Introduction: Who was Koxinga? I frst encountered Koxinga during my earliest visit to Taiwan, in 1993. Passing through Tainan, I stumbled across the city’s ‘Cultural Artifacts Exhibition Hall’ (台南市民族文物館). The foreign visitor unable, as I then was, to read Chinese, could divine from paintings and minimal English text the message that Koxinga was a Chinese warrior famous for expelling Dutch colonialists and ‘recover- ing’ Taiwan for China. Only years later did I learn that this Chinese hero had a Japanese mother; later still, that she hailed from my current home island, Kyushu. That transformation of my own crude understanding of Koxinga corresponds to changing Taiwanese interpretations of his legacy since the 1990s. This phe- nomenon is of signifcance for comprehending both the evolving discourse of Taiwanese distinctiveness, and cross-Strait divergence in visions of the island’s past and future. Like an earlier work on the same theme, the current chapter is thus ‘a study of how the perception and manipulation of historical symbols change in response to new historical circumstances’ (Croizier 1977: Preface). Writing in the era of Maoism in China and martial law on Taiwan, the American historian Ralph Croizier noted that ‘Koxinga remains a hero to all modern Chinese’ (1977: 86). In the more than four decades since, ‘historical circumstances’ have immeasurably altered, with implications for ofcial and popular discourse on ‘Chineseness’, ‘Taiwaneseness’, and Koxinga’s signifcance thereto. The time has thus come to reassess the symbolism of Koxinga’s heroism, and its manipulation by rival politi- cal actors in a post-Cold War East Asia riven by resurgent nationalism. Who, then, was Koxinga? Born in 1624 in Hirado, in present-day Nagasaki Prefecture, Zheng Sen (to use his infant name) was the son of Tagawa Matsu, a local woman, and Zheng Zhilong, known to Portuguese and Dutch contemporaries 9 THREE FACES OF AN ASIAN HERO: COMMEMORATING KOXINGA IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA, TAIWAN, AND JAPAN Edward Vickers AQ: Please advise whether replacing the en-dash with a colon to match the structure of other titles in the volume is acceptable?