The Jiajing wokou raids caused extensive damage to the coast of China in the 16th century, during the reign of the Jiajing Emperor (r. 1521–67) in the Ming dynasty. The term "wokou" originally referred to Japanese pirates who crossed the sea and raided Korea and China; however, by the mid-Ming, the wokou consisted of multinational crewmen that included the Japanese and the Portuguese, but a great majority of them were Chinese instead. Mid-Ming wokou activity began to pose a serious problem in the 1540s, reached its peak in 1555, and subsided by 1567, with the extent of the destruction spreading across the coastal regions of Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong.
Historical background
Maritime trade in 16th century China
Up until the establishment of the Ming dynasty in 1368, China had had a great maritime trading tradition that extended the Chinese trading network by sea all the way into the Indian Ocean. In 1371, the Ming founder Hongwu Emperor implemented the "maritime prohibitions" (haijin), banning all private sea trade in order to clear the seas of all piratical elements. Under the prohibition, all maritime trade were to be conducted through the officially sanctioned "tribute trade", which was a kind of trade where foreign tributary states presented tributes to the Chinese court, acknowledged themselves as vassals of the Ming, and received gifts as a sign of imperial favour. This trade, in addition to being humiliating to the foreigners involved (Sinocentrism), was inadequate to the demands of the markets, both domestic and foreign, since the Ming had strict rules about how often a vassal could come to present tribute. Still, the tribute trade, being the only legal form of trade with China, was extremely profitable. Hence many states, including Japan were willing to subject themselves to the rituals of the Chinese tributary system.
The Japanese were assigned the Zhejiang city of Ningbo as their port of entry into China, and were allowed to present tribute once every 10 years. These Japanese missions to Ming China continued up to Japan's Sengoku period, when the hold of the Ashikaga shogunate waned and power became divided by the warring regional daimyōs. These internecine feuds reached China in the Ningbo incident of 1523, when traders from the Ōuchi clan fought with those of the Hosokawa clan in Ningbo for the right to present tribute, which spiralled out of hand and resulted in the widespread pillage of Ningbo. When a Ming fleet appeared onto the scene to restore peace, the fleet was defeated instead and the Japanese traders got away. After this episode, the Ming banned all Japanese from trading in Ningbo, who would have to join the pirates on offshore islands in order to trade Chinese goods.
In May 1513, Portuguese explorers reached the coast of Guangdong, bringing the Columbian Exchange into China. This created a new global demand for Chinese products, while European firearms and New World crops were introduced to China for the first time. However, the potential of the China market was limited by the Ming's insistence of the maritime prohibitions. Early Portuguese attempts at trade negotiations were unsuccessful, and the Portuguese presence at the mouth of the Pearl River was driven off in the Battle of Tunmen of 1521 and the Battle of Xicaowan of 1522. The Portuguese, like the Japanese, were hence forced to conduct their trade illegally on the islands along the coast of China, away from the reach of the Ming authorities.
Thus, both the Japanese and the Portuguese were left out of the tributary trade by the first decades of the 16th century. By the middle of the century though, Japan and Portugal became the premier suppliers of silver in East Asia by bringing in silver from mines such as the Iwami Ginzan in Japan and the Cerro de Potosí in Bolivia. Silver was the lifeblood of the Ming Chinese economy, but the Ming government placed many restrictions on mining due to fears that the bullion would pool into private hands. Even without the restrictions, China's silver veins were too small and located too far away in the southwest from the commercialized and populous coastal provinces to keep up with the huge demand. This situation made unofficial dealings with foreigners very profitable and enticing for Chinese merchants, despite the risks and illegality of their trade.
The "wokou"
The term "wokou" literally means "dwarf pirates", with "wo" (倭; "dwarf") being the Classical Chinese pejorative for the Japanese people. The term was first used to refer to Japanese invaders on the Gwanggaeto Stele in 414 AD, and was reused in 1223 when Japanese pirates raided the Korean coast. These pirates eventually broadened their area of operations to the coast of China, and were active throughout East Asian coasts up to the establishment of the Ming dynasty in China. However, by the 16th century, the pirates nominally called the "wokou" were mostly not Japanese, but actually Chinese. According to the History of Ming and other contemporary Chinese records, only thirty percent of the 16th century wokou were Japanese, while seventy percent were ethnic Chinese. Moreover, the Chinese played the leading role in these later wokou raids, with the Japanese and those of other nationalities being associates and hired hands.
The Chinese people at the forefront of the wokou activities were merchants whose trade overseas was deemed illegal by the Ming government. Since the Ming government prohibited people from heading out to sea and forbid those who had from returning home, a large number of Chinese maritime merchants were forced to establish themselves on offshore islands or even overseas trading ports. Among the traders stationed overseas, of note were Xu Dong (許棟) and his brothers who began their fortunes in Malacca and Patani; and Wang Zhi and Xu Hai who based themselves in the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. The Chinese traders in Kyushu had deep ties with the local daimyo, who provided patronage and refuge for the merchant-pirates in return for a share of their profits. For example, Xu Hai's right-hand man was described to be the younger brother of the Satsuma lord Shimazu Takahisa, while his associate Chen Dong (陳東) held a high position in the Satsuma court as the chief of Shimazu's secretariat.
To protect their cargo from rival pirate gangs and the Ming navy, the merchant-pirates armed themselves with Portuguese guns and cannons and hired Japanese fighters. Despite the Ming being introduced to Portuguese firearms in the 1520s, these firearms were mostly deployed on the northern frontier and not on the coast. Furthermore, Wang Zhi helped the Portuguese traders reach Tanegashima in 1543, where the Portuguese introduced the arquebus to the Japanese for the first time. This armed the Japanese, who already had a reputation for being fearsome swordsmen, with firearms more advanced than what the Chinese coastal defense forces had at the time. The Ming aboriginal troops were said to be especially afraid of the pirates' arquebuses.
Coastal defence and politics
The blunder of the Ming navy during the 1523 Ningbo incident highlighted the decline of Chinese naval capabilities since the cessation of the famed treasure voyages in 1433. The early Ming had a system of coastal patrols and island bases for the defence of the Chinese coast, but these were withdrawn as the Ming foreign policy turned from proactive to passive during the reign of the Zhengtong Emperor (r. 1435–49). The official reason for the withdrawal was that these forward bases in the sea were a heavy burden on the civilians who had to supply them, and that the Ming army could focus on defence after the invaders had landed. Since then, warships were no longer used to patrol the coast and remained anchored in ports, where they rotted away from neglect. As an extreme example, the Dengzhou naval garrison in Shandong had a fleet of 100 warships in its heyday, but by the beginning of the 16th century, only 3 ships remained after years of retrenchment and disrepair. By the start of the wokou crisis in the 1540s, there were only 68 government warships on the coast of Fujian, while funds allotted for ship construction were apparently embezzled. Furthermore, naval garrisons along the coast were unwilling to build and accommodate for new ships since each ship needed people and resources for its maintenance. Ships confiscated from the pirates and redistributed to the naval garrisons ended up being stolen, exchanged, or scuttled.
In addition to the deterioration of the warships, decades of peace along the coast had relegated the military to a low importance, and garrisons became severely understaffed due to desertion. By the early 1550s these garrisons were reduced to roughly one third of their full complements of soldiers. During the wokou crisis, defenders had to augment their forces with various militia and mercenary groups like gentry guards, local ruffians, and even Shaolin monks. The Ming government, being committed to the northern frontier defence against the Mongols, could only spare reinforcements to the coast in the form of bandit fighters, ex-pirates, and aboriginal "wolf troops" (狼兵, langbing) led by government-recognized tribal headmen. These assorted troops, euphemistically called "guest troops" (客兵, kebing), were generally ineffective in battle, and were often a burden to the local populace.
The general dilapidation of the military was a symptom of the confused administration of the coastal provinces. The Ming provincial administration was split into three parallel hierarchies: one for civil, one for military, and one for surveillance. This deliberately fragmented structure was meant to provide checks against regionalism and the rise of powerful officials at the provincial level; however, it also made for an ineffective response during emergencies. Beginning in the middle of the 15th century, grand coordinators (xunfu) and supreme commanders (zongdu) were sent to the provinces undergoing military emergencies to override the existing provincial hierarchies. In the wokou-stricken provinces, however, a grand coordinator had not been appointed until 1547 due to the interference of the coastal gentry who were involved with the illegal foreign trade.
Doing away with foreign pirates is easy, but doing away with Chinese pirates is difficult. Doing away with Chinese pirates along the coast is still easy, but doing away with Chinese pirates in gowns and caps is particularly difficult.
— Zhu Wan, from History of Ming vol. 205, "Biography of Zhu Wan"
The coastal gentry, well-represented in the Ming court due to the abundance of successful imperial examination candidates from among their numbers, compounded their wealth by sponsoring the smugglers with seagoing vessels and profiteered by reselling the smuggled goods at a higher value, sometimes delaying or even refusing to pay the smugglers. They were able to keep the smugglers' dissatisfaction in check by cajolery, marriage alliances, and threatening to summon the Ming military on the smugglers. On the other hand, they protected themselves by hiring mercenaries as guards and bribing the local officials to look the other way. Zhu Wan, who became the Grand Coordinator of Zhejiang in 1547, called these gentry members "pirates in gowns and caps" (衣冠之盜), and identified them as the root cause of the coastal disturbances. In the 1540s, this gentry-led equilibrium began to fall apart as the dissatisfied smugglers went rogue from their gentry sponsors. The Veritable Records of the Ming points to a raid in 1547 as the start of the wokou troubles, where smugglers and foreigners burned down the Xie family estate in Yuyao after the prominent Xie clan (謝氏) refused to pay their debts to the smugglers and threatened to inform the government.
Shuangyu, the illegal entrepôt
After their ouster from the coastal ports of China, Japanese and Portuguese traders collaborated with illegal smugglers on island ports along the Zhejiang and Fujian coast. Among these ports, Shuangyu on Liuheng Island (六橫島) off the coast of Ningbo emerged as the primary emporium of clandestine trade.