Siege of Fort Zeelandia (1661): Koxinga Takes Dutch Taiwan

The Siege of Fort Zeelandia was the campaign in which the Ming loyalist commander Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong) drove the Dutch East India Company out of Taiwan. Landing in April 1661 with a large army, he besieged the Dutch stronghold at Tayouan, now part of Tainan, for about nine months until Governor Frederick Coyett surrendered on 1 February 1662. It ended almost four decades of Dutch rule and made Taiwan the base of a Chinese loyalist state.

Background: Dutch Taiwan

The Dutch East India Company, known as the VOC, settled at Tayouan, a sandbar off south-western Taiwan, in 1624. There it built Fort Zeelandia, a square brick fortress with corner bastions, and used the colony to trade silk, sugar and deer hides with China and Japan. Thousands of Chinese settlers came to farm under Dutch rule, and in 1652 an uprising among them led by Guo Huaiyi was crushed. The company then built a second, smaller fort, Provintia, on the mainland shore across the bay.

Koxinga was born in Hirado, Japan, in 1624, the son of the Chinese merchant and admiral Zheng Zhilong and a Japanese mother. When his father went over to the Qing in 1646, Koxinga remained loyal to the Ming and built a powerful army and fleet based at Xiamen and Kinmen. His great attack on Nanjing failed in 1659, and he began to look for a safer base.

The road to invasion

He Bin, a Chinese interpreter who had worked for the Dutch and fled to Xiamen in debt, urged Koxinga to take Taiwan and supplied him with information about the colony, including a channel near Luermen that large ships could use at high tide. Rumours of an attack alarmed Coyett, who asked Batavia for help. A fleet arrived in 1660, but its commander, Jan van der Laan, judged the danger exaggerated and left early in 1661 with most of his ships.

Koxinga’s fleet sailed from Kinmen in late April 1661, paused in the Penghu islands and arrived off Tayouan on 30 April. Estimates of his total force run up to about 25,000 men in several hundred junks. The Dutch had perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 soldiers in the whole colony.

The siege

Koxinga’s troops came ashore near Luermen and quickly controlled the mainland side of the bay. In the first days of the invasion a Dutch force of about 240 musketeers under Captain Thomas Pedel attacked Chinese troops on a nearby sandbar; it was outflanked and nearly destroyed, and Pedel was killed. At sea the Dutch warship Hector blew up during a battle with Chinese junks. Fort Provintia, isolated and short of water, surrendered on 4 May.

Coyett refused to give up Fort Zeelandia. In late May Koxinga’s forces attacked the fort and suffered heavy losses from Dutch artillery, so he settled down to a blockade. His army, short of food, spread out to farm and to subdue Taiwanese villages. Dutch prisoners were held in the countryside, and the minister Antonius Hambroek, sent to the fort to urge surrender, later became the subject of a Dutch legend of martyrdom after he and other captives were executed.

A relief fleet from Batavia under Jacob Caeuw reached Tayouan in August 1661 with about 700 men. On 16 September the Dutch launched a counterattack by land and sea that failed badly, costing them ships and well over a hundred men. Late in 1661 Caeuw sailed away, officially to seek help from Qing officials who had proposed an alliance against Koxinga, but he never returned to Taiwan.

The fall of the fort

The decisive change came in December 1661, when Hans Jurgen Radis, a German sergeant in Dutch service, deserted to Koxinga. He advised attacking the Utrecht redoubt, a small fort on the dune above Zeelandia that protected it from bombardment. On 25 January 1662 Koxinga’s batteries fired on the redoubt with heavy cannon, and the Dutch abandoned it. With the enemy now able to fire directly into the main fort, and the garrison weakened by disease and hunger, Coyett’s council voted to negotiate.

Under the treaty signed on 1 February 1662, the Dutch handed over the fort, its guns and the company’s goods, but were allowed to leave with their personal possessions. The survivors sailed for Batavia soon afterwards.

Why the Dutch lost

Numbers mattered most. Koxinga’s army was many times larger than the Dutch garrison, and his soldiers were veterans of years of war against the Qing. They included disciplined archers, gunners and heavily armoured infantry, and many Dutch officers who expected Chinese troops to flee before musket fire were proved wrong in the first days of fighting.

The VOC also misjudged the threat. Batavia was far away, its ships depended on the seasonal monsoon winds, and its leaders had withdrawn the reinforcements sent in 1660. The relief fleet that finally came was too small to change the outcome.

Fort Zeelandia itself held up well. Its angled bastions and thick walls, built to European designs, defeated Koxinga’s direct assault in May 1661. The fort fell only after a long blockade, hunger and disease had worn down the garrison, and after a defector pointed out the weakness of the outlying redoubt.

Key people

• Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong, 1624–1662): Ming loyalist commander who planned and led the invasion.
• Frederick Coyett (c. 1615–1687): Swedish-born VOC governor of Taiwan who commanded the defence.
• He Bin: former Dutch interpreter who encouraged the invasion and guided it with local knowledge.
• Jacob Caeuw: commander of the unsuccessful relief fleet.
• Hans Jurgen Radis: German sergeant whose defection exposed the fort’s weak point.

Consequences

Koxinga died suddenly on 23 June 1662, only months after his victory, probably of illness. His son Zheng Jing ruled Taiwan as the Kingdom of Tungning, which continued to oppose the Qing until its defeat at the Battle of Penghu in 1683. Chinese settlement of Taiwan grew rapidly under the Zheng family, laying foundations for the island’s later society.

The VOC never regained Taiwan. Its ships briefly cooperated with the Qing and occupied Keelung in the north from 1664 to 1668, but the venture brought little profit. In Batavia the company blamed Coyett, who was sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to exile in the Banda Islands, from which he was released in 1674.

Timeline

• 1624: the VOC settles at Tayouan and begins Fort Zeelandia.
• 1652: the Guo Huaiyi uprising among Chinese settlers is suppressed.
• 1659: Koxinga’s attack on Nanjing fails.
• 1661, 30 April: Koxinga’s fleet reaches Tayouan and lands troops near Luermen.
• 1661, 4 May: Fort Provintia surrenders.
• 1661, August: a Dutch relief fleet under Jacob Caeuw arrives.
• 1661, 16 September: a Dutch counterattack fails.
• 1662, 25 January: Koxinga’s forces take the Utrecht redoubt.
• 1662, 1 February: Coyett signs the surrender of Fort Zeelandia.
• 1662, 23 June: Koxinga dies on Taiwan.

Legacy

The historian Tonio Andrade has described the siege as the first major war between Chinese forces and a European power, and argues that it shows Ming-era Chinese armies were fully able to defeat Europeans when well led. Coyett’s defence, ’t Verwaerloosde Formosa (“Neglected Formosa”), published in 1675 under the initials C.E.S., blamed the company’s leaders in Batavia for ignoring his warnings. Together with the records of Koxinga’s officer Yang Ying on the Chinese side, it remains a key source for the siege.

Koxinga is honoured as a national hero in both mainland China and Taiwan, and in Japan he became the hero of Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s popular puppet play The Battles of Coxinga, first staged in 1715.

Why it matters

The fall of Fort Zeelandia ended the Dutch colony on Taiwan and showed that a Chinese army could defeat a fortified European outpost. It turned the island into a Chinese loyalist stronghold, set the stage for its incorporation into the Qing empire in 1683 and shaped Taiwan’s place in Chinese history.