Career
She was a Nagasaki Japanese who lived most of her life in the coastal town of Hirado, then later migrated to China. Tagawa Matsu was married to Zheng Zhilong (鄭芝龍), a Hoklo from Nan"an, Fujian, China who frequently traded with the Japanese in Nagasaki. The stone beside which she gave birth still exists today as the Koxinga Child Birth Stone Tablet (鄭成功兒誕石碑), which is 80-cm tall and 3-metre wide, and submerged during high tides.
In 1630, she was reunited with Koxinga by moving to Quanzhou, Fujian.
In 1646, when Koxinga was away, the city was invaded by the Manchus. Koxinga, upon hearing of the invasion, immediately returned to Quanzhou, only to discover that his mother had hanged herself in a refusal to surrender to the Manchus.
Some people say she was raped and killed by the Manchus. After this, Koxinga developed a growing and powerful antagonism with the Qing Empire.
In the Zheng family genealogy, Tagawa Matsu is recorded under the Sinicized name of Weng-shi.
There are a small amount of Chinese sources mistaking Tagawa Matsu as Weng Yihuang"s blood daughter, with a Japanese mother surnamed Tagawa. This is unlikely, as this would necessitate either Weng Yihuang moving to Japan (but he was an ironsmith, neither a sailor nor a trader) or the migration of the Tagawa women back and forth between the two nations (but travelling of women was restricted). In Koxinga Memorial Temple (鄭成功祠) in Tainan, Taiwan, Tagawa Matsu"s ancestral tablet is placed in a chamber called the Shrine of Queen Dowager Weng (翁太妃祠).
The title "queen dowager" is a posthumous title based on the princeship/kingship of Koxinga (Prince-King of Yanping Prefecture) in the Southern Ming Empire.