Tonio Andrade

On his book Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West

Cover Interview of December 08, 2011

A close-up

The book begins with an execution. Frederik Coyet, the leader of the Dutch colony that Koxinga captured, has been blamed for the lost colony, even though it wasn’t his fault. His reflections (he survives his execution day) set up the main questions of the book.

Coyet is a proud and cantankerous man, just one of a number of fascinating characters in the book, such as a whiny Dutch admiral with a speech defect, a foolhardy Chinese farmer, a couple of enterprising African boys, and a whole cast of pirates, rogues, and hustlers, including Koxinga’s father, a good looking but rather impoverished young man who made himself into the most powerful pirate in the world, far more impressive than the measly Caribbean buccaneers we hear so much about. The most fascinating character is Koxinga himself: proud, charismatic, stern, and unstable. He tended to get mad and chop off heads. He died in a fit of insanity.

All of these characters are drawn right from the historical sources. In fact, the sources I had available—sources that few historians have ever used—were remarkably rich. I tried to draw out from them the revealing personal details so that the book would be fun to read.

My goal was to talk about big issues in history through vivid narrative, and I hope that the book is read by people who might not ordinarily think of dipping into the 17^th century.

history / biography / globalization / asia / china / warfare / netherlands / hanson victor davis / koxinga / coyet frederik /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009