Leiden Files II - The Black Guard

Hey friends — happy Friday. 🛕

In May 1661, on a strip of sand outside Fort Zeelandia, a man raised a Dutch musket and aimed it at a Dutch soldier.

He had loaded that kind of musket many times before. He had been one of the Dutch fort's slaves.

Now he was Koxinga's.

This is the second issue of Leiden Files - and the harder one to write, because the men I'm trying to introduce don't appear in the histories you grew up with. Not in the Taiwanese textbooks. Not in the Dutch museums. Not even in the Black diaspora studies that have so carefully mapped the Atlantic world.

They appear in margins. Two lines in a Dutch officer's journal. A passing sentence in a Spanish friar's letter. A footnote in a 2024 academic paper.

So let's start where they actually stood. On a beach in Tainan. With borrowed guns and unfinished freedom.

Some of them came from East Africa. Some from Mozambique. Some from the Portuguese slaving routes that ran through Goa, through Malacca, through Manila - every port that the European trading companies used to move human cargo from one ocean to another.

By 1661, the Black diaspora had already crossed two oceans. It is still mostly told as an Atlantic story. But there was a Pacific chapter too. There was an Indian Ocean chapter. And one of those chapters ended on a sandbar called Tayouan, in front of a Dutch fort whose ruins you can still walk through today (now called Anping Fort / 安平古堡).

The Dutch East India Company brought enslaved Africans to Taiwan to build, to load ships, to fight. By the late 1650s there were several hundred of them inside Fort Zeelandia.

When Koxinga's fleet appeared in the bay in April 1661 - 400 ships, 25,000 men those Africans were watching from the walls.

To understand why Koxinga welcomed them, you have to look at his father.

Zheng Zhilong (鄭芝龍) was born in Nan'an, Fujian, in 1604. At seventeen, after some kind of family rupture nobody remembers cleanly, he sailed to Macau to live with his uncle. Macau was already a Portuguese colony, already Catholic, already a hub for trade between Europe, Africa, and Asia.

He was baptized there. Nicholas Gaspard. He learned Portuguese - and even Lusitanian, the secret Portuguese-Jewish dialect of the trading houses. By his twenties he was running fleets between Macau, Manila, Hirado, and Anping (安平, his Fujian hometown).

He also kept an African honor guard. Recruited through the Portuguese. Men he could trust because they owed him their freedom and not their birth.

His son grew up watching this.

Koxinga (鄭成功) was born in Hirado, Japan, in 1624. Japanese mother, Catholic Portuguese-speaking pirate-merchant father, Chinese homeland, Latin namesake (Coxinga, from Kok-sèng-iâ 國姓爺 - "Lord of the Imperial Surname"). His childhood was already a five-empire negotiation.

When he built his own army, he copied his father. He recruited Africans. He gave them Dutch muskets - captured or bought - and put them under the command of a Chinese officer who, the Dutch noted with surprise, preferred to dress in European clothing.

In the Dutch records, they appear as swartjes - "Black-boys." The word is colonial. The military reality was anything but small.

Two full companies (連) of African musketeers fought for Koxinga during the siege of Fort Zeelandia. That's roughly 200-300 men, trained in Dutch firing drills, armed with the same muskets the Dutch garrison used. Some had been recruited through Macau. Many had been enslaved by the Dutch themselves - and during those nine months of siege, more crossed over.

Frederick Coyett, the Swedish-Dutch governor watching his colony fall around him, would later write in his self-defense memoir:

These caused much harm.

It is the closest a colonial administrator gets to admitting that his own slaves outshot him.

On February 1, 1662, Coyett signed the surrender. The Dutch East India Company's thirty-eight-year experiment in Taiwan was over. Four months later, Koxinga himself was dead — fever, madness, syphilis, take your pick of seventeenth-century explanations.

And then the Black Guard disappeared from the record.

Not because the men disappeared. They lived on under Koxinga's son Zheng Jing, married into Taiwanese communities, raised children whose great-great-grandchildren may still walk through Tainan today without knowing.

They disappeared because three different historical traditions had reasons not to remember them.

For Chinese nationalist history, Koxinga had to be a pure-blooded Han hero pushing the Western barbarians off Chinese soil. African musketeers complicated the story.

For Dutch colonial history, the image of one's own enslaved people picking up one's own weapons and shooting one's own soldiers - this is not the kind of detail you put on a museum plaque in The Hague.

For Western academic history, the Black diaspora has been studied with extraordinary care in the Atlantic world. The Pacific and Indian Ocean chapters - where Africans served as sailors, soldiers, interpreters, and freed mercenaries from Goa to Nagasaki - are still a footnote.

It was not until 2024 that a paper appeared with the title "The Black Gunners of Formosa," trying to give these men a name and a place in Taiwan's founding story.

Three empires wrote the history of 1661 Taiwan.
None of them wrote about the men who pulled the triggers.
Until now.

I grew up hearing the 1661 story the way most Taiwanese kids do — Koxinga the hero, the Dutch the colonizers, and the island somewhere in between waiting to be saved.

What I didn't hear, until much later, was that the men closest to Koxinga in those final battles - the men whose muskets ended the Dutch project - had crossed two oceans to get there, spoke half a dozen languages between them, and had every reason to hate every flag they could see.

The story we tell of Taiwan's beginnings is, almost always, a story about who came to the island. It is rarely a story about who came with the people who came. There is a whole second tier of history that lives in those margins. Africans in Fort Zeelandia. Japanese mothers in Hirado. Filipino sailors on Spanish galleons. Indigenous Sirayan villagers in their own land, watching all of this arrive.

The Dutch saw locusts and remembered Egypt. (Vol.II.)
The Africans loaded their muskets and remembered, presumably, everything.

The next four issues of Leiden Files are going to spend some time in those margins.

- Ricky

🛕 Next Friday - Leiden Files III. The Dutch came for trade, not conquest. And the trade was deerskin - a million pieces a year, going to Japan. Then the deer began to run out.

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🌏 Alley-Tested, Story-Driven.
⚡ Island-Vibe, Deep-Connection.
✨ May the FORMOSA be with you.