A Prince's House, a Goddess's Temple: How the Qing Took Taiwan in 1683

The stele stands against a white wall inside the Grand Matsu Temple in Tainan, its characters picked out in red, a small wooden placard beside it giving the date: 1685, the twenty-fourth year of Kangxi. It is the oldest Qing stone inscription in Taiwan, and it is a victory monument. The man who put it there had spent twenty years getting to that wall.

Shi Lang 施琅 had once served the Zheng family. He fell out with Koxinga, lost his father and brother to the quarrel, defected to the Qing, and then argued for two decades that Taiwan had to be taken. In July 1683 he finally got his fleet — around 300 warships and 20,000 men out of Tongshan in Fujian. On 16 and 17 July he destroyed Liu Guoxuan's navy in the waters off Penghu. Penghu was the door. Once it fell, Taiwan had no defence at all.

Zheng Keshuang 鄭克塽, twelve years old and the third and last ruler of the Kingdom of Tungning, sent his offer of surrender in early September. Shi Lang landed on Taiwan on 3 October 1683 and took the formal capitulation. Zhu Shugui 朱術桂, the Prince of Ningjing and the last Ming claimant on the island, did not wait for him. He gave away his land, wrote a farewell poem, and hanged himself in his mansion at Sakam. Five women of his household died first; their tomb is still a temple on the other side of Tainan.

Shi Lang moved into the dead prince's house. Then he did something shrewder than occupying it: he memorialised the throne to turn it into a temple to Mazu, the sea goddess he credited with getting his fleet across the strait, and Kangxi raised her title from Heavenly Consort to Empress of Heaven. The Ming prince's palace became the first state-sponsored Mazu temple in Taiwan. The stele went up the following year to explain, in the government's own words, what had happened and why.

What it does not say is that the court nearly gave the island back. Kangxi's advisers argued Taiwan was a mudflat beyond the sea and not worth a garrison; the emperor considered evacuating the Chinese population and abandoning it entirely. Shi Lang's counter-argument — that whoever held Taiwan held the Fujian coast — won. In 1684 the island became Taiwan Prefecture, an appendage of Fujian province, and stayed one for two hundred and one years.

Look at the crown of the stone before you try to read the body of it. The coiled dragons across the top are the standard grammar of an imperial-grade inscription: this is not a temple's donor list, it is the state writing on rock. Two centuries of Qing administration follow from the argument carved into this slab, and the building it stands in was somebody's house first.

Where: Grand Matsu Temple 祀典大天后宮, Lane 227, Section 2, Yongfu Road, West Central District, Tainan — a short walk from Chihkan Tower. Free entry. The stele is mounted on an interior wall.

Cover photo: 施琅平臺紀略碑記 by Pbdragonwang, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.