In June 1622, the Taiwan Strait of China was in turmoil. In this year, the Dutch East India Company built a castle on Penghu Island, and the Ming Dynasty raised troops to attack, but several times ended in defeat. The following year, the Ming Dynasty began negotiations with the Dutch. Ming officials put forward conditions for the Dutch: if the Dutch could abandon the Penghu Islands and move to The Island of Taiwan, they would be allowed to trade between the two countries. However, the Dutch were reluctant to give up the Penghu archipelago, and negotiations between the two sides were terminated. The incident is recorded in the archives of the Dutch East India Company.
After the failure of the first negotiations, the Ming Dynasty began to send large armies to besiege the Penghu Islands. In this battle, the Ming Dynasty had 200 warships and more than 10,000 troops, and the Netherlands invested 13 warships with more than 900 people. The two sides fought for 8 months, and finally let the Dutch defenders have a desperate situation of isolation, and the Ming Dynasty also spent 170,000 taels of military expenses, which was a serious cost. As a result, the two sides negotiated again, and finally reached the previous conditions. In 1624, Dutch colonists withdrew from the Penghu Archipelago and attacked the island of Taiwan, gradually turning the island into a colony.
Taiwan Island, whose status is very important, is the hub of maritime transportation such as China and Japan. When the Dutch occupied the island of Taiwan, they had a trade transit station in the Far East and consolidated their hegemony as the "coachman of the sea". With such an important island, why was the Ming Dynasty willing to let the Dutch conquer it? Isn't this a betrayal of the territorial sovereignty of a State? To find out the ins and outs of things, we also have to start from the early Ming Dynasty.
In 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang established the Ming Dynasty. However, the remnants of Fang Guozhen and Zhang Shicheng, who were not willing to be defeated, wandered on the sea, colluded with the Wokou, and constantly attacked the long coastline. The Ming Dynasty could not cope, so it adopted an extreme policy - the sea ban. During the period of strict sea bans, not only was it impossible to conduct overseas trade, but even going to sea to fish was prohibited, and even the sale of overseas products was illegal. This policy was implemented for more than 200 years and became the basic national policy of the Ming Dynasty. It was not until 1567 that "one-port trade" was allowed in Yuegang, Fujian, but the fundamental policy of the sea ban was not broken.
The policy of sea prohibition has indeed dealt a great blow to the hostile forces at sea and is conducive to the stability of the coastal area. However, this has brought serious problems to the production and life of coastal residents. Coastal residents who used to rely mainly on fishing and overseas trade for their livelihoods are now banned, cutting off their livelihoods. Especially in Fujian Province, where the terrain is rugged and unsuitable for agricultural production, after the implementation of the sea ban, the life of the people in Fujian has plummeted.
As a result, many bold coastal residents have taken risks and engaged in smuggling trade. Isn't this a violation of the basic national policy of "sea ban"? Therefore, the Ming Dynasty classified these smuggling merchants as "Tongwu" and dealt with them according to treason. The more pressing the policy became, many extreme smugglers simply confronted the imperial court and engaged in the business of pirates, so the Ming Dynasty officials referred to them collectively as "Wokou". For example, Wang Zhi, the most famous leader of the "Wukou" in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, was the Anhui Hui merchant.
The Ming Dynasty was the most prevalent era of pirates in ancient China, which was inextricably linked to the Ming Dynasty's sea ban. Because the mainland is relatively strict, pirates often establish their own strongholds on the islands along the southeast coast. Among them, the Penghu Islands and Taiwan Islands have become the base camps of pirates. These places were "isolated overseas", and the Ming army was difficult to attack, which was very safe for pirates.
Let's talk about the Penghu Islands first, which is located in the middle of the Taiwan Strait and controls the route along the southeast coast, and the traffic location is very important. During the Yuan Dynasty, it occupied this area and set up the Penghu Inspection Department as a springboard for attacking Taiwan Island, but the Yuan Dynasty also failed to capture Taiwan Island. During the Ming Dynasty, it inherited the establishment of the Penghu Inspection Department. In 1384, due to the implementation of the policy of sea prohibition, the area was abandoned by the Ming Dynasty, the Penghu Inspection Department was abolished, and the inhabitants of this area were relocated to the mainland. Since then, pirates have occupied the Penghu archipelago. After the anti-Wu movement in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the coastal areas were finally stabilized a lot. By 1563, the Penghu Inspection Department was finally re-established.
Let's talk about the island of Taiwan. Taiwan Island, also known as "Ryukyu" in ancient times, was called "Xiaoliuqiu" in the early Ming Dynasty, and the Ryukyu Islands were called "Great Ryukyu", which was caused by the lack of understanding of Taiwan Island. Zhu Yuanzhang stipulated in the "Ancestral Training of the Emperor and Ming Dynasty" that the descendants of the Ming Dynasty were never allowed to attack 15 neighboring countries, including Da Liu Qiu and Xiao Liu Qiu. In fact, there was no state organization in Taiwan at that time, just a few tribes, some of which still migrated from the mainland.
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During the ming dynasty's implementation of the sea ban, a large number of pirate groups migrated to Taiwan Island, using Taiwan Island as a base to resist the Ming Dynasty's policy of sea ban. The earliest pirate operating in Taiwan recorded in the "Chronicle of Taiwan" is Yan Siqi during the Wanli Dynasty, who was originally from Haicheng County, Zhangzhou, but later went into exile in Japan for committing homicide, began to operate the smuggling trade between China and Japan, and became a pirate. He was exiled in Japan to northern Taiwan after a failed plot to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate. After that, he recruited immigrants in Taiwan and developed them, and was known as "the first pioneer to open up Taiwan". Since then, the dominant pirate force in Taiwan has been the Zheng Zhilong clique.
These pirates immigrated and built economically on The island of Taiwan, making the island gradually become a "paradise" for Chinese, and made great contributions to the integration of the island into the map of China. However, the pirate group is the enemy of the Ming Dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty must want to get rid of it quickly. However, the Ming Dynasty's own water army could not compete with the pirates, which made the Ming Dynasty very embarrassed.
Soon after Qi Jiguang's resistance, the three early colonial powers of Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands began to enter Central Asia. Spain occupied the Philippines; Portugal controlled the Strait of Malacca and acquired Macau from the Ming Dynasty; the Dutch, as a rising star, made Indonesia (East Indies) their colony and wanted to acquire an island along the East China Sea as a transit point for trade in the Far East. Initially, the Netherlands was interested in the Penghu Archipelago, and that was what was described at the beginning of this article.
When the Ming Dynasty saw the colonists coming east, they had the idea of inducing the colonists to deal with pirates, so the Ming officials instigated the Dutch army to attack the island of Taiwan. In 1624, the Dutch landed on the island of Taiwan, first expelling the Spaniards here, and then competing with the Zheng Zhilong clique on the island for spheres of influence. In 1627, the Dutch colonists and the Zheng Zhilong clique went to war, but the Netherlands was defeated.
But in the long run, the pirate group was not a rival to the Dutch colonists. In order to protect himself, Zheng Zhilong accelerated the recruitment of immigrants in Fujian on the one hand and enriched his own strength, and on the other hand, he also sought cooperation with the Ming Dynasty. In 1628, Zheng Zhilong announced his surrender to the Ming Dynasty and "cut off Yikou and suppress the thieves" for the Ming Dynasty, so the Ming Dynasty named him "Five Tigers Guerrilla General". After that, Zheng Zhilong began to develop his own forces in the Fujian area, and the army grew to 30,000 people and more than a thousand ships.
With the official signboard, Zheng Zhilong's power developed very rapidly, and he had the strength to compete with the Dutch colonists. In 1633, Zheng Zhilong defeated the Dutch East India Company fleet at the Battle of Kinmen, and thus monopolized trade on the southeast coast.
However, although Zheng Zhilong accepted the ming dynasty canonization, he was always only a pirate force, and now that he has developed Taiwan, he has transformed himself into a local separatist force. After the fall of the Ming Dynasty, the Zheng Zhilong clique held Zhu Yujian hostage in an attempt to blackmail Tianzi to order the princes. After the Qing soldiers arrived, Zheng Zhilong surrendered to the Qing Dynasty. Zheng Zhilong's son Zheng Chenggong did the true colors of the local warlords to the bottom, and under the banner of reviving the Ming Dynasty, he constantly attacked the Southern Ming army and robbed the cities, grain and grass of the Southern Ming to develop himself.
It was also after the Qing Dynasty entered the customs that Zheng Zhilong's forces neglected the management of Taiwan, so that the entire island of Taiwan was occupied by the Dutch. In 1661, Zheng Chenggong was no longer able to gain a foothold on the mainland, so he led his army to defeat the Netherlands and recover the island of Taiwan. Zheng Chenggong was known as a national hero for recovering the island of Taiwan. However, he himself was a local warlord. The ministry edition of the high school history textbook once referred to Zheng Chenggong as "The Southern Ming General Zheng Chenggong", but the revised version removed the word Nanming and only mentioned "Zheng Chenggong", which was an accurate judgment of Zheng Chenggong's attributes.
In short, the Ming Dynasty let the Dutch introduce the island of Taiwan, the purpose of which was to attack the Pirate Group of Taiwan to the Dutch colonies, while it sat and watched the sandpiper-clam dispute. The ming dynasty's goal was indeed achieved, and eventually forced the Zheng clique to surrender to the Ming Dynasty. However, this also led to the island of Taiwan once becoming a Dutch colony. Fortunately, Zheng Chenggong was unable to gain a foothold on the mainland and regained the island of Taiwan, otherwise the history of the island would be difficult to write. In 276 years of the Ming Dynasty, it never had the idea of occupying the island of Taiwan on its own, which is also very rare in history.