Hualing Nieh Engle was born in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, in 1925. At a young age, she experienced the hardships of the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1948, she graduated from the National Central University in Nanking with a degree in Western Languages.
In 1624, the Dutch East India Company constructed a fortress named Fort Oranje on the western side of the Taijiang Inland Sea in Tayouan (now Tainan’s Anping area) in southern Taiwan. Four years later, the fortress was later renamed Fort Zeelandia, which was the most important trading post for the VOC in the 17th-century East Asia.