Dongshi (東石; lit. “east stone”) Township: When the Ming loyalists under Koxinga (鄭成功) still holding out against the 1644 conquest of China by the Mongolian Qing relocated to Taiwan ousting the Dutch in 1661, one prominant participant was Liu Ying (柳櫻).
Liu was from Quanzhou Prefecture (泉州府) in Fujian Province (福建), and when his descendents developed coastal areas north of Tainan (in today’s Chiayi County), they looked to their ancestral homeland for labourers and investors to join them in fishing and oyster cultivation. Among these were two brothers, Huang Sheng (黃生) and Huang Sheng (黃聖) [another account has unrelated men surnamed Huang and Wu 吳)], from Dongshi (東石) in Quanzhou’s Jinjiang County (晉江縣), who called their new home Dongshi.(Despite the strong importance given by Chinese to the place of their ancestry, this habit of re-using hometown names, so frequently adopted by European migrants to the Americas and elsewhere (c.f. Sandiaojiao), seems less common in Chinese immigration to Taiwan.)
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