This is not the same as the Sri Lankans in Taiwan thread in the Living in Taiwan forum.
There is a family with a rare last name Shi (世) living in Huatan, Zhanghua county. So rare in fact, that they are the only family with that last name in Taiwan. Their family tomb stone has the words 錫蘭 (Sri Lanka) written as their Ancestral land, which they didn’t really know why.
Their family arrived to Taiwan from Tsuân-tsiu (泉州) and that’s all they knew about their origin. It wasn’t until when travel to China opened in the late 80s that one of the Shi family members visited Tsuân-tsiu and ran into someone with the compound family name of Xushi (許世). With the help of Xushi, she learned the true origin of their last name.
When Ming dynasty navigator Zheng He visited the Kotte kingdom of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on his first voyage in 1406, Zheng picked up that he wasn’t welcomed and King Vira Alakeshvara was secretly planning to kill him and loot his fleet, so Zheng left in a hurry. Zheng also bypassed Sri Lanka all together on his second voyage.
During that time there had been lots of reports on hostile Kotte actions towards Ming merchant ships. So by the time Zheng set sail for the third time and reached Sri Lanka in 1411, he was prepared to intervene. On the other side, King Vira Alakeshvara decided to finish of what he couldn’t last time, and pretended to welcome Zheng and invited him to visit the palace, while sending troops to cutoff Zheng from his fleet anchored at Colombo and attempted to board the ships and loot.
After realizing he couldn’t get back to his ships, Zheng marched 2,000 soldiers straight to the Kotte capital, laid siege, and sacked it. They did it so swiftly that King Alakeshvara didn’t have time to flee and was captured. When the troops King Alakeshvara sent to attack the fleet learned of this, they rushed back to rescue their king, but Zheng dug in to the fortification and forced the Kotte troops to siege their own capital, which ended in a total rout for the Sinhalese.
Zheng then appointed Parakramabahu VI to the throne as per local official’s suggestions, and took King Alakeshvara as hostage back to Beijing. King Alakeshvara was eventually set free 3 years later.
Meanwhile the newly appointed King Parakramabahu VI was on very friendly terms with the Ming dynasty and sent multiple envoys to China. Including one where he sent his son, whose name was phonetically transcribed as 世利巴交喇惹 (Sè-lī-pa-ka-lá-ra) or 昔利把交剌惹 to China in 1459.
Unfortunately, King Parakramabahu VI died on 1467 and a civil war broke out in Kotte over succession and 世利巴交喇惹 elected not to return to Sri Lanka as a result and remained in Tsuân-tsiu instead. Emperor Yingzong appointed him to be an official translator at the Foreign Ministry (四夷館通事), and he married an Arabian wife.
Sometime in the Qing era, one of the Shi clan migrated to Taiwan. So the Shi family in Taiwan is a direct 19th or 20th generation descendant of the Kotte prince 世利巴交喇惹.
