Koxinga Shrine

The Koxinga Shrine — officially the Zheng Chenggong Ancestral Shrine — commemorates the Ming loyalist general who expelled the Dutch from Taiwan in 1662 and established a short-lived independent Chinese kingdom on the island. The current shrine building was constructed in 1875 by the Japanese colonial authorities, who emphasised Koxinga's partly Japanese heritage (his mother was Japanese) as a way of asserting cultural connections between Japan and Taiwan. The shrine later became a site of Taiwanese identity after the Japanese departure in 1945.

The shrine is set in a tranquil garden compound with traditional Chinese-Japanese hybrid architecture — an unusual combination that reflects the site's complicated history. The attached Museum of Taiwan History houses exhibits on Koxinga's campaigns and the early period of Chinese settlement on the island. The shrine draws visitors from across Taiwan, and the annual commemorations of Koxinga's victory over the Dutch are observed here with ceremony and significance.

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A story
Koxinga — Zheng Chenggong — is one of the most politically contested figures in Chinese history. To Taiwanese, he is the man who expelled the Dutch colonisers and established an independent Chinese government on the island. To mainland China, he is a patriotic Ming loyalist who refused to accept Qing rule. To the Japanese colonial government, which built the current shrine in 1875, he was a hero of half-Japanese descent — his mother was Japanese — useful for legitimising their own ambitions in the region. The same person, worshipped for entirely different reasons.

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