BOOK
REVIEW Of Chinese pirate kings and Dutch
traders Pirate King: Coxinga
and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty by Jonathan
Clements, and The Dutch Encounter with Asia:
1600-1950 by Kees Zandvliet
Reviewed by Macabe Keliher
The 17th
century was a monumental time for Asia. The Dutch had
just arrived, and began to extend a broad and profitable
trading empire; China's Qing Dynasty arose and brought
the Ming to a violent and catastrophic end; and Taiwan
was first absorbed into Chinese rule. These events,
while regionally limited, have had continuous impact
right through our present day. The Dutch, for example,
stayed on as colonizers for 350 years, writing the rules
of Southeast Asia's nation-states in the 20th century.
And the cataclysm in China sparked the battle for
Taiwan, a battle that has yet to be resolved.
In
fact, global trade first took root at this time.
European merchants established trading bases throughout
Asia, hoping to capitalize on the European demand for
Asian goods, as well as partake of and profit from the
intra-Asian trade in silk, deerskin and porcelain - the
Spanish took the Philippines, the Portuguese Macau, and
the Dutch Java (in modern-day Indonesia), as well as
Taiwan and Japan. Likewise, Chinese traders, while not
circumnavigating the globe to take goods to market, did
monopolize the middleman market at one point.
And yet so little has been written about the
period; so little is understood about the complexity of
the day and its carcinogenic growth into the
contemporary era. True, general sweeps like John Wills'
1688: A Global History and Jonathan Spence's work
on the era have touched on the times, while academic
studies have filled us in on the specifics of, say, the
rise of the Qing Dynasty, but none of these has been
enough to frame the era.
Most important, myths
are perpetuated, and governments today have rewritten
the history for political motives. Beijing, and Chinese
scholars, spare no ink in demonizing the Dutch of the
mid-17th century who "illegally took part of China". Or
Taiwan nationalists who belt out at every opportunity
the 17th-century beginnings of Taiwan's 400-year
independent history.
Koxinga
exposed The Chinese general Koxinga is one of the
most politically charged and misunderstood characters of
history today. Known as Zheng Chenggong to the Chinese
(Koxinga, also spelled Coxinga, is a European bastardization of
Zheng's nickname in the Fujian dialect), he has been
used by both Beijing and Taipei in their battles of
propaganda in the war over the identity of Taiwan. For
Beijing, Zheng, or Koxinga, is the hero who took back
Taiwan from the Westerners; he is the Chinese loyalist
who "reunified" Taiwan with the mainland. His name is
evoked for historical legitimacy in the contemporary
conflict across the Taiwan Strait, and his tactics
studied by the People's Liberation Army. For Taipei
Zheng is, in the words of Vice President Annette Lu,
"Moses who led his people to the land of milk and
honey". He is a savior who fled China and established a
new land for the Taiwanese.
With such propaganda
rife and distorting public knowledge of history,
Jonathan Clements has done us a great service in
breaking through these political myths and offering the
most complete biography of the man and his deeds.
Through detailed research in primary Chinese and
Japanese sources, Clements destroys the illusions of
Zheng as a Chinese loyalist or biblical character, and
refashions the man as a self-interested military
commander bent on power, a man whose "pride and vanity
threatened to ruin him", as Clements writes.
When defeated by the Qing in the epic battle for
Nanjing in the mid-17th century, Zheng had little choice
but to flee China and re-establish his base "overseas".
Enter Taiwan, which the Dutch had occupied since 1624,
and whom Zheng expelled after a lengthy war. Zheng was
not a pre-modern Chiang Kai-shek, however, who was
preparing to retake China; rather he aimed to invade the
Philippines. As for the milk and honey, well, the
"Taiwanese natives were less pleased, since their island
was merely swapping one set of conquerors for another,"
Clements writes.
Pirate King: Coxinga and the
Fall of the Ming Dynasty goes beyond just the
biographical details of the legendary warrior. As its
subtitle indicates, the book begins with the collapse of
the Ming Dynasty in 1644 and recounts in an engaging
narrative the pivotal events of China's dynastic
upheaval: The fall of the Ming; the invasion of the
Manchus from the north and the establishment of the Qing
Dynasty in Beijing; and the fight for the south that
would not be complete until Taiwan was conquered in
1683.
The story is woven around the Zheng
family, not just Koxinga; thus Clements gets us
intimately acquainted with Koxinga's father, Zheng
Zhilong, or Iquan as the Europeans called him. The elder
Zheng ruled the seas as a pirate and then a merchant,
then as the naval authority for the Ming Dynasty. This
fascinating and charismatic character controlled all
trade going in and out of China in the mid-17th century,
forcing the Europeans hoping to peddle goods to and from
the Middle Kingdom to go through him.
The
Dutch Such an engineering of East Asian trade was
not, however, solely the masterminding of the elder
Zheng; the Dutch had a role in setting it up this way.
Having arrived in Asia at the turn of the century, the
Dutch were, as Kees Zandvliet writes in The Dutch
Encounter with Asia:
1600-1950, "keen to stick to what it did best:
commerce". They did not want to become colonizers -
although they sometimes did, as in the case of Taiwan -
and so hoped to maintain strong relations with regional
kings or strongmen who would aid the Europeans in their
commercial exploits.
"Better to have contact
with one Chinese captain than to exercise direct control
over Batavia's large Chinese population; better to have
a good relationship with the sultan of the island of
Ternate (in what is now Indonesia) than govern the area
directly," writes Zandvliet.
In this way the
Dutch exercised indirect control of their commerce
centers, so that not one island of the East Indian
archipelago fell under direct Dutch rule until the 20th
century. And this was where the Dutch trading company
VOC had established its Asian headquarters.
Such
a strategy was for the most part successful. The Dutch
were the most profitable European traders in Asia for a
century and a half. But beyond that, the Dutch
headquarters in Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) "became
an important center of Asian diplomacy - local
representatives of the VOC acted as both mercantile
agents and ambassadors at royal courts, their mission
being both to supervise trade and to report on political
developments in the region", writes Zandvliet. This won
the Hollanders the only European trading rights with
Japan in the 17th century, and allowed them to hold more
swaths of territory for a longer period of time than any
other European power.
Zandvliet chronicles this
Dutch "encounter" with the Eastern Hemisphere in an
innovative and successfully creative way: through the
objects of the day. This four-centimeter-thick volume
uses the artwork, pictures and objects from the
Hollanders' 350 years in Asia to tell the story of their
trade, their administrators, and their interactions with
the local populations. What one finds is not an
illustrated history book, but rather the illustrations
of the day used to narrate the history.
The
gifts presented and those received from Dutch missions
to emperors and kings are presented here in rich color
and detail, as are the paintings of Dutch forts and
battles against discontented local populations. European
life in Batavia is laid out in detail with all its
trimmings, including slaves - the product of a
prosperous trade that has largely been ignored by
historians in favor of focusing on the African-North
American slave trade. One of the most powerful images is
a sculpture of a cross-legged Indonesian boy with a
diesel engine block cradled in his hands, accompanied by
a two-page caption of the history of Dutch engines in
the East Indies. It demonstrates a clash between Eastern
mysticism and Western technology, stands as an example
of industry in the start of the 20th century, "and the
paternalistic and sometimes openly racist attitudes",
Zandvliet writes.
Indeed, never before have we
been so intimately acquainted, outside of a museum, with
the period.
History proffered As the
director of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, and having more
than 20 years of research experience in the national
archives at The Hague, Zandvliet is well credentialed to
produce such a book. Each chapter is like a guided tour
through a museum, taking a theme of objects and art to
create a narrative of the period. Thus Chapter 2, for
example, is the "Governor-General Portraits, 1609-1945",
which, strung together (they adorned the walls of main
VOC and government chambers in and around Batavia)
represent the continuity of Dutch influence.
While The Dutch Encounter with Asia is
confined in its scope to the Dutch in Asia, Pirate
King at times becomes too broad and loses focus,
digressing, for example, on page after page about the
Jesuits' relationship with a Chinese emperor; or losing
the Zheng narrative to whole chapters on the battles
between the Dutch and the Portuguese. And Clements
oversteps his bounds as a historian at times to
interject thoughts and feelings of historical persons
when no historical material exists to tell us as much.
It was not the case, for example, that the Chinese
"intended to wipe the Dutch off the face of the earth"
in 1623 when the Europeans came to force themselves into
the China market - they only wanted to drive the Dutch
out of Chinese waters, and subsequently offered them
Taiwan.
Fortunately, none of this detracts from
the importance of either of these books. Not only do
they take us one step closer to demystifying the history
and dispelling the myths and misconceptions about the
period, but they also give us greater insight into the
region as it is today.
Pirate King: Coxinga
and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty by Jonathan
Clements. Sutton Publishing. ISBN: 0750932694, 275
pages, illustrations, price 19.99 pounds sterling
(US$36).
The Dutch Encounter with Asia:
1600-1950 by Kees Zandvliet. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
ISBN: 9040087172, 462 pages, illustrations, price $50.
Macabe Keliher is the author of
Out of China: A History of Seventeenth-Century
Taiwan. His most recent book, Small Sea Travel
Diaries, will be released this month. His website
iswww.macabe.net.
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Aug 28, 2004
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European bastardization of
Zheng's nickname in the Fujian dialect), he has been
used by both Beijing and Taipei in their battles of
propaganda in the war over the identity of Taiwan. For
Beijing, Zheng, or Koxinga, is the hero who took back
Taiwan from the Westerners; he is the Chinese loyalist
who "reunified" Taiwan with the mainland. His name is
evoked for historical legitimacy in the contemporary
conflict across the Taiwan Strait, and his tactics
studied by the People's Liberation Army. For Taipei
Zheng is, in the words of Vice President Annette Lu,
"Moses who led his people to the land of milk and
honey". He is a savior who fled China and established a
new land for the Taiwanese. 
Encounter with Asia:
1600-1950, "keen to stick to what it did best:
commerce". They did not want to become colonizers -
although they sometimes did, as in the case of Taiwan -
and so hoped to maintain strong relations with regional
kings or strongmen who would aid the Europeans in their
commercial exploits. 
