What I Am Reading: "Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory Over the West" by Tonio Andrade

I stumbled across this book on a bad Goodreads list, but it turned out to be a good read (see what I did there?). I’m trying to expand my historical horizons backward in time and away from Europe, and this book does both while also situating itself within a debate on historical theory. Plus it has the Dutch, the true hipster choice in European age of sail empires.

The book is a military history of how the Dutch colony on Taiwan (or “Formosa” to Europeans) was taken over by the Chinese faction led by warlord Zheng Chenggong, or Koxinga, to use the Europeanized version of the title he went by. The story is bloody, dramatic, and adventurous, and the book keeps things moving along at a fast clip. It has dramatic escapes and captures, gruesome executions and drunkenness, rivaling any pirate tale. Personalities and action effortlessly share space with background and political and technological contextualization; and I thought that the book was both highly informative and highly readable. I didn’t even mind the kind of occasional glibness that usually annoys me in other works; my only real complaint is that, along with the plethora of reproduced period maps and charts from archives, I could have used a modern infographic to better understand the geographic situation of the book’s centerpiece, the siege of Zeelandia Castle on the extinct Bay of Taiwan.

The book is more than just a cool story, though. It is intended as a case study in the historical debate over Military Revolution Theory – the idea (to over-simplify) that Europe conquered and colonized the rest of the world because its constant wars fueled technological and social advances that gave it an advantage over Asian, African, or American enemies. This theory has also produced a revisionist counter-theory, that Europe’s technology and organization was (again to over-simplify) actually largely on-par with the rest of the world until the Industrial Revolution. The book’s author, Professor Tonio Andrade, originally wrote a larger work about the colonization of Taiwan in the 17th century, and was convinced to expand the section on the Chinese defeat of the Dutch into its own book. He had originally fit that story into a firmly revisionist framework, arguing that European expansion was a result of their political will, and not of technological or organizational supremacy. Thus, the assumption was that the Dutch defeat by Koxinga was inevitable, for reasons of sheer numbers and proximity alone. However, the research that produced this book led to a different conclusion, one much more mixed and not adhering to either Military Revolution Theory or the revisionist school.

One of the criticisms of Military Revolution Theory is that it was formulated when there was plenty of data on European warfare, and not much on warfare on other continents. In more recent years, there has been an increase in non-European data, fueling the idea that other civilizations, including those of Asia, were just as advanced as the Europeans were. In fact, there is a Chinese Military Revolution Theory, that many advances in warfare were first pioneered by the Chinese (including the use of guns by the 1100s). This book, and the war between the Chinese and the Dutch over Taiwan, is an important data point in assessing these theories, because most of the military history data is from Europeans fighting other Europeans, or Asians fighting other Asians. This story is of one of the comparatively rare instances of Europeans fighting Asians prior to the Industrial Revolution. More on the theoretical analysis later.

Koxinga, who was born in 1624, was not the first in his family to have dealings with the Dutch. His father, Zheng Zhilong, dealt with them throughout his lifetime. He worked for them as a translator, in fact, when they were first getting set up on Taiwan. The Dutch established their colony there in the 1620s, after their encampment on the Penghu Islands, between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, proved inhospitable. The real money was in trade, and Zheng Zhilong set about acquiring that money by moving into piracy, with Dutch connivance and safe harbor. Zheng was from the land of Min, the Chinese coast bordering Taiwan, a mountainous region of seafarers. The Dutch relied on their Chinese subjects and residents to build Taiwan into a prosperous outpost.

Eventually, in the face of Zheng’s increasingly large-scale piracy, the Ming Dynasty government pursued its usual policy of cooptation, and made Zheng a high-ranking government official. His pirate influence waned, however, once he ceased to command his fleet; and he called upon the Dutch for help putting down the pirates who proliferated in the vacuum. He then found himself fighting and defeating a Dutch expeditionary force in 1633, after the Dutch East India Company (VOC)’s leadership pushed him for more trade concessions than he was able to deliver them, being caught in the middle as a Ming official. After his quick-thinking defeat of a Dutch fleet, though, Zheng Zhilong became the government’s Holland-whisperer, having gained considerable political influence and become recognized as the man best suited to handle Dutch policy. As such, he was able to give them their trade concessions, and both Zheng and the VOC prospered considerably from the arrangement.

The Ming, however, were not long for this world. In 1644 the dynasty fell, to be replaced by the Manchu Qing dynasty. Zheng, firmly ensconced in his territory, was loyal to Ming holdouts for a time, even sheltering one Ming claimant. It took a few years, but he eventually saw the wisdom in submission, and defected in 1646, though he was taken prisoner by the Qing.

His son, Koxinga, had not wanted to surrender. Koxinga was the offspring of Zheng’s marriage to a Japanese woman, Tagawa Matsu; and there seems to be some reasonable evidence that he received some samurai training from the members of her clan, though Koxinga is a national hero in Taiwan today and as such many aspects of his biography are prone to dramatization. He came to live with his father at age 7; in Confucian China he was a successful student, passing the Imperial Examination system at least to the prefectural level. The claimant to the Ming throne, Longwu, was impressed by him to the point that he bestowed several honors upon him, including the Imperial Surname, Kok-seng, which came to be westernized as Koxinga.

Longwu did not have a successful “reign,” however, and died when he went to campaign without Zheng’s support, after which Zheng finalized his plans to defect. Unlike his father, Koxinga vowed to fight on, confounding Confucian values by putting his national duty over his filial. After his father’s defection and imprisonment, he went south as the leader of a small band. A few years of campaigns against bandits and small-scale potentates followed, as Koxinga schooled himself in tactics and transformed from a commander on paper only into a real military leader. After a couple of years of buildup, he returned to his family’s home islands in Min and bloodlessly deposed his uncles, taking control of the family estates. Despite a few setbacks (such as losing the home islands again as he sailed off to support another Ming claimant in southern China) he steadily grew in power, building up his forces and his wealth as he pioneered new military units, communication methods, and tactics. By 1655 he had secured himself a rump Ming state by defeating Qing forces at the battle of Haicheng, and ruled as a warlord loyal to a dead regime.

Koxinga was a perfectionist and a harsh disciplinarian, and he built a highly-trained army to pursue his goals. These goals could be over-ambitious, however: in 1658 he sailed an expeditionary force north in an effort to force the Yangtze river and capture Nanjing, but was stymied by a massive typhoon. In 1659 he tried again and succeeded in advancing down the river, but a few easy wins made him overconfident, and he didn’t hurry to strike decisively against his Qing enemies. His forces were defeated, and he retreated back to his enclave.

From there, he surprised his polity with a new plan in 1661: they were going to take over Taiwan. Koxinga’s Chinese rise take up the first third of the book, before he turns his attention to the defeat of the Dutch colony. The colony at that time was governed by the high-handed Frederick Coyet. Governor Coyet had worried about an attack from Koxinga for a while, as there was plenty of commerce with the nearby mainland and a military buildup couldn’t maintain perfect OpSec. However, the Admiral that the VOC leadership in Batavia (Indonesia) had sent, Jan van der Laan, grew impatient waiting for an attack that was slow to materialize, and sailed his fleet off prior to Koxinga’s attack. This draw-down just compounded the colony’s lack of a defensive infrastructure, as a storm had destroyed one of their critical island fortresses on the Bay of Taiwan five years earlier.

Defying his inner circle, Koxinga made a perilous crossing of the Taiwan Strait and landed in April of 1661. The Bay of Taiwan was defended by Zeelandia Castle (and Zeelandia City) on an island covering one entrance; but Koxinga took advantage of the high tide to sail his boats through the other, shallow entrance, formerly covered by the fort that had been washed away. Koxinga’s forces, sailing on hundreds of junks, sailed into the bay and landed on the mainland. From there they went to Baxemboy, the centrally-situated island that had once housed the fort (right next to the island that Zeelandia City and Castle were on), and lured out a force of Dutch musketeers. Those musketeers, a couple of hundred under Thomas Pedel, were surprised by a force under Koxinga’s ace commander, Chen Ze, that sailed around behind them and wiped them out, a major blow to Dutch forces. Additionally, the largest of the three remaining Dutch ships was destroyed in a naval battle, accidentally blown up by an errant spark.

Koxinga set up camp on the mainland and besieged the Dutch forces in Fort Provintia. After assessing their position, engaging in some tedious posturing and back-and-forth, and convening a meeting to impart bureaucratic consensus to the process, the Dutch commander, Jacob Valentine, surrendered to Koxinga. As the rump Ming forces rolled up outlying Dutch and Chinese farms, towns, and missions, only isolated Zeelandia Castle was left, with a few hundred Dutch soldiers and civilians. Koxinga quickly ferried across to occupy the evacuated Zeelandia City, and began the siege.

Zeelandia Castle was what Andrade refers to as a Renaissance Fortress, with bastions extending from every corner of the square battlements that provided overlapping fields of cannon fire. This type of fortress design is considered a major military innovation, and is one of the technological aspects that the book assesses. This firepower defeated Koxinga’s first attempts to storm the fortress, and the siege dragged on into the summer. Koxinga had vast numerical superiority, perhaps as many as twenty-five thousand men on the island. However, as most of his sieges has gone quickly (statistically, they were most often compelled through bluster), he had not brought much food to the island, and it wasn’t long before his men were starving. He set many of them to agricultural work, though the rice crop would be a long time in coming. Bad weather in the Strait prevented any rice shipments from the mainland. Koxinga also lost men battling the Taiwanese aboriginals on the island, including the largely-unrecorded Prince of the Middag in the northern part of the island, whom the Dutch had coexisted with and who guarded his territory from invaders.

Koxinga ruled the island as a despot, overseeing starvation and executions; and the Dutch were not any less brutal in their enclave. The Dutch were doing a little better on supplies than their besiegers were, but not much better, and they too suffered from malnutrition and from unsanitary conditions, packed into the castle as they were. They weren’t sure of their long-term prospects; in fact, over the summer, the only ship to arrive was one that had set out prior to the invasion, to formally relieve Coyet of command due to his fearmongering over a potential invasion. This was disregarded.

Then, in August, a Dutch fleet appeared off the island. One small Dutch ship had escaped at the beginning of the assault, and made it back to Batavia in only seven weeks. The VOC had scrambled its forces at that point, and sent a reasonably-sized relief force. Koxinga had not expected them, as he thought that it was impossible for word to get back to Batavia with the monsoon season blowing winds in the other direction. The Dutch squandered their element of surprise, though, and Koxinga was able to redeploy his forces to the Zeelandia Castle and City area to prevent full relief (though the Dutch were able to partially resupply). Intelligence from civilians and defectors told the Dutch that the Chinese were starving, and some urged them to establish a blockade to block any mainland rice shipments from getting through. However, instead Coyet chose an attack on the Chinese forces in the city. This led to the loss of several ships and men as the large Dutch vessels grounded themselves in shallow water and were exposed to cannon fire, and the attack failed to move the needle. On top of that, a rice shipment from China made it through to Koxinga as autumn approached. The fleet thus did not change the situation greatly.

Koxinga tried new approaches to the siege. He tried to cut off and attack the small battery on the dunes above the Castle, but his artillery was driven off by musket fire before it could effectively be brought to bear. He tried to build a fortification on Baxemboy that would be able to fire into the Castle from a blind spot, but was prevented from doing so when the Dutch quickly constructed a counter-fortification.

The siege thus continued in a stalemate. Part of the Dutch fleet was sent to evacuate the smaller forts on the northern coast of Taiwan; instead they were blown off course to mainland China, where (under Coyet’s detailed orders) they set about trying to make a deal with the Qing. The two low-ranking men they sent ashore, Melchior Hurt and Jacob Clewerck, managed to do so after a long trip, and made it back to their ship, delayed from leaving without them by weather. The Qing were eager to ally against their enemies, and the delay was mostly from drawn out practices of protocol. However, this diplomatic coup went to waste as the Dutch leadership squabbled and wasted time appointing an envoy. The Admiral of the relief fleet, Jacob Cauw, gave up this voyage in the face of difficult sailing and returned to Batavia instead of making it to mainland China.

In December of 1661, a Swiss sergeant named Hans Radis defected from the Dutch side as conditions in Zeelandia Castle continued to deteriorate (having been resupplied is, after all, different from being continuously resupplied). Coyet would later blame him for Koxinga’s men realizing the importance of the battery on the dunes above the castle, though it seems clear that they already knew of this strategic importance from their earlier effort to take it. What Radis did perhaps instruct them on was the siege tactics necessary to take a Renaissance Fortress: not the fluidity that had characterized Koxinga’s strategy to that point, but the obstinate build-up of counter-fortification. To this end, Koxinga’s men built a crescent-shaped demi-lune fortification (perhaps also learned from Radis) in a spot that could hit the hilltop battery but could not be hit by the Castle’s guns, and used it to concentrate enough fire on the battery to blast it apart, and make it impossible to repair or use effectively (cannons were often used to destroy crenellations atop fortifications and prevent enemy troops from manning their own artillery).

After the Chinese stormed the dunes in January and built their own battery on it, the Dutch realized that their position was hopeless. With more troops they could perhaps have dislodged Koxinga’s men, but they did not have enough able-bodied troops to attempt it. After a few rounds of grandiloquent negotiations, the surrender was finalized at the beginning of February, 1662.

From there, history became perhaps a little less dramatic. Coyet was scapegoated in Batavia for the fall of Dutch Formosa, but held out politically and legally long enough to return to Holland and publish his book, Neglected Formosa, that turned the tables on his VOC enemies and made them responsible for the Dutch defeat. Koxinga himself had troubles being resupplied by his own men from the mainland, and commanded a new wave of executions. His next big idea was to receive tribute from the Spanish in the Philippines; but before this situation could lead to another expedition (or anything other than the expulsion of that colony’s Chinese population), Koxinga died of some sort of illness. The Dutch and the Qing did ally to destroy the remaining Koxinga/Ming faction, but cooperation broke down over the reconquest of Taiwan. The Qing took it themselves, without Dutch involvement, in 1683.

So: what does this example have to say about Military Revolution Theory? Andrade falls somewhere between the theory and the revisionist theory. On one hand, several of the theorized European advantages were clearly not present here: European musketry, theorized to be better, was matched in some cases by Chinese musketry (or sometimes those wielded by their African soldiers, many of them freed slaves or the descendants of freed slaves; the Pacific at this time was truly globalized), or in other cases did not provide any advantage, such as when Pedel’s troops were wiped out on Baxemboy by Chinese soldiers with more medieval armaments. Similarly, the Europeans were not more disciplined in fighting in formation, if anything the Chinese forces were due to Koxinga’s drilling. The sides were similarly well-matched in artillery; the Chinese were very rigorous in acquiring and studying European cannons, thus making them part of the same military exchange that led to technological advancement in Europe.

On the other hand, there were two real technological advantages that the Dutch had: better sailing ships, and the Renaissance Fortress. Chinese junks were mainly only able to sail at a reach (i.e. with the wind at their backs), while more complicated European rigging could sail much closer to the wind. This makes sense: the Asian Pacific had seasonal monsoons, whereby the wind could be counted upon to be blowing in one direction or the other; while European traders had to sail longer distances and deal with more varied weather conditions, and thus adapt their sailing accordingly. Junks, however, could outrun European ships with the wind at their backs. This advantage came into play in this campaign when the Europeans were able to send word for help, thus depriving Koxinga of the free hand he expected from the monsoon season.

The Europeans similarly had superior fortifications, and the overlapping fields of fire prevented Koxinga from taking the fortress by scaling the walls or battering down the gates as he had on occasion with Chinese fortifications, made of straight walls that artillery could not effectively defend. His men made four major attempts to take the Zeelandia Castle, and the only one that succeeded was the one that adopted the system of counter-fortifications that was put into place in European siege warfare, perhaps as advised by Radis. This technological superiority in fortification was tested by a control group when the Dutch, while still fighting alongside the Qing, re-fortified part of remote northern Taiwan in 1666. The post-Koxinga troops who tried to flush them out were repulsed when trying to simply rush the walls, and left in defeat despite the fact that the Dutch definitely did not have enough provisions, men, or ammunition to survive an extended siege.

Thus, Coyet was in a way right when he wrote that it would have been possible for the Dutch to win. However, the real difference was in leadership. Koxinga, informed by Chinese military traditions (The Art of War was frequently quoted in he and his commanders’ documents), maintained flexibility in dealing with the Dutch, and was not wedded to dogma. He was better able to employ universal military maxims such as the use of deception or attacking when and where an enemy was weakest. The European technological advantages that did exist were marginal and thus possible (perhaps easy) to overcome. Coyet, on the other hand, had poor relations with his leadership team, had not been well-prepared for the invasion, and was generally not as capable a commander. Thus, in analysis, while the Military Revolution Theorists were right about a technological gap (which perhaps imperceptibly widened over the centuries), the revisionists were right on a larger scale about Asian military theory being dynamic in this era, not stagnant. Clearly, they came out ahead in this comparison.

As a final note, another element that Andrade takes care to highlight is the effect of the weather and of climate change on the course of history. In the mid-17th century, there were several volcanic eruptions along the pacific rim, the ash from which led to a period of global cooling by a couple of degrees. This temperature change had a domino effect of spawning natural disasters and devastating crop cycles, and the resulting disruption led to societal chaos and even collapse. One such collapse was that of the Ming, as the colder weather caused crops to fail in the face of droughts, leading to famine and instability that toppled a decaying empire. On the smaller scale, the weather reappears throughout the story, whether it is washing away the Dutch fortress or preventing the Dutch from sailing to the Qing or delaying rice shipments to Koxinga for the first part of his campaign. Technology did not save the Dutch, and climate change helped doom them.