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“The mountains and rivers of my homeland have all changed colors, and the palaces of the old capital turned to ashes. But although the imperial spirit is finished in the Central Plain, the gowns and caps survive overseas. Although the scenery of mountains and rivers here are different, the pureness of the wind and the glory of the moon are the same for tens of thousands of li. I have once heard that the ancient sages may find it difficult to say, but the gowns and caps of the maritime kingdom the same as all antiquity.”- Zheng Jing

The story is not about an emperor hanging himself in Beijing. It’s not about a Chinese pirate born in Nagasaki. It’s not even about that pirate’s victory over the Dutch and the conquest of Taiwan. That pirate, the Lord of the Imperial Surname, passed away in 1662, driven to death by despair, malaria, or sunstroke. This is about what comes after. This is about “a desolate island in the middle of the sea.” This is about the Zheng family and the maritime Chinese.

But before we tell that tale, we need to set the scene. The Zheng had once been pirate lords of East Asia, rich enough to raise armies against the Qing, menace the Dutch, and demand tribute from Spanish Luzon. But years of war against the emperors of China had been bloody and costly. They failed to free Nanjing from the Qing, who depopulated the coast to ban the Zheng from funding their wars through trade. They fled to Taiwan in 1662, seizing it from the Dutch. But that same year, they heard that the last Ming emperor was strangled in Yunnan. How do you fight for a dynasty that has already died?

Zheng Chenggong, the man who burst from history larger than life, didn't. The pirate king raised by samurai, the Lord of the Imperial Surname, died of a broken heart in 1662 [1]. Many of his followers couldn't. They defected to the torrential Qing advance in 1662 and 1663, seeing the Zheng expelled from the mainland. The Zheng, who once they ruled China’s gateway to the world, the cities of in Guangdong and Fujian, now they ruled a malarial swamp. Many of the Qing court looked on with glee, expecting the rebels to simply starve to death. Memorials to the court called them the "remnant of ashes," the dying embers of the Dynasty of Perpetual Brightness.

This would turn out to be a bit premature and cause a lot of headaches down the road. But this was only due to the reforms of Zheng Jing, Zheng Chenggong's son, who gave the Zheng their foundation for survival.



First, Jing and his advisers led the way to tame Taiwan. Even before his final victory over the Dutch, Chenggong had demobilized soldiers and turned them to farming, and his son followed suit. The Zheng gave settlers tools and animals, and granted tax breaks to those who opened new land. The Zheng built a Confucian academy and schools for the peasants; it extended irrigation networks; and it helped over 50,000 settlers cross the Straits from China. To "civilize" the island,the Zheng built Buddhist temples and shrines to Fujianese gods in their nascent towns. Jing renamed Taiwan from Dondgdu, “Eastern Ming,” to Dongning, “Eastern Pacification.” He also instituted civilian government, establishing new prefectures and government offices across the colonies.

The Zheng intervention worked. By 1680, the land under cultivation had more than doubled since the Dutch conquest [2]. And what they grew changed. Sugar production had flatlined, but the settlers grew rice and sweet potatoes, raised silk and trapped salt. They carved home away from Han.

But the farming was not enough; a hundred thousand farmers in Taiwan would never match a hundred million in the Qing Empire. The Zheng would need trade again, and Jing revived the family’s maritime empire, establishing the “Monopoly Firm,” managed by the Revenue Office, to manage overseas trade. The Monopoly Firm sent ships to Nagasaki, engaged in a quasi-war with the Dutch East India Company, and built ties to the Qing mainland by rebels, corrupt officials, and smugglers.

Perhaps the most important foreign ties for the Zheng state, were, however, its ties to another island at the edge of the world. Jing had sent a proclamation across the Indies, telling that the Zheng would give "great encouragement to trade in his ports." The Dutch, still bitter over the loss of Taiwan, refused to come to terms or trade directly. But the English, desperate for an in in the China trade, rapidly responded. In June 1670, the English East India Company signed a commercial treaty granting the Company a trading factory, in return for an annual rent of 500 reals, two gunners, and a smith to make firearms. England would struggle in the East Indies; its sailors were no more efficient than the Chinese; its woolen cloths were no better than Chinese textiles. But the Zheng state would prove to have an insatiable debate for English firearms, forming a lucrative core of the East India Company’s trade in East Asia.

Jing also revived trade with Luzon, sending a dozen junks a year to Luzon, brimming iron, raw silk, and animal products in exchange for silver. Perhaps more ominously, at least for the Spanish, were the letters the Jing sent to Luzon's Chinese community, who in turn hailed him as their king.

The Qing might have laughed at Zheng, and considered him a nuisance. If they had read the diaries of his officials? It might have not been as funny.

“For ten years, we will let the multitudes grow. For ten years, we will educate and nourish them. And in thirty years, we will compete for first and second with the Central Plain.”-Chen Yonghua, Advisor Staff Officer

[1] Or malaria. Or sunstroke. Or poison. Or syphilis.

[2] Roughly OTL; this number is from 1684, after the Qing conquest, but given that the Zheng state avoids the Three Feudatories Revolt this isn’t much of a change. For one, the Zheng haven't just lost a ton of troops in Southeast China and the island hasn't been invaded.
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