Son of China, Sun of China: Interview With Lord of Formosa’s Joyce Bergvelt

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The interview transcript below has been edited lightly for clarity and length.

What drew you to the story of Koxinga and inspired you to write a historical novel about him in particular?


It wasn’t so much his story that I wanted to tell, but also that of the Dutch on Formosa. The two stories are inextricably entwined. It has always intrigued me that Koxinga’s lifetime coincided exactly with the time the Dutch colonized the island, so the decision to make his life story the main thread in the book came almost naturally.  


How did you go about finding a publisher for your book?


As the original, English manuscript was finished back in 2010, it was hard to find a British/U.S. publisher while living in Holland, not having any connections in the industry. At my agent’s advice, I then translated it into Dutch, and then managed to find a publisher who specialized in books on the Dutch colonies and historical novels (Uitgeverij Conserve). It was a perfect match.


My Dutch publisher wasn’t doing much with the English manuscript, so I took it upon myself to find a publisher. I was contacted by Michael Cannings at Camphor Press, an independent publisher specialized in books on Taiwan and China. Did I have a publisher yet? And so it goes. I was very lucky. Camphor Press has done an amazing job on the book. 


Will a Chinese-language version ever be published?


Prior to the book’s release, I was already in touch with a few Taiwan publishers who were all interested after reading the synopsis and a sample (Chinese) translation. However, there was a storm of publicity in Taiwan when the book came out, resulting in three other major publishing houses inquiring after the translation rights as well. It’s early days yet….but yes, it’s probably a matter of time.

The most important (non-fiction) book that was written on the Dutch period in recent years is Tonio Andrade’s Lost Colony (2011). Yet you don’t mention the book in your list of sources. Can you tell us why?


I finished my manuscript in 2010, so Lost Colony hadn’t been published yet, and wasn’t available to me at the time, but his first book How Taiwan Became Chinese (2007) was. However, when the Dutch translation of Lost Colony (De Val van Formosa) came out in 2015, I made use of the brilliant reconstructed maps to add more geographical detail to Taoyuan Bay. We also had permission to use the – if slightly adjusted – maps in Lord of Formosa. The Dutch version is listed as a source. 



Lost Colony tells the same story, but then in non-fiction, and the Dutch translation appeared around the same time Lord of Formosa was published. Did you find that the novel had to compete with Tonio Andrade’s book?


On the contrary: they actually seemed to reinforce each other. They are two very different books. Lost Colony is non-fiction, written by an academic historian from a broader, world history point of view, with a strong focus on the military history. 
Lord of Formosa, although closely based on events, is a fictionalized account of the events, told through the eyes of the [real] characters. What the two have in common, is that they both tell the same story.

[The Dutch version of Andrade’s book was] first planned to be released in May 2015, but was delayed until October of that year, in the same week as my book was set to appear. Quite odd, really.
 When we found out, the publishers got in touch, the translator (Tristan Mostert) contacted me, and for a while we actually contemplated joining forces for the book presentation. We didn’t do that in the end, but we did go to each other’s book launches. Since then we really cooperated together, sharing information, promoting each other’s books, referring to them in interviews, etc. People often buy Andrade’s book after they have read mine, and vice versa.

You have lived in Japan, Taiwan and China, the three places where the story of Lord of Formosa takes place. To what extent do you think this has helped you write this book?


To be honest, I don’t think I could have written this book if I hadn’t lived in these countries. 


You lived in Taiwan during the early eighties, under martial law. Did that affect you and your family in any way, and do you remember what that was like?


I remember it well, as I was eighteen/nineteen. I don’t think it truly affected us as expats, as long as we toed the line. I suspect that most expats in Taiwan weren’t aware of what was going on beneath the surface, and by this, I mean how the KMT government dealt with opposition or anyone critical of the president and his regime. 
One of the things that comes to mind is how the main roads were cleared of traffic and the traffic lights controlled whenever President Chiang Ching-kuo travelled through. That, and the ever-present military police at airports and other public places. 
There was also a rumor going around that the amahs who worked in the houses of the senior executives within the expat community (like my father: Philips Electronics was the biggest foreign investor in Taiwan at that time) were instructed to spy on their employers for the government. I wondered about that at the time, but looking back with what I know now, it wouldn’t surprise me. 



You spent a year in Beijing, China, for your studies. Can you tell us something about your time there? When was this?


I was there for the academic year ‘85/86 as a mandatory part of the degree course I was doing at Durham University (U.K.) in Chinese Studies. We lived on campus at Renmin (Peoples’) University. It was tough in the beginning, as the living conditions were fairly primitive. The heating system didn’t go on until November 15th, even if it was already freezing outside. Hot water was limited: there was a one-hour hot-water slot in the morning, and a two-hour slot in the evening. The only vegetables that were available to us in the winter were cabbage, carrots, and more cabbage, so we often went to the nearby Friendship Hotel if we could afford it. The women all had to bring a year’s supply of tampons, as these weren’t available there back then. And there was just one telephone for the eighty-odd people in the building. 


When the winter passed, things became easier, having become friends with many others in the building: Japanese, Russians, Americans, and the odd French or Scandinavian. Roommates became friends for life. And yes, we also made friends with the Chinese students, mostly through sports. I well remember the clear blue skies of winter [and] the spectacular thunderstorms of summer. Our Chinese improved in leaps and bounds, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.  


Having lived in both Taiwan and China, what would you say are the similarities and differences between these countries?


For one, they (largely) share a culture, and an official language, Mandarin. The difference is that many conservative (Confucian) values were actively discouraged in the post-Mao China of the 1980’s, while in Taiwan, these have always been very much alive, and cherished. I can only speak for the China I knew back in those days, but people in the cities were rude, suspicious and unmotivated, while in Taiwan, I have always found the people to be hardworking, enterprising, friendly and welcoming towards foreigners. But I blame this on the system, not necessarily on the people. 


What is your personal opinion of Koxinga – what kind of person, man and leader was he?


I’m of the opinion that he was an intelligent, learned and cultured man who was curious as to how things worked outside China, but with the same superstitions as any other man of his time. He was a poet, a scholar, and a man who had a strong bond with his Japanese mother. But as things go, he changed. He had to, due to the expectations his father had of him, and he had to adjust to the war that was forced upon him and his family.

Wartime shaped him: he excelled in the martial arts and he eventually became a very capable military leader. The personal losses he suffered as well as his father’s ultimate betrayal changed him: it brought out a hard, even cruel side in him, compounded by the bouts of madness that he suffered as a result of the disease that affected him. That same hard side in him was likely to be one of the contributing factors that turned him into a successful military leader.

I think he was a man caught in the momentum of history: a country overrun by the Manchus, the fall of the great Ming dynasty. He didn’t go [to Formosa] out of some heroic ideal to expel the Dutch colonists who just happened to be there. He honestly believed that he would be able to get the Dutch to leave without a fight.


He had his women, yes, and he most likely forced himself upon unwilling servants [ed: he raped them]…yet this should be seen through the lens of the time – the seventeenth century – and from the perspective of a very patriarchal society in which women were regarded as inferior to men.    

(From Camphor Press)

What are your views on the Dutch and Koxinga, what they claimed, how and why they fought and how things turned out? (Basically, are you on a “side?”)


In some of the reviews on the book, the criticism I get is that it is not clear for readers who they should feel sympathy for, who they should ‘root’ for. I take this as a compliment, as this is exactly what I hoped to achieve: that the readers decide this for themselves.

I purposely didn’t take sides, because it just isn’t that simple. 
The Dutch colonized Formosa as the VOC (the Dutch East India Company) had the sovereign powers to wage war or colonize land if it were in the interest of commerce. The VOC was a commercial enterprise. Coyett, the last VOC governor of Formosa, had a job to do and found himself in a tough spot: he was pressured by the company to obtain free trade with China at all cost, while having to deal with the threat that Koxinga posed, as well as a local population that rebelled against the company. The council in the Netherlands didn’t have a clue what was happening in the East, the reports were always dated by about seven months at least, and in Batavia they were also removed from the scene.

At the same time I sympathize with Koxinga. He was fiercely loyal to the Ming and its emperor, and he became obsessively more so after his father’s defection to the enemy. But there he lost his sense of reality: he simply could not accept that the Ming Dynasty had truly come to an end, and that he was fighting for a lost cause. He, too, had a stubborn streak. 
He had no real desire to wage war on the Dutch, as the VOC had contributed considerably to the wealth of his family enterprise. It was the fact that they were already there, they were in his way.

So, to answer your question: I didn’t take sides while writing the book, and I won’t do so now.  



When reading the book, I felt that the older Koxinga got, the further we were pushed from his innermost thoughts, and he was discussed by external narrators rather than an inner monologue more and more. Was this intentional on your part? If so, why?


This wasn’t intentional, but I guess it’s a natural consequence of the story’s progression. The book consists of three parts. Part One primarily focuses on Koxinga’s life up to his early twenties. Part Two focuses more on the Dutch on Formosa, while Part Three brings both stories together. New characters are introduced in the second part, and the role that these others played (He Ting-bin, Frederic Coyett, Reverend Antonius Hambroek) became increasingly important. 



How did you decide what historical events to include and which to leave out (for example, leaving out Koxinga’s repeated use of high tides to pull off unlikely naval successes, or using fire-boats in unexpected ways, but including, say, the Chinese laborer rebellion that preceded Koxinga’s invasion by a few years)? 


I suppose I could have included [these examples], but I don’t remember if these details were available to me at the time of writing. Originally, I did include a lot more naval battles, skirmishes, endless negotiations, but I scrapped a good deal (about 150 pages’ worth!) for fear of making readers battle-weary. I wanted to focus more on the people instead. I chose to write the story from the human perspective: the drama, the tragedy on both sides.

Your book has a number of female characters and manages to bring out female voices in what is otherwise a very male story. Was this intentional? If so, how did you go about doing it, and how successfully do you think you achieved it?


Yes, this was intentional. Let’s be honest: Lord of Formosa tells the life story of a great military Chinese leader as main theme. Yet there were women in his life, and I have tried to bring this to the fore. His mother, the Japanese Matsu Tagawa, was a major character, especially in Part One. The other women had smaller parts, but they have a significant role nonetheless. There was Koxinga’s paternal grandmother, Lady Zheng, and Koxinga’s wife, Deng Cui-ying. On the Dutch side, Coyett had a wife, as did Reverend Antonius Hambroek. One of the reverend’s daughters plays quite an important part at the end. 
But it wouldn’t have made sense to give these women a bigger part in the book: not only because there was very little material available on them, but also because not all of them played active roles in the events. If I had chosen for the story to be told through their eyes, it would have become an entirely different book.

Was I successful? That’s up to the reader to decide. One of my (Dutch) agent’s suggestions was: “Turn it more into a women’s book.” I’m glad I didn’t follow that advice.


What are your views on how Taiwan’s history has impacted its evolution in terms of culture, ethnic identity, overall identity or even politics? (Any or all of these) And what do you think the future holds for Taiwan?  

I think it’s Taiwan’s geographical location that has determined its history. The size of the island, the distance between itself and the mainland, and that it was hundreds of miles removed from any other nation. That distance has given it a distinct, unique identity, which is only now slowly revealing itself after so many years of being run by the Chinese Nationalists. Because of its location, so conveniently halfway between Batavia (Jakarta) and Deshima (the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki, Japan), the Dutch claimed it as their own. And that same distance from the Chinese mainland is the reason that it fell back into isolation and state of neglect, even after the Chinese officially claimed it – for the first time – well after the Dutch left.

The Chinese weren’t interested in the island: it was for this reason it was ceded as “small change” to the Japanese in a deal in 1895. They regarded it as a backwater, a hinterland beyond its natural borders. And as a last resort to turn to for the Chinese Nationalist Army in 1949.


Koxinga radically erased all vestiges of the Dutch presence, but many Taiwanese still pride themselves in having Dutch blood running through their veins, as well as [indigenous Austronesian] roots. In that sense alone, history cannot be denied: Taiwan has a history of colonization interspersed with neglect, and more often than not, it had to fend for itself. It has made Taiwan what it is today.

China’s claim that Taiwan has ‘always been a part of China’ has no historical foundation whatsoever. 
What do I think the future holds for Taiwan? I wish I knew, but I cannot say. I can only hope that China learns to co-exist with Taiwan as its neighbor in a peaceful way, and that it will restrain itself. Perhaps this seventy-year-old stalemate can be resolved in a satisfactory way for all parties concerned within the next decade, once and for all.

For better or worse, Koxinga’s invasion is held up by many as a sign of Taiwan’s ‘historical’ ties to China. What do you think of this?


I think that’s an example of history taken out of context and rewritten in order to suit the interests of a new regime. And obviously it would be in the interests of China to propagate this. Koxinga was given heroic status by the KMT. Yet Koxinga and his men were not heroes who liberated Formosa from the Dutch, they just drove them away so that they could take over the island for themselves. And they didn’t even have the intention to stay, either: they planned to reconquer the mainland so that they could return to the Mother country. 


Besides, even prior to Koxinga’s coming to Taiwan, there had been an exodus of Chinese migrants who came to the island to flee from the invading Manchus. Many others went further south: to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, resulting in large Chinese communities there, as well. So, you could easily say that these countries have ‘historical ties’ to China, just as Taiwan does.

Territories held by Koxinga in red, and his sphere of influence in pink. (By Ifatson on Wikicommons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

In Taiwan and parts of China, Koxinga still holds a prime place in the historical narrative. What – if anything – do the Dutch think of their former colony and the loss of it (or their history of colonialism in Asia in general)? 


Quite honestly, this whole episode in Dutch colonial history is hardly known in the Netherlands. It’s barely mentioned in Dutch history textbooks. The fairly recent name change from Formosa to Taiwan probably didn’t help either.


Losing Formosa cost the VOC an absolute fortune at the time. The whole idea of losing it to the ‘army of rabble led by the son of a Chinese pirate’ was embarrassing, also because of their own neglect. It didn’t fit in with the notion of the successful, glorious Dutch Golden Age, and was best forgotten.

The thirty-eight years that the VOC spent on Formosa did not have much impact on Dutch history as a whole, although you could argue that, as a trading base, it played a vital, pivotal role in bringing goods such as porcelain, silks and tea from China to the Dutch Republic and Europe.
 The general consensus today among the Dutch on colonialism is that it is, and should be, a thing of the past. Yet countless Dutch families that lived in Indonesia for generations who were expelled after its independence, mixed-blood among them, still have strong roots there.

Just imagine that the Ming hadn’t fallen, or that Koxinga had not seen the need to go to Formosa. One would suppose that Formosa might still have been a Dutch colony until its independence after WWII, just as was the case with Indonesia. It’s an interesting thought.

How has the reception of the book been? Have there been any differences in how it’s been received among different groups of readers (say, those in the Netherlands, those reading in English in Taiwan, those in other countries?)


In Holland the book was well received, both by literary critics and readers alike, and it’s currently in its third print run. It was nominated for several awards and was longlisted for the Hebban Debut Prize 2016.
 The advantage of having a specialized publisher such as Camphor Press, is that they ensure that the book becomes available in the region. The English publication was very well received by the press in Taiwan; the reviews have been excellent, and there was a storm of publicity following its publication. 


The difference? The Dutch are both embarrassed and shocked to discover that ‘we’ once colonized Taiwan for nearly forty years, because most people here have absolutely no idea, historians among them. Some people are even annoyed. “Why didn’t I know any of this?!” 
They thank me for enlightening them and introducing them to this unknown period of our colonial history.


Following all the publicity, I have been overwhelmed by the positive reactions from Taiwan. The KMT government strongly discouraged Taiwanese from learning about their own history, making them learn Chinese history instead. Many people from Taiwan contacted me personally to thank me for writing this book, saying that it was about time someone wrote about their real history. I also get messages from people who were quite moved by the book, actually crying about the fact that they knew so very little about their own history, and that it took a foreigner to enlighten them.

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Bergvelt’s recounting of the ignorance many Dutch people have of their country’s history in Taiwan were in my mind not long ago. I’d mentioned that concrete sun perched atop a bulky gray gate at the entrance to Tainan’s Koxinga shrine to a Taiwanese friend. I had thought that most Taiwanese would be aware not only of the connection, but of this specific demarcation of it. After all, the attempt to establish a Koxinga-KMT narrative runs like a ley line through Taiwanese political history. I was wrong: this friend not only did not know the symbol was there, but didn’t believe me when I insisted it was. It took a journey through Google Maps to prove it, after which he just looked at me.

“I had no idea,” he said. “That’s horrible!” (He’s no fan of the KMT.)

“That’s why it’s important to know your history. You may not like it – it’s not always pleasant – but it happened, and people will try to twist it to fit their preferred narrative. That’s not history – it impacts us today, and you can only fight that if you really know the story.”

And then I recommended Lord of Formosa to him.

(Featured photo by Diego Ruschel, on Wikicommons)