In the year 1683, two consequential battles took place respectively in the West and East. In the wake of a siege-breaking bloodbath outside Vienna, King Jan III Sobieski of Poland wrote to his queen-consort about how his winged hussars had saved Christendom from the invincible Ottoman janissary. Thousands of miles away in the high-walled Forbidden City in Beijing, a courier rushed in with the news of an equally inconceivable military triumph: The emperor’s armada had brought Taiwan back under the imperial reign. It was the Mid-Autumn Festival, an occasion of family reunions in Chinese culture. Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty, ravished with excitement, improvised a poem to celebrate the historic reunification of Chinese territories across the strait, “long had I deplored my subjects stranded off the seashore; in peace now they plow the fields with the mandate of heaven restored.”1

A cliff-hanging sea battle put an end to the Taiwan question that arose over 300 years prior to the one we had today, though Beijing had also preferred the issue settled in a peaceful manner. History might not repeat itself, until it does.

Inconclusive Civil War

Today’s standoff across the Taiwan Strait is a leftover of the 1946-1949 Chinese civil war between Communists and Nationalists. The deadlock was reached after Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek dragged his demoralized Nationalist forces to the island in 1949, biding his time for a comeback. In a similar fashion, the Taiwan question three centuries earlier was also derived from a struggle for China’s national power. Only that it was a dynastic war between Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911).

Having fought Ming beyond the Great Wall for decades, the once nomadic Manchus brought Beijing under their heels in 1644 and began a full-fledged national takeover as the new dynasty Qing. The capital of the heavenly empire then was the low-hanging fruit for Manchus, as a sprawling peasant uprising had devastated Ming’s central government and cornered Emperor Chongzhen to end himself in a disgraceful suicide. Qing was set to rule the empire. In the vast, unoccupied southern provinces, however, Ming loyalists enthroned surviving royal princes, several all at once, to continue the fight against the Manchu conquest. It took the Qing court another two decades to crush all the resistance forces, all but one staunch defiant, who still stood to the ground on China’s southeast coasts.

Zheng Chenggong 郑成功, sometimes referred to as Koxinga, was a steadfast, ruthless and loyal commander. Born to a Chinese pirate and a Japanese samurai’s daughter, Zheng received an orthodox Confucian upbringing at Nanjing’s imperial college, which rendered him religiously devoted to Ming’s cause of defending the heavenly mandate. He proclaimed his resolve to fight Manchus in 1647 and raised an army of 170,000 strong in the coastal province of Fujian2, even though his father Zheng Zhilong 郑芝龙 had already surrendered to Qing one year earlier. And thanks to his father, who had once built a fearsome seaborne faction, Zheng inherited a fleet second to none in East Asia at the onset of his crusade. This maritime force was a game changer. It helped Zheng’s father pull off arguably China’s first military victory over a Western power (Battle of Liaoluo Bay in 1633 料罗湾海战), it enabled Zheng to follow through the 15-year struggle against Manchus to the end, and it would later wind up to be the biggest obstacle to Taiwan’s return to the fold. Manchus were strangers to sea waves, but unstoppable on horseback. After a calamitous military adventure to recover Ming’s second capital Nanjing in 1659, Zheng came to recognize Qing’s superiority in land battles, and decided to seek out a home base beyond Manchu warriors’ reach in preparation for the long haul. Zheng laid his eyes on Taiwan.

In 1662, Zheng led his mighty fleet to embark on another military adventure to take Taiwan from the Dutch East India Company, which had kept a colonial presence on the island for nearly 40 years. This time he succeeded, earning himself the title of the nation’s hero that has lasted till today. Zheng was determined to build the island into a military base and commercial center, in a bid to wait for a window to rehabilitate Ming’s rule in China. Zheng Chenggong passed away in the same year of his conquest, but his son resumed his project. Also in the year 1662, two other earth-shaking events took place in China. The last Ming emperor was murdered in Yunnan, making Zheng’s regime in Taiwan the only force still upholding Ming’s banner across the country. In Beijing, a Manchu prince who was eventually remembered as the greatest emperor of the Qing Dynasty, if not of all Chinese dynasties, ascended to the throne by the reign title of Kangxi, even though he was only eight years old then. The standoff across the Taiwan Strait officially began.

This standoff came to existence because of the soaring military projection cost for Beijing, built up by the treacherous sea waters and Zheng’s seasoned maritime force. Originating from the nomadic Jurchens in northeast China, Manchus remained largely a land power by the time of Zheng’s retreat to Taiwan. The Qing Empire’s only naval force then was constituted mainly of defectors from Zheng’s fleet, and therefore deemed feeble and unreliable. Only with the help of the vengeful Dutch did the Manchu navy in 1663 conquer Amoy (today’s Xiamen), a coastal island built into a military outpost by Zheng Chenggong.3 Still, Qing made its due attempt to unify China. In 1665, gathering all the seaborne might at hand, the Qing court launched its first strait-crossing military operation to eradicate the Ming Empire’s last residue on Taiwan. Shi Lang 施琅, a defector from Zheng’s side, commanded the Manchu fleet. He was the key figure who eventually helped Emperor Kangxi achieve the remarkable feat, but his debut in 1665 ended in a fiasco. As the Manchu fleet made it halfway near Penghu islands, its formation was broken down by ferocious storms in the open sea, and Shi’s flagship disappeared for days before it was found drifting 150 miles away to Guangdong.4 Besides the capricious weather, Shi’s adventure was unlikely to fare well due to an array of unfavorable factors: Shi was not delegated with full authority because of his record of infidelity; the powerful minister Oboi 鳌拜 acting as the young emperor’s regent was not determined to press the claim on Taiwan; and most important of all, the Qing Empire, which set up in Beijing for only 20 years, did not have the capacity to prepare a naval force strong enough to bear the staggering military cost generated by the Taiwan Strait. After the defeat, the Qing court ordered the fleet disbanded, called back to Beijing all its naval commanders, and aborted the plan to recover Taiwan by force.5 A delicate balance was reached that neither the Qing Empire on the mainland nor the Ming loyalists in Taiwan could unseat each other.