Sons of the Sea Kings

In 1661, a Chinese warlord did what every European power believed impossible: he took Taiwan from the Dutch.

For nine months, the guns of Fort Zeelandia held the most modern fortress in the East Indies. The Dutch East India Company had a proverb for men like the one massing on the sandbar outside: three volleys, and the Chinese will run. They were forty years out of date. The man at the gate was Koxinga — son of a smuggler-admiral, heir to a fleet that ruled the China seas — and when the fort finally fell, he founded the first Chinese kingdom ever built on Taiwanese soil.

But Koxinga's war is only the heart of a larger story.

Sons of the Sea Kings spans three generations of the most formidable maritime dynasty the region has ever known. It begins with Iquan, the boy who knelt before a Japanese shogun, traded the stolen charts of the Ming Empire for a dagger and a promise, and rose to burn a Dutch fleet to the waterline. It ends with his grandson Zheng Jing, who inherits a kingdom caught between a hostile China and a watchful Japan — and must climb alone to the snows of the Jade Mountain to decide which way it will turn.

Grounded in the Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese records of the age — a captive surveyor's diary, the chronicles of Koxinga's own officers, the archives of the Tokugawa court — this is historical fiction that reads like a thriller and remembers like an epic.

Empires rise and fall on who controls the bays. This family knew it before anyone.