CHENGGONG,ZHENG. Carioti,Patrizia. — Zheng Chenggong.

Napoli, Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1995. 190 pp. 25 col. ills. Softcover. 8vo. (Istituto universitario orientale, Dipartimento di studi asiatici, 45).Text in italian. - This academic study, written by Italian professor and historian Patrizia Carioti, offers an in-depth historical analysis of Zheng Chenggong (better known in the West as Koxinga) and his family's trading empire in the 17th century. The book describes how the Zheng family (first father Zheng Zhilong and later son Zheng Chenggong) built a gigantic, centrally controlled pirate and trading organization in the East China Sea. Carioti analyzes how this organization gradually became so powerful and structured that it functioned as an informal, independent state dominating the maritime trade routes between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. It covers, among other things, Zheng Chenggong's role as a general of the remaining Ming loyalists, who fiercely opposed the conquest of China by the Manchus (the Qing dynasty). The study specifically highlights how the Zhengs used their economic power in the Japanese port city of Nagasaki as political leverage to solicit military support from the Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate. It forms the historical background to the famous military campaign in which Koxinga, in 1662, forcibly drove the Dutch East India Company (VOC) out of Taiwan (Formosa) after a months-long siege.