Zheng Chenggong, whose real name was Zheng Sen, because the Longwu Emperor gave the country the surname "Zhu" and the name "Success", so it got this name, and people often respected him as "Guo surname Ye".
Although he was a loyal and filial uncle of the Southern Ming Longwu regime, in fact, Emperor Longwu was only a puppet of Zheng Zhilong's "princes who threatened the heavens", and the Longwu regime was completely parasitic on the shell of Zheng Zhilong's maritime merchant clique.
However, Zheng Zhilong was not satisfied with this feeling of "one person under one person", and under the inducement of the Qing Dynasty university Shi Hong Chengzu, Zheng Zhilong went north with almost all his military strength to surrender to the Qing, which directly led to the collapse of the Longwu regime.
Therefore, when Zheng Chenggong and his father En broke with each other and continued to raise the banner of the Ming Dynasty in Kinmen, the Ming Dynasty was actually without a monarch, and Emperor Longwu had been captured and killed in Tingzhou in August 1646.
However, Zheng Chenggong, who was deeply influenced by the Confucian idea of loyalty to the king and serving the country, called himself "Zhongxiao Bo recruited the surname of the great general to commit crimes", and formed an army with Confucian students, from more than 90 people at the beginning of the army, to several thousand people, and then to 200,000 troops during the Northern Expedition to Nanjing in 1658, all of which reflected Zheng Chenggong's excellent ability to govern the army and the hatred of the country that always surged in his heart.
After two years of embarrassing situation in which there was a monarch but no monarch reigned, Zheng Chenggong learned of Zhu Yourong's ascension to the throne in Zhaoqing in September 1648 (at that time he had been on the throne for 3 years) and excitedly said, "I have a king". In the final history of the Southern Ming Dynasty, Li Dingguo, the King of Jin in the southwest, and Zheng Chenggong, the King of Yanping in the southeast, became the last afterglow of the Ming Dynasty.
In addition to persisting in resisting the Qing Dynasty, another of Zheng Chenggong's great achievements was to recover Taiwan, which had been lost to Heyi for 38 years.
The lost territory of the Ming Dynasty, recovered by the Ming generals, can also be regarded as the recovery of the dignity of the Ming Dynasty, the last Han Dynasty.
However, for Zheng's successful recovery of Taiwan, there are a lot of details missing in the historical records, and the exact time and place of his recovery of Taiwan, and even the sound and smile of this national hero are not accurately recorded, so that the portrait of Zheng Chenggong that has been passed down in later generations has different shapes.
On the one hand, this is because the Qing Dynasty fixed the history of the Ming Dynasty in 1644 after fixing the Central Plains, and did not recognize Hongguang, Longwu, Yongli, etc. as the continuation of the Ming Dynasty; on the other hand, it was because the Zheng Army belonged to a military organization and could not have a record of historical officials like a stable regime.
It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the Taiwanese historian Jiang Shusheng discovered a diary written by the Dutchman Philip Mei in the Netherlands ("Mei's Diary") that recorded the specific situation of Zheng Chenggong's army leading the army to cross the sea from April 30, 1661 to February 9, 1662, and the description of Zheng Chenggong's own appearance, so that we can glimpse the true image of this heroic figure 300 years later, and learn the accurate time and place of Zheng Chenggong's army: April 30, 1661, 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m., Tainan City southwest of the Kaiyuan Temple area.
However, Mei Shi was only a Dutch land surveyor, and the content he could see and record was very limited, and more details of the war, including the portrayal of Zheng Chenggong's army and the prejudgment of The military movements of The Zheng army in Batavia before the war, were unknown.
At the end of 2009, when the Taiwanese scholar Xu Zongmao was on a business trip in Japan, he accidentally found a 17th-century Dutch ancient book in a cultural relics store, which contained a large number of Taiwanese illustrations, but could not be bought back due to the high price.
In early 2010, the Fujian-Taiwan Museum, which received the news, immediately decided to purchase this rare ancient book, and after translation, it was learned that the author of this ancient book was the Dutch governor in Taiwan, Who was defeated by Zheng Chenggong that year.
After being defeated by Zheng Chenggong's army, he was imprisoned by the Dutch East India Company for up to 7 years for the crime of "surrendering by disobedience", in order to defend himself, He yi quoted various official documents, letters, council records and other original materials to write the book "Forgotten Formosa" (also known as "Neglected Formosa"), which recorded in detail many details before and after Zheng successfully recovered Taiwan, which is the most detailed of the same kind, which supplements the deficiencies of China's historical materials, and what is more valuable is that there are a large number of copper plate illustrations in the book.
"Forgotten Formosa" was written in 1675, because it is a private work, it was not published in large quantities, and it can be completely preserved for 335 years and has traveled to the Netherlands, Japan, and finally to China, which is very valuable.
The book details zheng chenggong's soldiers holding swords in both hands, wearing iron armor, bare arms and thighs, and using 28 cannons when attacking the city of Zeelandia, and even clearly records that Zheng Chenggong had two teams of black soldiers (not recorded in Chinese historical records), causing great damage to the Dutch.
In 2013, the Cultural Relics Appraisal Team of the Fujian Provincial Cultural Relics Management Committee identified the Forgotten Formosa as a national first-class cultural relic.