King of Ducks

Tsai-ya ducks have been farmed in Taiwan ever since Han Chinese came to Taiwan to settle in the seventeenth century. Duck farmers used to raise their birds near small streams, which are everywhere in subtropical Taiwan, whose annual precipitation ranks among the world's highest. All duck farmers, present and past, are just common people trying to make a living, except Zhu Yigui (朱一貴) nicknamed the King of Ducks.

Zhu was a member of the Tryad (三合會), a secret society formed by Koxinga, who drove the Dutch out of Taiwan in 1672 and started Sinicizing the island. Koxinga's ultimate goal, which wasn't achieved of course, was to defeat the Manchu and restore Han Chinese Ming rule. The King of Ducks had the same family name as the imperial cognomen of the Ming emperors. That gave him the dubious right to be a pretender to the Ming throne. As a matter of fact, Koxinga signed all his decrees as Zhu Chenggong (朱成功) instead of Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功), for he was granted the imperial surname of Zhu (朱). Koxinga, incidentally, is a transliteration of Guo-sheng-ya in Mandarin and Koksingya in Hoklo (國姓爺), which literally means the Lord of the Imperial Surname.

The King of Ducks was born in present-day Neimen (內門) in the southern Taiwan county of Kaohsiung in 1778. He was a very successful duck farm owner. A hybrid breed of tufan or tohuan (土番) was also raised on his farm for meat. It is a cross of tsai-ya and the Muscovite, which is much larger and whose duck broods. The hybrid birds grow fast and large enough to be slaughtered in about three months. They do not reproduce, however.

Legend has it that his neighbors wondered why his flock of hybrid birds never dwindled no matter how many of them were slaughtered. One curious neighbor tried to snoop. He tailed Zhu Yigui one day. Not knowing someone was behind him, Zhu Yigui drove his ducks to a stream, called Gangshan-xi (岡山溪), which is not too far away from his home village of Neimen. The stream is a tributary of the Erzhong-xi (二重溪). He let the birds swim and feed in the stream and took a rest under a huge banyan tree, whose thick leaves overhung a small bend. He sat on a stone and catnapped. It was summer. A snooze was comfortable under the cool shade of the tree.

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