Lost Colony

The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West

Tonio Andrade

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400839537
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

How a Chinese pirate defeated European colonialists and won Taiwan during the seventeenth century During the seventeenth century, Holland created the world's most dynamic colonial empire, outcompeting the British and capturing Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Yet, in the Sino-Dutch War—Europe's first war with China—the Dutch met their match in a colorful Chinese warlord named Koxinga. Part samurai, part pirate, he led his generals to victory over the Dutch and captured one of their largest and richest colonies—Taiwan. How did he do it? Examining the strengths and weaknesses of European and Chinese military techniques during the period, Lost Colony provides a balanced new perspective on long-held assumptions about Western power, Chinese might, and the nature of war.It has traditionally been asserted that Europeans of the era possessed more advanced science, technology, and political structures than their Eastern counterparts, but historians have recently contested this view, arguing that many parts of Asia developed on pace with Europe until 1800. While Lost Colony shows that the Dutch did indeed possess a technological edge thanks to the Renaissance fort and the broadside sailing ship, that edge was neutralized by the formidable Chinese military leadership. Thanks to a rich heritage of ancient war wisdom, Koxinga and his generals outfoxed the Dutch at every turn.Exploring a period when the military balance between Europe and China was closer than at any other point in modern history, Lost Colony reassesses an important chapter in world history and offers valuable and surprising lessons for contemporary times.

CLOSING

Epilogues and Conclusions

When I started this book I was firmly in the revisionist camp. I believed that Europe held little if any technological lead over developed parts of Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Sino-Dutch War offers much to corroborate that view. Dutch cannons provided no advantage against Koxinga, who fielded artillery every bit as good. When Swiss soldier Albrecht Herport reminisced about the war, he expressed a common opinion in saying that the Chinese “know how to make very effective guns and cannons, so that it’s scarcely possible to find their equal elsewhere.”¹

Those cannons were adopted from European models, but of course the Chinese had invented cannons first, and copying is part of war. The French and Italians and Dutch and Spanish had been imitating each other’s designs for decades. Herport goes on to note that the Chinese were especially good at this process of adoption: “Anything they see even one time they can produce themselves quickly.”²

Yet their ability to make good cannons was no accident. A century before the war, the Ming had established a special bureau to study western cannons.³ They used them against the Japanese in the Korean War of 1592–1598 to devastating effect. The Japanese, who possessed advanced guns of their own, became so wary that they avoided Ming artillery for the rest of the war.

Ming officials were so intrigued by European cannons that, as we’ve seen, they even dredged them up from shipwrecks. In the 1620s, at least forty-two Dutch and British pieces were salvaged in southern China and shipped to Beijing, a distance nearly equivalent to the distance between Paris and Moscow. The operations were massive, with derricks and cranes and chains of steel.⁴ To reverse-engineer the cannons, Beijing sought artisans from the Land of Min, whose people were renowned throughout China as forgers and casters, having learned about advanced cannon designs from the westerners themselves.⁵ “These days,” a Chinese writer noted, “the westerners are floating around the seas of southern China, and there’s no shortage of people consorting with them. The people of Min have already learned from them the craft of forging powerful cannons.”⁶ Beijing was soon making what they called Red Barbarian Cannons. Thus, by the time the Sino-Dutch War started, Chinese cannon technology was highly advanced, particularly in Koxinga’s home province.

Of course, it’s one thing to make good guns and another to use them. Scholars have argued that a hallmark of European modernization was a precocious focus on measurement, the application of mathematical principles to practical purposes, particularly to warfare.⁷ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scientists like Nicholas Tartaglia and Galileo Galilei developed targeting tools that helped gunners aim and load their cannons, improving accuracy (figure 25). The Chinese seem to have adopted these tools.⁸ We have no direct evidence about Koxinga’s own use of them, but we do know that his artillery teams were swift and accurate, so much so that a frustrated Coyet wrote, “They are able to handle their cannons so effectively . . . [that] [t]hey put our own soldiers to shame.”⁹

What about handguns? Muskets were known in East Asia long before the Taiwan War. The Japanese pointed them at the Chinese in the 1590s. The Ming studied them. They also studied the advanced muskets that Europeans brought in the early seventeenth ce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Dramatis Personae
• Preamble
• One
• Two
• Three
• Closing