Koxinga Zheng Chenggong

Zheng Chenggong was a renowned Ming loyalist general resisting Qing conquest during the late Ming dynasty; the Southern Ming Yongli Emperor enfeoffed him Prince of Yanping. In 1661, he led a naval expedition across the Taiwan Strait, defeated the Dutch colonial forces, and reclaimed Taiwan. There, he instructed the people in land reclamation, established schools, and built temples—laying the foundational pillars for Taiwan’s development. He died the following year, and the local military and civilian population, overcome with grief, began worshipping him as the Sage King Who Opened Taiwan. During the Qing dynasty, temples dedicated to Zheng Chenggong proliferated throughout Taiwan, with the Yanping Prince Temple in Tainan serving as the central site of veneration. In his ancestral homeland of Shijing, Nan’an County, Fujian Province, the Zheng Chenggong Temple and Ancestral Temple stand in spiritual resonance with those in Taiwan. The cult of the Sage King Who Opened Taiwan functions simultaneously as a protective deity worship rooted in Taiwan’s immigrant society and as a shared historical memory and spiritual bond uniting both sides of the Taiwan Strait; annual rituals regularly draw kinship groups from across the strait to participate in joint ceremonies.