The Surrender of Fort Zeelandia, February 1662

Nine months is a long time to hold a fort you know is not going to be relieved.

Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功 — Koxinga to the Dutch — came through the Lu'ermen channel on 30 April 1661 with a fleet the garrison could not count and roughly 25,000 men. He was not an invader in search of new land so much as a Ming loyalist commander who had just lost the mainland to the Qing and needed a base with rice, salt and a harbour. Fort Provintia, the smaller inland post at Sakam, capitulated within days. Zeelandia, out on the sandbar with Governor Frederick Coyett inside, did not.

The siege settled into stalemate through the summer and autumn. A relief squadron arrived from Batavia and achieved nothing. What broke the deadlock was a defector: a sergeant in Dutch service named Hans Jurgen Radis went over to the Zheng camp and pointed out what the besiegers had missed — the Utrecht redoubt on the high ground behind the fort, which commanded Zeelandia's walls. Koxinga's gunners took it in January 1662 and began firing down into the compound. Coyett signed terms on 1 February. On 9 February the surviving Dutch marched out with their flags flying, their personal property, and passage to Batavia.

Koxinga renamed the place Anping, moved into the inner fort, and was dead within five months, aged 37. The kingdom his family ran from here lasted twenty-one years before the Qing took it. Coyett fared no better: Batavia tried him for losing the colony, sentenced him to death, commuted it to exile on a small island in the Banda group, and released him years later after his family petitioned the Prince of Orange.

The image most people have of this siege comes from one man who was standing in it. Albrecht Herport was a Swiss painter who signed on as a VOC soldier, survived Zeelandia, went home to Bern, and published his account in 1669 with engraved plates — the fort on its sandbar, the Zheng lines, the ships burning in the channel. It is the closest thing to a photograph anyone has of the event, and the reason we know what the fort actually looked like from the sea.

Where: Anping Old Fort 安平古堡, 82 Guosheng Road, Anping District, Tainan — the site of Fort Zeelandia. The Utrecht redoubt stood on the rise now occupied by the surrounding Anping streets and has left no visible trace.

Cover image: engraving of Fort Zeelandia from Albrecht Herport's Eine Kurtze Ost-Indianische Reiß-Beschreibung (1669), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.