Matsu Islands Fujian (Fukien) China

Zheng Zhilong, born in Fujian, the son of a mid-level financial official for the Quanzhou government, had once, when he was a child, wanted to eat a longan fruit.

Finding a tree, he threw a small stone at the tree in the hope of knocking some fruit loose.

The mayor of Quanzhou, surnamed Tsai, was passing by, and his hat was knocked off by the stone Zheng had thrown.

Due to the child's age, the mayor forgave Zheng and released him, but Zheng's father never forgave him for embarrassing the family, and had forced him out of the family home at the age of seventeen.

Studying business under his uncle in Macau at the age of eighteen, he had been baptized as a Catholic in Macao, receiving the Christian name Nicholas Gaspard.

He later worked for Li Dan, a Chinese businessman in Nagasaki, Japan, where Zheng married Tagawa Matsu, a local woman.

When Dutch forces took over the Pescadores archipelago off the Taiwan Strait in 1622, Li Dan had sent Zheng to Pescadores to work with the Dutch as a translator.

The Dutch, wishing to control and monopolize commerce routes to Japan, collaborate with Chinese pirates; Zheng was one of the collaborators, engaging in robberies along coastal China.

After Lee died, Zheng acquired his fleet of ships in 1623.

Zheng's son, Zheng Chenggong, was born in Nagasaki in 1624.

Zheng relocated his enterprise to Taiwan in the same year, due to the feudal nature of Japan during the Edo period.

He had built ten outposts in the island's southwestern coastal region, between Tainan and Chiayi, but had been evicted shortly after when the Dutch arrived on the island.

Zheng had in 1625 founded Shibazhi, a pirate organization of eighteen well-known Chinese pirates.

Members include Shi Dashan, the father of Shi Lang, the future commander-in-chief of the Manchu fleets that will one day destroy the power of the Zheng family and conquer the short-lived Kingdom of Tungning (now Taiwan) founded by Zheng Chenggong, better known to history as Koxinga.

The Shibazhi have begun to challenge the Ming fleet and have won a series of victories.

The Ming Dynasty's southern fleet had surrendered to Shibazhi in 1628, and Zheng Zhilong receives the appointment of major general.

Tsai, the mayor who had forgiven Zheng for de-hatting him so many years ago, comes to Zheng and asks for a position in the Ming navy; Zheng grants this request.

After joining the Ming navy, Zheng and his wife had resettled on an island off the coast of Fujian, where he operates a large armed pirate fleet of over eight hundred ships along the coast from Japan to Vietnam.

Appointed by the Chinese Imperial family as "Admiral of the Coastal Seas", he defeats Dutch East India Company vessels in the Gulf of Kinmen on October 22, 1633.

Zheng will continue to serve the Ming dynasty after the fall of Beijing in June 1644.