belonging to Zhilong. Xu Xinsu, the only Chinese
merchant licensed to trade with the Dutch, requested that the junk and
its crew be turned over to Chinese officials. If not, he said, Chinese officials
would “punish him severely and bring him to total ruin, through which
the company would at once lose the Chinese trade.” It was a difficult de-
cision. Turning the junk over to the authorities would cause “bitterness . . .
among the pirates, who necessarily should at this juncture . . . be kept as
friends.” Ultimately the company resolved to give the junk and its crew
(“minus three or four of the leaders”) to Xu Xinsu to hand over to the
53 According to a Chinese source, this phrase (TIIh) was used to describe Zheng
during official discussions between Chinese officials about how to handle him and his fol-
lowers. See Peng Sunyi, Jing hai zhi, p. 3. Other Ming documents confirm that Zheng culti-
vated an image of benevolence. See, for example, Cao Lütai ‰iı, Jing hai ji lüe t¸ˆ§,
Taiwan wenxian congkan 4(33), pp. 3–4.
54 See for example, Peng Sunyi, Jing hai ji, p. 2.
55 Indeed, as Blussé argues, Zheng Zhilong’s bond with his home village and his ability
therefore to count upon the backing of its people were key factors in his success (“Minnan-
jen or Cosmopolitan,” p. 264).
56 One Chinese source indicates that many thousands joined him in one ten-day period
because of famine (cited in Tang Jintai, Kaiqi Taiwan di yi ren, p. 123.

57 Zheng shi shi liao chu bian GÛv∆Ïs, Taiwan wenxian congkan 4(157), pp. 1–2. See
also the citation on p. 124 of Young-tsu Wong, “Security and Warfare on the China Coast:
The Taiwan Question in the Seventeenth Century,” Monumenta Serica 35 (1981–1983):
111–196.
authorities, but this did not satisfy Chinese officials, who demanded that
the company offer more than a gesture against Zhilong.58
In October of 1627 Chinese officials asked the company to help a Chi-
nese fleet destroy Zhilong’s forces. If it refused, they said, “[Xu Xinsu] would
no longer be allowed to come trade with the company but would rather
be destroyed along with his entire family.”59 The company agreed to help,
and a month later Lieutenant Governor Gerritt de Witt arrived in per-
son on the coast of China.60 He informed officials in Fujian that “the com-
pany will undertake to drive (either by force or friendship) the pirate [Zhi-
long] and his men from the coast . . . without any help from the Chinese
in men or ships (aside from five junks that will be manned by Nether-
landers).” In exchange he expected that “the officials [de grooten] of China
will grant to the company permanent free public trade.” 61 Chinese au-
thorities agreed to the deal, but the Dutch did not act quickly enough.
Zhilong attacked the city of Xiamen, destroying hundreds of junks and
burning houses.62 The attack persuaded the Ming court that Zhilong was
too powerful to subdue with military force, and it decided instead to woo
him with a “summon and appease” policy (zhao fu ¤æ).
So, early in 1628, the emperor offered Zhilong an official title, an im-
perial rank, and an opportunity to prove his loyalty. Zhilong was made
“patrolling admiral” (you ji jiang jun CªNx) on the condition that he
clear the coast of pirates. The assignment suited him. He now had a le-
gitimate excuse to destroy his competitors, and his title made it easier to
gather supplies and armaments for his rapidly growing fleets. He estab-
lished himself in Xiamen City and worked to expand his trading net-
works.63 The Dutch, too, found opportunities in Zhilong’s official status.
In October of 1628, the governor of Taiwan took advantage of Zhi-
long’s visit aboard a Dutch ship and forced him to sign a three-year trade
accord: Zhilong would supply silk, sugar, ginger, and other goods in
exchange for silver and spices at fixed rates.64 Thus, it appeared that
58 Resolution of the Council of Formosa, 6 August 1627, VOC 1093: 386

59 Resolution of the Council of Formosa, 12 October 1627, VOC 1093: 387v Simpsou
himself took part in action against Zhilong. Peng Sunyi, Jing hai hi, p. 2.
60 Resolution of the Council of Formosa, 12 October 1627, VOC 1093: 387v; and 25
October 1627, VOC 1093: 388.

61 Resolution of the Council of Formosa, 6 November 1627, VOC 1093: 389v-390.
62 See Letter from Governor Pieter de Nuyts to Governor-General Pieter de Carpen-
tier, 15 March 1628, VOC 1094: 133–135.

63 Wong, “Security and Warfare,” pp. 120–127; Boxer, “Rise and Fall,” pp. 420–421.
64 Accort getrocken tusschen Pieter Nuyts, Raedt van India ende Gouverneur over t’eij-
landt formosa ende tfort Zeelandia ter enee zijde ende Iquan, overste Mandarijn van t Provin-
Zhilong’s new legitimacy might bring peace and trade to Tayouan. Yet
there were troubles. The contract stipulated that the company would
be allowed to trade freely with private Chinese merchants, but the Dutch
suspected that Zhilong was monopolizing the trade. More importantly,
Zhilong’s own authority was in question, for a new pirate organization
had appeared.
Once Zhilong turned legal, he could no longer allow the pirate cells
that had supported him to continue pillaging. Left without employment,
they coalesced around a new leader, a man named Li Kuiqi (ıÌ_),
who had been one of Zhilong’s commanders.65 According to Chinese
sources, Kuiqi was worried Zhilong would sell him out to Chinese au-
thorities and therefore rebelled.66 By late 1629 Kuiqi had gathered a fleet
of more than four hundred junks, which he used to drive Zhilong from
Xiamen. As a consequence, trade to Taiwan evaporated. Dutch officials
deliberated. Which side should they take? On the one hand, Zhilong
had been monopolizing Tayouan’s China trade. On the other, Kuiqi was
capturing Taiwan-bound junks and jeopardizing Dutch profits.67 Both
sides made overtures to the company. The company decided to support
whichever side would help achieve free trade. When the governor of
Tayouan wrote to Zhilong and promised help against Kuiqi in exchange
for trading rights, Zhilong made a clear reply. He said that it was a pro-
pitious time to act: a victory against Kuiqi would gain for the Dutch a
great name throughout all of China.68 The Dutch decided to back Zhi-
long. “It is to be hoped,” wrote the governor, “that the company would
thus have a true and sure man and would be served by nobody else bet-
ter than by him.”69
On 9 February 1630, the Dutch attacked Kuiqi in the Bay of Xia-
men, taking advantage of a rupture in the pirate’s organization. One of
Kuiqi’s commanders, a man by the name of Zhong Bin (Èy), had
switched sides because of disagreements.70 He led his followers around
the bay and took position behind Kuiqi’s fleet while the Dutch sailed
into the bay, pinning Kuiqi’s ships against Zhong Bin’s. Kuiqi’s forces
cia van Aimoijen, Admiral vande Chineesche Zee ter andere, 1 October 1628, VOC 1096:
124–125. See also Blussé, “Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan,” pp. 257–259.
65 Peng Sunyi, Jing hai ji, p. 3. Li Kuiqi was known in Dutch texts as “Quitsicq.”
66 See Blussé, “Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan?” p. 258.
67 Letter from Governor Pieter de Nuyts to Governor-General Antonio van Diemen,
4 February 1629, VOC 1096: 120–123. See also Zeelandia Dagregister, 1A: 389.
68 Zeelandia Dagregisters, 1A: 394.
69 Ibid.
70 Zhong Bin is known in Dutch sources as “Toutsaylacq.”
crumbled, and he himself was captured. It was a stunning victory. Zhi-

long was delighted and promised to do his best to persuade Chinese
officials to grant free trade. He could not agree, however, to the com-
pany’s demand that shipping to the Spanish and Portuguese be ended.
Indeed, he said, he would rather be dead than agree to that, for the Iber-
ian trade brought enormous revenues to Chinese officials, who would
never consent to its abrogation.71
On 20 March 1630, Chinese officials in Xiamen held a special cer-
emony to honor the victors. An official representative of the governor
of Fujian presented Dutch officials with medals, a parasol, and an official
robe.72 Then the Dutch were paraded in triumph through the city streets.
Dutch officials, however, were more interested in commerce than cer-
emonies, and they pressed the representative for trade privileges. He
replied that he himself had no authority in this area, but that his supe-
riors would doubtless be happy to oblige. The Dutch wanted to iron out
the details immediately, but the man had other worries. Zhong Bin, the
former lieutenant of Kuiqi, who had been integral to the victory, was
also meant to be honored at the ceremony but had not appeared. Wor-
ried about his absence, the Chinese official abruptly left Xiamen, leav-
ing the Dutch without guarantees of free trade.73
Indeed, Zhong Bin had turned back to piracy and quickly became
as powerful as the man he had just helped defeat. He drove Zhilong from
Xiamen, raided Fuzhou City, and in June 1630 captured six Dutch ves-
sels and nineteen Dutchmen, saying he would return them only if the
company joined him against Zhilong.74 Company officials pretended to
comply, but in fact they were negotiating with Zhilong. Then events
took a familiar turn: Chinese officials decided to give Zhong Bin the
position Zhilong had filled in Xiamen (Zhilong was offered a new post,
north of Fuzhou). Zhong Bin accepted. Much to the dismay of the
Dutch, another pirate had made the transition from outlaw to official.
The Dutch had little recourse but to accept the new situation and con-
71 Zeelandia Dagregisters, 1A: 399.

72 I have found no Chinese sources mentioning this ceremony. The Dutch text refers
to an official representative of the “Combon” (junmen x˘) of Fujian.
73 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Jacques Specx, 5 Octo-
ber 1630, VOC 1101: 412–423, fo. 422; Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-
General Jan Pietersz. Coen, 10 March 1630, VOC 1101: 408–411.
74 See Kawaguchi Choju, Taiwan Zheng shi ji shi, p. 7. See also Letter from Governor
Hans Putmans to Governor-General Jacques Specx, 5 October 1630, VOC 1101: 412–423,
fo. 412; and Zeelandia Dagregisters, 1A: 442.
clude a trade agreement with Zhong Bin.75 But two weeks later, Zhilong
attacked him. With the help of one of Zhong Bin’s “vice-admirals,” who
defected to Zhilong’s side, Zhilong once again became master of the Tai-
wan Straits.
All of this pirate maneuvering was frustrating to the Dutch. They
wanted trade, which required stability. They hoped that with Zhilong
back in control, commerce might increase, but few Chinese traders
were allowed to trade with them, either on the Chinese coast or in
Taiwan itself. When company officials complained to Zhilong, he said
he had no power to grant free trade. When they appealed to Chinese
officials, they got the runaround. Out of their frustration was born a
new strategy for acquiring trade in China: adopt the methods of the
pirates themselves.
The author of the strategy was Hans Putmans, who became gover-
nor of Taiwan in 1629. He believed that the company’s old ways had
proven useless, and he composed a long letter to explain his views. “It
is a sad situation,” he wrote, “that a trade as rich as that of China is hin-
dered by such faithless, devious, and ungrateful people as the man-
darins.”76 The company, he believed, had acted in good faith to help
Chinese officials rid the seas of pirates. Officials had expressed thanks
and given presents after the defeat of Kuiqi, but then new officials had
arrived, claiming to know nothing of their predecessors’ promises.
Whenever one pirate was defeated, a new one emerged, and Chinese
officials were just as likely to reward a pirate as to destroy him, as was
clear from the cases of Zhilong and Zhong Bin. Putmans concluded that
the only way to impress the mandarins was by means of violence.77 The
company must emulate the pirates:
The Chinese pirates . . . can amply show us how and in what

manner the empire of China might be pressured, for, as Zhilong,
Kuiqi, and Zhong Bin have shown, the one barely comes to
power before the next overturns him and becomes the chief,
gaining such power that the officials of China try all kinds of
ways to control them, offering them the positions of Mandarin
75 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Jacques Specx, 22 Feb-
ruary 1631, VOC 1102: 446–455. See also Zeelandia Dagregisters, 1: 39.
76 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Jacques Specx, 22 Feb-
ruary 1631, VOC 1102: 446–455.

77 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Amsterdam, 14 October 1632, VOC 1105:
197–200, fo. 199.

of Xiamen and the Admiralty of the Seas. . . . What would pre-

vent us from likewise acquiring a force of Chinese, so long as
we let them enjoy part of the booty?78
Twelve European ships would, he suggested, be enough to uproot the

other pirates and become the core of a pirate force so strong that the
Empire of China would be forced “to dance to our tune” [near onse pij-
pen . . . dantsen].79 Like the pirates, the Dutch could live by preying off
the rich China trade. Indeed, he wrote, Dutch patrol yachts frequently
encountered in a single day “40–50, indeed 80 junks, all loaded with
rice and other bulk goods.”80 He believed that the company would not
have to worry about a concerted response by Chinese officials, for “the
one province [of China] seldom or never comes to the aid of the other
during these outbreaks of piracy, and each cares only for itself.”81 In-
deed, he said, whenever a pirate attacks a province and then leaves,
provincial officials often call the pirate back and give him official rank.
(Not to mention, wrote Putmans, that the Chinese are sodomites and
sinners and deserve to be attacked.82)
At first, the company’s leaders in Batavia chose not to adopt Put-
mans’s strategy. They had asked a Chinese merchant for advice and
received a disappointing answer: there was no way for the Dutch to ob-
tain free trade with China and that they would therefore have to content
themselves with a licensed trade. The Chinese merchant advised co-
operation with Zhilong, and Batavia ordered Putmans to follow the ad-
vice. But Putmans soon became convinced that Zhilong himself was hin-
dering trade with the Dutch. In the fall of 1631, he and other officials
heard that Zhilong had put up placards forbidding Chinese to trade in
Taiwan without official licenses. The licenses were hard to come by, and
when Dutch officials asked Zhilong to procure them he replied that he
was lobbying officials in Fujian, but that any real action on the matter
would have to be taken by the imperial court itself.83 Zhilong was per-
haps telling the truth, but Putmans felt that all of Zhilong’s promises
78 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Jacques Specx, 5 Octo-
ber,1630, VOC 1101: 412–430, fo. 416.

79 Ibid.
197–200, fo. 198.

81 Ibid., fo. 199.
82 Ibid.
83 Zhilong said he was in talks with the Junmen (x˘) and Haidao (¸D) of Fujian.
“disappeared into smoke.”84 In March of 1633 Zhilong sent a letter to

Putmans saying that the “king’s court” had decided to provide eight
passes yearly to Chinese merchants that would allow free trade with the
Dutch so long as the company did not try to trade in China. It was good
news, but because Zhilong had promised such passes for a long time,
Putmans and his colleagues were skeptical: “the Chinese have now for
years tried to keep us satisfied only with frivolous and sweet words.”85
Therefore, in the summer of 1633, officials in Batavia decided to al-
low Putmans to put into practice his new pirate policy.86 It was an op-
portune time. Zhilong was distracted, for yet another pirate organiza-
tion had arisen, this one led by two people: Li Dan’s son Augustine and,
more importantly, a man named Liu Xiang (Bª).87 The two had at-
tacked Xiamen and captured ships in the Taiwan Strait, and Zhilong
was preparing a fleet to counter them. Whereas pirate forces consisted
of small junks and modified merchant vessels, Zhilong was construct-
ing thirty special war junks, some of which were inspired by European
ships and had two decks of cannons.88 “It is said,” wrote Putmans, “that
such an armada of beautiful, big, well-armed junks . . . has never been
seen before in China.”89 But the Dutch never gave the armada a
chance. On 12 July 1633, a company fleet sailed into the Xiamen har-
bor and attacked it with no warning. Zhilong, thinking that the Dutch
had come to trade, was taken by surprise. He could do nothing but watch
as the Dutch burned and sank all but four vessels. The Dutch demands
were ambitious. They wanted freedom to trade in China and elsewhere
with whomever they chose. They also demanded the right to establish
permanent trading houses on Xiamen’s Gulang Island (what would later
become the site of the international concession of Amoy after the Opium
War) and in Fuzhou. Zhilong’s response was polite but unyielding.
The Dutch proceeded to behave like pirates, capturing junks and
84 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Jacques Specx, 9 No-
vember 1632, VOC 1109: 195–197.

85 Zeelandia Dagregisters, 1E: 573–574.
86 See Generale Missiven, H. Brouwer, A. van Diemen, P. Vlack, Philips Lucasz., en J.
van der Burch, Batavia, 15 August 1633, in Cheng “De VOC en Formosa,” pp. 108–112.
87 Liu Xiang was known in Dutch sources as “Janglauw,” based on another form of his
name, Xiang Lao (ª—).

88 See Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Hendrik Brouwer, 30
September 1633, VOC 1113: 776–787, fo. 777. The large war junks were each armed with
between sixteen and thirty-six large cannons (Zeelandia Dagregisters, 1F: 16).
89 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Hendrik Brouwer, 30 Sep-
tember 1633, VOC 1113: 776–787, fo. 777.

demanding protection taxes, although they were careful to let Chinese

prisoners go free, hoping to maintain favor among Chinese merchants
and potential allies. They also tried attracting other pirate cells to join
them. Putmans dispatched a junk to the pirates Liu Xiang and Augus-
tine, inviting them to join his raids. The pirates sent a conciliatory but
wary response: they would be pleased to join the Dutch but were afraid
the invitation might be one of Zhilong’s tricks. Putmans captured one
of Liu Xiang and Augustine’s junks by mistake and used the opportu-
nity to prove his goodwill: he returned it with an invitation to join in
pillage against China. Liu Xiang and Augustine began sending junks,
which provided enthusiastic help for the Dutch.90 In the meantime,
other pirate cells also were attaching themselves to the Dutch fleet. “The
pirates,” wrote the Dutch governor, “grow daily more numerous . . . and
they have now increased to 41 pirate junks and around 450 soldiers, in
addition to the sailors. Tomorrow 14 or 15 more will arrive, so that this
multitude is rapidly increasing.”91 Zhilong tried offering amnesty to pi-
rate commanders to persuade them to defect, but to no avail. Accord-
ing to Putmans, the cells’ leaders kept a jealous watch on each other
and informed him of any treachery. It appeared that Putmans’s plan was
working. Would a Dutchman become a new “chief of the alliance”?
Zhilong was determined to prevent that from happening. Even as
the pirates coalesced he prepared a new fleet, with help from Chinese
provincial authorities. He took his time, learning about Dutch plans
through an ingenious ruse. Even as the Dutch gathered their pirate navy
around them they wrote a series of letters to Chinese officials demand-
ing free trade. Zhilong intercepted the letters and then wrote fake re-
sponses, impersonating Chinese officials. In this way he both learned
about Dutch plans and stalled for time, knowing that the typhoon sea-
son might weaken the Dutch before he made his move.92 A typhoon
did indeed hit the Dutch fleet, incapacitating four of its ships. In Oc-
tober of 1633, Zhilong was ready to act. He sent a messenger to Put-
mans’s flagship to deliver a letter: “How,” it asked, “can a dog be suf-
fered to lay his head on the pillow of the emperor’s resting place?”93 Then
90 Generale Missiven, H. Brouwer, A. van Diemen, P. Vlack, J. van der Burch, and An-
tonio van den Heuvel, Batavia, 15 December 1633, in Cheng “De VOC en Formosa,” p. 116.
91 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Hendrik Brouwer, 30 Sep-
tember 1633, VOC 1113: 776–787, fo. 786.

92 Zhilong’s manipulation of the Dutch is outlined in Blussé, “The VOC as Sorcerer’s
Apprentice,” especially pp. 102–104.

93 Blussé’s translation. Ibid., p. 103.
Zhilong attacked with 150 vessels, many of them large war junks. The
company’s pirate allies, surprised by the strength and resolve of Zhilong’s
troops, fled the scene, allowing Zhilong to trap the main part of the
Dutch fleet between two of his squadrons and destroy two Dutch ships.
Abandoned by their pirate allies, the Dutch retreated to Taiwan.
They tried for a time to fight on, and even managed a few more co-
operative sorties with Chinese pirates, but war was costly in terms of
lost trade, and, more importantly, Zhilong was prepared to be concilia-
tory in peace negotiations. Zhilong promised that three Chinese traders
would be given licenses to trade in Taiwan so long as the Dutch kept
away from China. This was not the free, “unlicensed,” trade for which
they had fought, but it was better than what they had enjoyed before.
The Dutch had been unable to overcome Zhilong, but they had shown
they could be a threat when provoked, especially when they allied with
other pirates. This threat likely persuaded Zhilong to grant better trad-
ing conditions.
The pirate wars were not over. In 1634, Liu Xiang attacked the im-
portant trading city of Zhangzhou. The pirate asked Putmans to renew
the alliance but received an equivocal response. Putmans said that the
current situation suited him well, but that if Zhilong’s promises should
evaporate, he would help Liu Xiang next year.94 Then Liu Xiang asked
permission for his fleet to rest in Taiwan. When Putmans refused the
request, the pirate captured a Dutch junk and distributed its thirty-man
crew throughout his fleet as human shields. Not long thereafter, Chi-
nese inhabitants of Taiwan reported that Liu Xiang was sending a force
to attack the Dutch fortress. Forewarned, the Dutch had no trouble re-
pelling Liu Xiang’s assault.
In spite of Liu Xiang’s attack, Putmans believed that pirates benefited
the company. Without them, China would become “arrogant” [hooch-
moedigh] and less willing to deal with the company.95 Indeed, he said, all
had gone well, for trade with the Chinese was flowing faster and richer
than ever before. “We have shown,” he wrote, “what damage and dis-
ruption we can cause them, and it appears that even though they held
the field, destroyed two of our yachts, and drove us from their coast, they
still came seeking peace with us, and have granted us better trade than
94 See Generale Missiven, H. Brouwer, A. van Diemen, P. Vlack, and J. van der Burch,
Batavia, 15 August 1634, in Cheng “De VOC en Formosa,” pp. 128–130.

1–14, fo. 6.
ever.”96 Each year four or five richly laden silk junks and eight or so
smaller junks bearing porcelain and less valuable cargos arrived in Tai-
wan. The Dutch used the threat of violence and new pirate alliances to
keep pressure on Chinese officials in order to maintain this trade.97
Zhilong, for his part, also prospered. Liu Xiang was a difficult enemy,
but Zhilong eventually defeated him, and by 1637 Zhilong’s ships sailed
freely throughout East and Southeast Asia, from Japan to Malacca.98
Many private traders paid to fly his flag for prestige and protection. He
built an opulent castle in Quanzhou prefecture, which was connected
by a canal directly to the sea. In 1640 he was made governor-general
(Zongbing `L) of Fujian province, one of the highest posts in the Ming
bureaucracy.99 In 1644, when the Manchus entered Beijing and pro-
claimed the foundation of the Qing dynasty, Zhilong chose the side of
the old regime, declaring himself loyal to the Ming dynasty and recog-
nizing the prince of Tang (Zhu Yujian, a Ming descendant known as
the Longwu emperor) as rightful heir to the empire. The grateful prince
gave Zhilong a promotion and, more importantly, symbolically adopted
Zhilong’s son, bestowing upon him the title “Guoxingye” (Ím›),
meaning “lord of the imperial surname.” Since this title was pro-
nounced “Kok-seng-ia” in the Southern Min dialect of Fujianese, Zhi-
long’s son came to be known to the Dutch and other Westerners as
Koxinga. In essence, the Zheng family became honorary members of
the Ming imperial clan, a position of immense prestige.
Yet Zhilong was ambivalent about the Ming cause, preferring to in-
vest his resources in trade rather than military campaigns to restore the
Ming. The Ming prince came to distrust Zhilong and in 1646 under-
took a land-based expedition without Zhilong’s help, foregoing a more
cautious—and more promising—maritime strategy. Outmaneuvered by
Manchu forces, his army collapsed and he was captured and exe-
cuted.100 Zhilong began negotiating with the Manchus, who made a
tempting offer: if he joined them, he would be named viceroy of Fujian
and Guangdong. His highest officers and his son Zheng Chenggong
96 Ibid., fo. 9.
97 See Generale Missiven, H. Brouwer, A. van Diemen, P. Vlack, and J. van der Burch,
Batavia, 15 August 1634, in Cheng “De VOC en Formosa,” pp. 130–131.
98 An account of Zhilong’s decisive battle with Liu Xiang is found in Peng Sunyi, Jing
hai ji, p. 5.
99 Wong, “Security and Warfare,” pp. 128–129.
100 Lynn Struve, The Southern Ming, 1644–1662 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1984), pp. 75–97.

urged him to reject the offer, but in November 1646 he went to Fuzhou
to offer his allegiance to the Qing dynasty. It was a setup. The Manchus
took him to Beijing to live under house arrest.
Zheng Chenggong took over. Unlike his father, a merchant-pirate
who dabbled in politics, Chenggong was deeply political. His opposi-
tion to the Manchus was ideological, even “fanatical.”101 He pursued
a constant and shifting war against the Manchus, which he financed
by maritime trade. His made Xiamen his main base, calling it the “Ming
Memorial Prefecture” (Si Ming zhou ‰˙{), and established a gov-
ernment based on Ming administrative structures.102 Chenggong, no
simple merchant or pirate, considered himself the main hope for a Ming
restoration, and others agreed. Many loyalists arrived in Xiamen to
help.103 Yet Chenggong had trouble striking against the Manchus. Fu-
jianese describe their home province as “many mountains, few farms”
(shan duo tian shao sh–÷), for only 10 percent of Fujian’s area is
lower than 200 meters altitude. The mountains cut Fujian off from in-
land China, and are one of the reasons that Fujianese people tend to
be oriented toward the sea. Fujian’s geography sheltered Chenggong
from Manchu land attacks, but it also made it difficult for him to ex-
tend his control inland. He had a decisive advantage at sea, being able
to ferry his troops quickly along China’s vast coast, but his land forces
achieved victories only in limited areas near his coastal bases.104 In 1656
he began planning a campaign to reinvigorate his cause: the capture
of Nanjing. On 7 July 1659, his armada sailed into the mouth of the
Yangtze River to lay siege to Nanjing. Yet just as his forces encircled
the city, a Manchu army arrived by chance in the area, on its way north-
ward from Guizhou. It rushed to Nanjing and launched a furious coun-
101 Wong, “Security and Warfare,” p. 133. According to Wong, Chenggong was a “rev-
olutionary traditionalist” who “transformed sheer violence into a political movement in an

unprecedented way. He politicized the entire region.” Wong, who, as he himself notes, stud-
ies Chenggong to understand the current situation between the People’s Republic of China
and the Republic of China on Taiwan, may be viewing Chenggong’s politics somewhat
anachronistically, but his main conclusions are sound: Chenggong was opposed to the
Manchus on ideological grounds, and his struggle against the Manchus politicized Fujian
and the Taiwan Strait.
102 John E. Wills Jr. points out that the Zheng family drew its officials less from schol-
arly groups than from merchant and military groups. See John E. Wills Jr., “Maritime China.”
103 As John E. Wills Jr. has suggested, however, scholars in Chenggong’s court had fewer
opportunities for advancement and influence than in other loyalist courts, a problem that
reduced Chenggong’s chances for a successful assault against the Qing. See John E. Wills Jr.,
“Maritime China.”
104 John E. Wills Jr., Mountain of Fame, pp. 222–227.
terassault. The battle-hardened Manchu bannermen pressed his troops,

who broke formation and ran.
A month later, the remains of Chenggong’s forces arrived in Xia-
men. Many experienced officers and thousands of soldiers had been cap-
tured or killed. Because the other centers of Ming loyalism were crum-
bling, the Manchus would no longer have to fight on multiple fronts,
and Chenggong realized he must find a new base.105 His family had had
extensive experience with Taiwan. His father, even after leaving Tai-
wan to serve as a Ming official, appears to have remained closely in-
volved with Taiwan’s Chinese inhabitants. Chinese sources indicate
that during a severe famine in Fujian, for example, Zhilong had made
a plan to transport tens of thousands of drought victims to Taiwan, pro-
viding “for each person three taels [of silver] and for each three people
one ox.”106 There is no evidence from Dutch sources that the proposal
was ever carried out, but this and other evidence indicates that the
Zheng family kept close ties to Taiwan.107 In 1661 Zheng Chenggong
invaded Taiwan, his troops helped ashore by Chinese colonists. His
forces swept across the plains of southwest Taiwan, easily routing Dutch
forces. The main Dutch fortress held out for nine months, but ultimately
it, too, fell.
The triumph of this scion of pirates holds lessons for the study of
European expansion during the early modern period. As John E. Wills
Jr. writes in his influential survey of the field, Europeans were success-
ful in Asia primarily because of “the organization, cohesion and stay-
ing power of [European] state and corporate organizations.”108 To be sure,
105 Indeed, the Zheng family, following Li Dan before them, had long had close ties to
the island. As we have seen, Zheng Zhilong the senior proposed to colonize Taiwan. Simi-
larly, the Zheng family tried to keep their hands in Taiwan’s administration, even during
Dutch rule, especially in the 1650s, when Zheng Chenggong tried collecting taxes from Chi-
nese traders and settlers. See Andrade, “Commerce, Culture, and Conflict,” part III.
106 It is unclear when this proposal was made. Huang Zongxi ¿v™, Ci xing shi mo Á
mlΩ, quoted in Fang Hao Ë®, “Chongzhen chu Zheng Zhilong yimin ru Taiwan shi” R
’ÏG¤sæ¡JO∆, Taiwan Wenxian, 12(1): 37–38. Fang Hao’s short article, which offers
a plethora of quotes from primary sources, is still the best introduction to this mysterious
episode, but see also Guo Shuitan ¢ÙÊ, “Heren ju tai shiqi de Zhongguo yimin” ¸H⁄O
…¡∫§Íæ¡, Taiwan wenxian, 10.4 (1959): 11–45; John E. Wills Jr., “Maritime China,”
p. 215; and John Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier 1600–1800
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 466–467 n. 214. The tael was a weight
and currency unit used for silver weighing approximately 37.5 grams.
107 See Andrade, “Commerce, Culture, and Conflict,” part III.
108 John E. Wills Jr., “Maritime Asia,” p. 86.
the states of China and Japan were as strong as European states, both
in terms of centralization and of course in size, but they were not in-
terested in maritime expansion, which is why European trading orga-
nizations, with state support, were able to achieve the successes they
did.109 Yet Europeans’ position in East Asia was weak. The colony of
Macao, for example, was dependent upon Chinese goodwill. If the Por-
tuguese did not behave themselves, an edict from officials in Canton
was enough to stop food supplies to the port. The small factories the
Portuguese and Dutch were allowed to occupy in Nagasaki were simi-
larly vulnerable. Dutch Formosa and the Spanish Philippines were the
only territorial colonies the Europeans possessed in East Asia, yet both
were threatened by Chinese competition: the Spanish colony nearly fell
to the Chinese pirate Lin Feng (LÒ); the Dutch colony fell to Zheng
Chenggong.110
When the Dutch had established their Taiwan colony in 1624, they
were fortunate to find no Chinese organization powerful enough to pre-
vent them from gaining control. To be sure, Li Dan and Yan Siqi con-
trolled large trading and pirate organizations, but neither they nor any
of the other Chinese merchant-pirates had the power of legitimacy. That
is to say, none had the protection of a state. The Dutch East India Com-
pany, on the other hand, was the world’s largest and best-capitalized pri-
vateer enterprise. The right to engage in piracy—or, from the Dutch
perspective, economic warfare—was written into its charter. In the East
Asian context, it had clear advantages over its Chinese rivals. It could
raise capital openly in its home country, negotiate treaties with foreign
powers, rely upon the Dutch legal system to solve disputes and guaran-
tee contracts, and even at times count on its government for military
109 To be sure, toward the late sixteenth century, Japan was an expansive power under
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had recently established dominance over the feudal Daimyo.
Hideyoshi planned to invade Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and, ultimately, India
so that he would be the ruler of all the known lands. When he invaded Korea in 1592, how-
ever, his forces became enmeshed in a difficult guerrilla war, and thereafter, Japan’s plans for
overseas adventures were largely abandoned. The Ryukyu Islands were invaded in 1609 and
became a Japanese protectorate. And in 1616 a Japanese expedition tried to establish a base
on Taiwan, but failed. But in the course of the seventeenth century, especially after 1635,
when the shogun decreed that no Japanese citizens would be allowed to trade to the south-
ern seas, Japan left the business of aggressive expansion.
110 For a nice introduction to the fascinating story of Lin Feng, see Cesar V. Callanta,
The Limahong Invasion (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1989). There are hints that Lin
Feng may have styled himself a king and was attempting to found a state. His invasion force
included colonists, who may have been united by notions of statist legitimacy. Thus, although
his organization was not a proper state, it may have had statelike qualities.
and financial support. Lacking legal legitimacy, Chinese pirate-merchant

organizations were for the first half of the seventeenth century little more
than pesky competitors. Many a pirate leader gained official position in
China, but that meant he had to stop his pillage, after which one of his
underlings would mutiny and start the cycle again.
In the 1650s, however, Zheng Chenggong created an anomaly in late
imperial Chinese history: a Chinese maritime state that was interested
in sponsoring overseas trade and colonialism. The main advantage the
Dutch had enjoyed—state support—was negated. Whereas before they
had competed against illegal and loosely affiliated pirate organizations,
they now faced a cohesive structure buttressed by claims of legitimacy,
and Zheng was able to do what his predecessors had failed to do: re-
move the Dutch from Taiwan. Indeed, Chenggong’s Memorial Ming Pre-
fecture promoted commerce for the same reasons the Dutch government
had established the Dutch East India Company: to raise revenues for a
fight against foreign rule. So long as the Dutch East India Company had
fought against pirates, it had prevailed. When it began fighting against
a state, even one as short-lived and peripheral as Zheng Chenggong’s,
its advantages disappeared. The greatest privateer organization of Eu-
rope had met its match.

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The Company’s Chinese Pirates:

How the Dutch East India Company

I n the early seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company

Journal of World History, Vol. 15, No. 4

for the Scripta Sinica is http://www.sinica.edu.tw/ftms-bin/ftmsw3). All translations are my

5 October 1630, VOC 1101: 412–430, fo. 416.

Fu-chien,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1983, p. 14.

people and foreigners must take place within formal missions. No

merchants (¸F”H). Li Jinming (ı˜˙), Mingdai haiwai maoyi shi ˙N¸~Tˆv(The

sion in “Chinese Maritime Trade,” pp. 36–54 and 234–249.

12 “Farangi” is the Portuguese transliteration of a Chinese naturalization (Ú¶˜) of

with filthy hearts.”13 Working closely with a Chinese official, whom he

first expedition returned to Holland in 1597, it was a tremendous suc-

cided to create one United East India Company (Vereenighde Oost-

15 See van Veen, “VOC Strategies,” pp. 90–96.

officials.28 Although he gained legitimacy in the eyes of some Chi-

29 October 1625, VOC 1087: 385–396, fo. 389.

October 1625, VOC 1087: 385–396, fo. 389.

Company’s own administration. Consider the story of Salvador Diaz, a

thereby to keep tabs on Dutch plans (Blussé, “Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan?” p. 254).

Dutch officials in Batavia accordingly instructed the governor of Taiwan to

49 Letter from Governor Martinus Sonck to Governor-General Pieter de Carpentier,

19 February 1625, VOC 1085: 228–233, fo. 232.

November 1626, VOC 1090: 196–206, fo. 202.

ries of his generosity abound.53 He appears also to have been careful to

because of famine (cited in Tang Jintai, Kaiqi Taiwan di yi ren, p. 123.

58 Resolution of the Council of Formosa, 6 August 1627, VOC 1093: 386

October 1627, VOC 1093: 388.

tier, 15 March 1628, VOC 1094: 133–135.

crumbled, and he himself was captured. It was a stunning victory. Zhi-

71 Zeelandia Dagregisters, 1A: 399.

The Chinese pirates . . . can amply show us how and in what

75 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Jacques Specx, 22 Feb-

ruary 1631, VOC 1102: 446–455.

197–200, fo. 199.

of Xiamen and the Admiralty of the Seas. . . . What would pre-

Twelve European ships would, he suggested, be enough to uproot the

78 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Jacques Specx, 5 Octo-

ber,1630, VOC 1101: 412–430, fo. 416.

197–200, fo. 198.

“disappeared into smoke.”84 In March of 1633 Zhilong sent a letter to

84 Letter from Governor Hans Putmans to Governor-General Jacques Specx, 9 No-

vember 1632, VOC 1109: 195–197.

name, Xiang Lao (ª—).

tember 1633, VOC 1113: 776–787, fo. 777.

demanding protection taxes, although they were careful to let Chinese

tember 1633, VOC 1113: 776–787, fo. 786.

Apprentice,” especially pp. 102–104.

Batavia, 15 August 1634, in Cheng “De VOC en Formosa,” pp. 128–130.

Press, 1984), pp. 75–97.

olutionary traditionalist” who “transformed sheer violence into a political movement in an

terassault. The battle-hardened Manchu bannermen pressed his troops,

and financial support. Lacking legal legitimacy, Chinese pirate-merchant

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