Qualla: Koxinga Ancestral Shrine

Koxinga Ancestral Shrine: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gisling, CC BY 3.0. He was born in Japan, raised in China, and died in Taiwan. Zheng Chenggong — known in the West as Koxinga — was the son of a Chinese merchant-pirate and a Japanese woman named Tagawa Matsu, a combination that made him an anomaly in every political category of the seventeenth century. He grew up to become one of the most consequential military figures in East Asian history: the commander who expelled the Dutch East India Company from Taiwan in 1662 after a nine-month siege, establishing the last holdout of the Ming dynasty on an island that the Qing empire would not fully conquer for another two decades. He died the same year he won. His son built him a shrine in 1663, and that shrine still stands.

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Image: Gisling | CC BY 3.0

Koxinga Ancestral Shrine: A Son's Memorial

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 阿道, CC BY-SA 4.0. Zheng Jing — Koxinga's son and successor to the Kingdom of Tungning — built the Koxinga Ancestral Shrine in 1663, the year after his father's death, to serve as a place of family veneration. The original structure was a private shrine: not a public temple, not a state monument, b...

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Image: 阿道 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Koxinga Ancestral Shrine: A Name Changed by Conquest

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. When the Qing dynasty absorbed Taiwan in 1683 and the Kingdom of Tungning came to an end, the shrine's identity had to change. An ancestral hall honoring the founding dynasty of the defeated kingdom was a politically sensitive object. The Qing administration renamed it 'The Cheng...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Koxinga Ancestral Shrine: The Well and What Remains

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. Of the original seventeenth-century shrine, very little survives in its first form. The most tangible connection to the building Zheng Jing constructed is an old well in front of the gate — still present, still visible, sunk into the ground before the entrance as it has been for ...

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Image: Mx. Granger | CC0

Koxinga Ancestral Shrine: Mother and Son in Stone

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zhangzhugang, CC BY-SA 4.0. Inside the shrine stands a sculpture that captures something the official historical record often overlooks. The piece depicts the young Koxinga alongside his mother, Tagawa Matsu — the Japanese woman who bore him and who, according to various accounts, died during the Qing conqu...

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Image: Zhangzhugang | CC BY-SA 4.0