Yingge Rock's cannon story was in print by 1871, without Koxinga

The New Taipei City registry lists Yingge Rock, on the hills north of the town, as a cultural landscape, designated in 2006.⁶⁷ Its description says the rock’s miasma stopped Koxinga’s army and that his cannon broke the rock’s neck.³ The Yingge Ceramics Museum, in a journal of 2021, tells the tale with two birds and then calls it invented, because on the historical record Koxinga’s army never reached the north.⁴⁸ The earliest text we found with the cannon in it is a gazetteer of 1871, and it does not use Koxinga’s name.¹²

Rock in one text, birds in another

The registry puts the whole monster in the rock.³ The museum’s journal, in a short tour of the Yingge area, gives the town’s name a source: a rock shaped like a parrot on the slope of the northern hills.⁹¹⁰⁷ In its telling two strange birds were making trouble, and Koxinga’s army, lost in their miasma, was ordered to shoot them down with cannon.¹¹⁴ The shot broke the neck of one bird, which fell and became Yingge Rock.⁴ The other fell across the river at Sanxia and became Yuanshan.⁴

The New Taipei City Library’s record of a photograph of the town office from the Showa years of Japanese rule calls the same rock eagle-shaped.¹²

The texts line up like this, oldest first.

A tablet that spells it another way

A tablet beside a rock cave at the site is dated 1 October 1927, according to the New Taipei City Library’s record of a photograph taken in 1955.¹⁶ The library quotes its inscription, which names the Yingge village head, Huang Chunqing, as its author.¹⁶

The tablet wants the name written 鸚哥, parrot, and not 鶯歌.¹⁶ A Japanese photo album of 1918 had explained the name another way: the rock looks like a hawk standing, it was once called 鷹哥石, and 鶯 stands for the Taiwanese word for hawk, not for the warbler that the character means in Japan.¹⁵ The gazetteer of 1871 has a third spelling, 鶯哥, and calls the place a mountain.¹ The settlement below it was 鶯歌石莊 in the late Qing, then 鶯歌石庄 and, from 1905, 鶯歌石區 under Japanese rule, until 鶯歌庄 replaced it in 1920.¹⁷ The library’s record also mentions the Koxinga folk tale beside the tablet, but the inscription as quoted says nothing of him or of a cannon.¹¹¹⁶

What the 1871 gazetteer says

The Danshui tingzhi, the gazetteer of the Tamsui sub-prefecture, was compiled under the sub-prefect Chen Peigui, and its prefaces are dated 1871.¹³ In its chapter on historic sites, two short entries follow one another.¹¹⁴

The entry calls the place a mountain, not a rock, and does not say it was a bird.¹ The mountain section of the same book lists both peaks and says they face each other.¹⁸ We take 鶯哥山 to be the rock, because the names match, the museum places Yingge in Sanjiaoyong in 1871, and the tale is the same.¹⁹ That identification is ours.

The firing is by 偽鄭, the false Zheng.¹ That is the gazetteer’s name for the Zheng regime, and it uses it 14 times, while the name 鄭成功 never appears in the sixteen juan as transcribed.² Lian Heng says Koxinga was called 國姓, “the imperial surname”, after the Longwu emperor gave him the surname Zhu.²⁰ The gazetteer knows the byname and uses it twice, for a well and for a fish.² The first entry opens its story with 相傳, “tradition says”; the second has no such word and offers the broken peak as a mark that can still be seen.¹¹⁴

The compilers tied other stories to the false Zheng.²¹ At Jade Mountain, tradition says he led foot soldiers to the foot of the range and stopped at a stream so poisonous that many who waded it died.²¹ At Guoxing’s Well near Dajia, tradition says he camped his troops where the water was full of miasma, struck the ground with his sword and found a spring.²¹ Miasma or poison runs through all three, and Lian Heng writes of Tamsui and Keelung in the Spanish period the same way, as wild places where settlers sickened and died of it.²²

The book was disputed from the start. Lian Heng says Chen had Yang Jun of Houguan rewrite the draft that Lin Hao had compiled for the previous sub-prefect, and that Lin Hao answered with a critique, the Dingmiu.²³ In it Lin Hao says Chen’s team took the Jilong islet of Penghu for the Keelung of the Tamsui district, and calls the author ignorant of history.²⁴ That is a different entry, and the transcription of the critique has no remark on Yingge or Yuan Mountain.²⁵

Which Zheng

Koxinga died on Taiwan in 1662, aged 39.²⁶ His son Zheng Jing succeeded him, and the regime lasted until 1683.²⁷²⁸ The sources we read put Zheng forces in the far north after his death. The 1747 gazetteer of Taiwan says that in 1666 Zheng Jing sent the commander Huang An against the Dutch who had rebuilt the fort at Keelung, and that in 1681 the commander He You was ordered to garrison Keelung.²⁹ Lian Heng says He You built a wall at Tamsui in 1683.³⁰ He also says that in 1683 a party under the supervisor Chen Fu was sent to Tamsui to look for gold, while the Tamsui gazetteer itself puts a gold party in 1682 under a Chen Tinghui, and elsewhere names Chen Fu without a date.³¹

So “the false Zheng” in 1871 could mean any of the regime’s armies, or Koxinga; the entry does not say, and that reading is ours. The museum’s journal answers flatly that no army of his reached the north.⁸ We found no source that puts Koxinga himself in the north, and none that rules it out beyond the museum’s statement.

Gaps on either side of 1871

The Taiwan gazetteers of 1685, 1717 and 1747 have no place called Yingge Mountain or Yuan Mountain in the transcriptions we searched.⁵ After the gazetteer, the next dated telling we found is in that 1918 album, beside its photograph of the rock.¹⁵ Oral tradition, it says, has the rock breathing poison mist until the army of the Zheng, 鄭氏の軍, lost its way there about two hundred years earlier and broke its neck with cannon, and the clouds cleared at once.¹⁵ Like the gazetteer, it gives no first name.¹⁵ The tablet of 1927 has no cannon in it.¹⁶ The first text we could open that puts the cannon in Koxinga’s hands is the registry’s, written for a designation of 2006.³⁶ No text we opened from between 1871 and 2006 names Koxinga as the one who fired, so we cannot date the moment Koxinga’s name entered it.