The child of a millionaire Chinese smuggler-admiral and a samurai woman from Japan, Coxinga is raised in luxury and symbolically adopted by a fugitive Ming pretender. When the Manchu invaders reach south China, his wily father switches sides, but Coxinga stays doggedly loyal to a doomed dynasty, becoming the leader of the Ming resistance in his twenties. Includes the strange case of the “boiling river dragon”, reporting to an empty throne in the “zombie Ming dynasty”, the nature of a maritime “ghost nation” and the Manchus’ devastating “wall around the sea.”

Over at the Subject to Change podcast, our two-part piece on the fall of the Ming dynasty gets to my beloved Zheng Chenggong, a.k.a. Koxinga, a.k.a. Quaesingus, a.k.a. “the arch-pyrate Coxinga, etc etc. He was the subject of my first-ever real history book, Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty.