The History of China - #241 - Ming 28: Wokou! Wokou! A Pirate's Life For Me!

Episode Date: September 25, 2022

We're rascals and scoundrels, we're villains and knaves. We're devils and black sheep, we're really bad eggs. We're beggars and blighters and ne'er do-well cads, Aye, but we're loved by our mommies and dads, Stand up me hearties, yo ho! Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me! Time Period Covered: ca. 1521-1550 CE Sources Cited: Andrade, Tonio and Xing Hang. “Introduction: The East Asian Maritime Realm in Global History: 1500-1700” in Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1500-1700. Chin, James K. “Merchants, Smugglers, and Pirates: Multinational Clandestine Trade on the South China Coast, 1520-50” in Elusive pirates, pervasive smugglers: violence and clandestine trade in the Greater China Seas. Geiss, James. “The Chia-ching reign, 1522-1566” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part I. Laver, Michael. “Neither Here nor There: Trade, Piracy, and the ‘Space Between’ in Early Modern East Asia” in Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1500-1700. Petrucci, Maria Grazia. “Pirates, Gunpowder, and Christianity in Late Sixteenth-Century Japan” in Elusive pirates, pervasive smugglers: violence and clandestine trade in the Greater China Seas. Wills, John E. “Maritime China from Wang Chih to Shih Lang: Themes In Peripheral History” in From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history.

Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 241. Woe-co, woe-co, a pirate's life for me. Piracy. Noun. Commerce without his folly swaddles. Just as God made it. Ambrose Bierce. Piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers, rather than moral failures on the part of consumers.

Henry Jenkins. Heaven is vast, and the emperor is far away. Old Chinese proverb. Face it, if crime didn't pay, there would be very few criminals. Lawton Lewis Burdock from Shadows of the Empire. Pirate. Was ever there a name, a term, that evokes more romantic, adventurous, and free-spirited imagery? From classic tales like those such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and its peg-legged rogue Long John Silver, to Disney's boat ride-turned-mega-movie franchise Pirates of the Caribbean and the always memorable Jack Sparrow. Captain Jack Sparrow, if you please. Yes, sorry, Captain Jack Sparrow, if you please. Yes, sorry. Captain Jack Sparrow.

To HBO's recent forays into their real-life Blackbeard story with Our Flag Means Death, and even its fantastical turn in Westeros with its recent episodes in House of the Dragon and the war against the Lord Crabbeater and the Stepstones by the Iron Throne, pirates are everywhere in popular culture. And who can blame us? They're inherently romantic. They're awesome. The affable villain, always ready with a quip or a dashing side-long grin or a flintlock pistol when the going gets tough.

Robbing from the rich and giving to the... Well, okay, mostly giving to themselves, but anyways, pass the rum. Well, I probably don't really need to tell you that such a sanitized, romanticized, and dare I say, Disney-fied view of piracy and pirates is, largely, and excuse my Mandarin here, but for lack of a better word, bullshit. A pirate's life for me meant a lot of things, but rarely ever more than just a desperate escape from an even worse situation, and damn the downstream consequences. Whether we're talking about the Caribbean, or the larger Atlantic, or the Indian Ocean, or South Seas, or up and down the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese coasts, piracies brought in all types. Typically, those on the very fringes of society, or even those hanging all the way off the edge already, doing what they could and what they had to, to survive

even as little as another day. And so today we're going to begin what will become a new semi-side project of the show, one a little bit like my earlier Mongolian series, which will ride largely parallel to the regular feed, and likewise will be partly free, where it directly intersects with the main show, but also partly bonus content that will be stored in the treasure chest where X marks the spot over at Patreon. Because you know how it is, a captain's got to make his coin somehow or another. So before casting off and launching in, let me suggest, request, and harangue you once again to consider joining our salty crew over at patreon.com slash thehistoryofchina for as little as $1 per show to get access to all the

primo extra content that I've cobbled together over all these years. That includes all the Mongol episodes, yes, the back halves to all those cliffhangers, and even quite a few episodes you've never heard at all. More than 20 hours in total. And access to all the future bonus episodes and materials yet to come. And I'm really quite excited about this Chinese Pirate series, because, I mean, it's pirates! How could you not be in favor of pirates? I love two things in the world, and they're Mongols and pirates, and so here we are.

Get in on the ground floor. Once again, that is patreon.com slash thehistoryofchina. Okay, so there's my semi-annual pitch to send me money, and now that's said, it's time to cast off. It will probably surprise no one to say that Maritime East Asia is something of a hot-button topic when it comes to international relationships, trade, and territorial claims. The issues that plague the regions today, places like Taiwan, the Diaoyu-slash-Senkaku Islands, Spratly Islands, fishing rights off the coast of the Philippines, the so-called Nine-Dash Line, I mean, pick your poison here, are in reality nothing new. The region, with its huge variety of claims, counterclaims, political rivalries, contested sovereignties, and occasional gun measuring contests between rival navies, is a tale about as old as time.

In fact, one of the most unique aspects of this region of the world is just how historically contentious it is, and seemingly at least, always seems to have been. Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang open their essay on the topic with the quip, quote, An East Asian war is more likely to erupt over the Diaoyu or Spratly Islands than over any land borders, end quote. And it's very hard to argue with such a claim. When did this situation develop into the ever-contentious issue it remains today? Certainly, people from all across the East Asian coastal regions and the Pacific Islands surrounding the mainland have been plying the waves up and down the eastern sea for virtually as long as they've

been capable of creating seafaring vessels, that is to say, for millennia. And yet we can confidently assert that it wasn't until around roughly the year 1500 that this still-ongoing international competition and rivalry really began to kick off. It was that two-century period between about 1500 and 1700 that saw, quote, the velocity and scale of that commerce increase dramatically, end quote. There are a number of powerful reasons for that. Increased Portuguese trade and interference across the region, including Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and Japan. The expansion of the Indian and Javan sea lanes and trade routes, Japanese instability, all of these are powerful motivating factors. But none of these are nearly as consequential as the

ever-present 900-pound gorilla in the bathtub, I'm talking about Ming China, and its policies, actions, and even inactions regarding its own coastal borders. Coastal and maritime East Asia is, in the 16th through 18th centuries, quite unique. No other region in the world was quite like it, and I certainly don't just mean in aesthetic ways. Unlike the Mediterranean, Atlantic, or even Indian Oceanic worlds, the East Asian Pacific was utterly dominated by a singular, seemingly monolithic political entity, the Ming Imperial Court of China. From Andrade and Hong, quote, No other ocean realm has had such a colossus affecting its trade patterns and historical

developments, with the exception of the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire, and possibly the Atlantic world during the late 20th century, the golden age of American influence. But whereas the Roman Empire lasted only a few centuries, and America's influence is new, China's dominance has been a fact for two millennia, end quote. Indeed, historically, when China has done well, the region as a whole has tended to economically boom in turn. And when China has waned, or attempted to severely curtail its engagement with overseas trade specifically, its neighbors and or satellite states have often fallen upon hard times as well. Yet, for all its enormous influence over the Eastern Sea,

for China itself, maritime trade has often taken a backseat or tertiary role in its economic calculus, or even viewed as more of a burden than a boon altogether, something to be tolerated and regulated at times, and something to be avoidedated and regulated at times, and something to be avoided and suppressed altogether at others. The nearly three centuries of Ming rule over China serves as a good example of this inaction. From its very outset, the Ming emperors of the Zhu clan had a tumultuous relationship with seaborne trade. The founder of the Ming himself, Zhu Yuanzhang, aka the Hongwu Emperor, famously envisioned an empire where the people were kept

few and totally immobile, never needing or wanting to venture beyond their respective hometowns. This was, of course, never fully realized, much less realistic. It did, however, serve as a basis for much of the Ming policies going forward throughout the dynastic regime, and then clamped down even more completely during the subsequent Qing. A vision of the seas as a boundary rather than horizon. From Professor John E. Wills, quote, when we compare maritime China to other maritime areas, such as the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the shallow seas joining the Mele Peninsula with the main Indonesian islands, some striking contrasts emerge. In the other areas mentioned, naval power could be used to concentrate wealth in one center at the expense of another,

and the wealth would pay for the fleets. Maritime China, by contrast, offered only meager opportunities for such positive interactions between profit and power. The South China coast confronted an open ocean. To expand on that idea, China had been from its very outset an inland empire, tied to the rivers and plains of its interior from its very beginnings. The ocean as an environment to interact with at all was only pushed up against considerably later, and once having done so, its vastness and emptiness left very little motive to want to interact with it very much, if at all. The ocean was tempestuous, dangerous,

expensive, and untrustworthy. But even more damning than that, quite possibly, it just wasn't particularly profitable. Such neighbors as did exist and were known by the ancient Chinese, from the Korean kingdoms to Japan and Ryukyu to the southern islands, barely registered as a blip on the Chinese radar for much of their respected histories. China had very little interest, usually, in going to any of them, but if they had any interest at all, it was rather in attracting or impelling them to come to China and offer it tribute. The emperor, after all, does not seek out the vassal. As such, with so little to attract the imperial court to really regard the eastern ocean as anything other than a mostly empty expanse of nothingness, and with frequent, one might reasonably say constant, pressures, concerns, and opportunities arising from the

landward northern, western, and southern frontiers, it's pretty easy to see why ministers and emperors both would have simply chosen to not deal with the ocean, and therefore officially seal it off. It just wasn't worth the headache, as far as they were concerned. This is not to try to say that China always attempted to seal off oceanic exploration or trade. Indeed, the Ming and Qing periods, along with the similar isolationist policies of Tokugawa Japan and Choson Korea, stand out as a remarkable, if rather long-lasting, aberration in Chinese history. Throughout the Tang, Song, and Yuan periods, for instance, maritime trade was tolerated, or even encouraged. Even the early Ming, during the reigns of the Hongwu and then Yongle emperors, were interested enough in oceanic exploration and trade to design, construct,

and send out the, you know, largest and most impressive fleet of exploratory ships to have ever been created. So yeah, kind of a big deal that. I may have done a show or seven on them a little while back. But even during the periods of Ming and Qing, with the tighter restrictions on seafaring trade, all such restrictions and bans were only ever as good as the enacting government's ability, and impetus, to actually enforce any such laws or edicts. And suffice it to say, Ming was never particularly great at enforcing its own border control policies, even when it was terribly interested in doing so. I mean, just ask the Mongols all along its northern borders. With the coast being a vastly lesser concern, and oh so far away from the political epicenter that was Beijing, the officials in charge of such tertiary regions could be, and just about as often were, convinced to look the other direction,

in exchange, of course, for a piece of the action. And yes, I know, I know it will shock and alarm many of you that I might be suggesting that some government officials of Imperial China might have been on the take, derelict in their duties, or even outright corrupt. I'll forgive you if you need to clutch your pearls tightly to your chest or make for your nearest available fainting couch. Nevertheless, the evidence is clear. It was known to happen from time to time. So it was that Ming China was, more often than not, a tremendous and hugely lucrative market, ever hungry for overseas goods and commerce, and with just as many eager buyers on the other end, but with little to no official system or dispensation to allow for any such intercourse to take place. Andrade and Hong note that, quote,

stringent attempts at prohibition only moderately impeded a thriving maritime trade, to allow for any such intercourse to take place. Andrade and Hong note that, quote, stringent attempts at prohibition only moderately impeded a thriving maritime trade, in which East Asians, and particularly Chinese, out-competed other groups, including Europeans who had far more state support for their endeavors, end quote. Moreover, the officials along that oceanic border could be generally counted upon to either not care enough to do their jobs, or else far more interested in their personal pocketbooks, such that the cracks in the system that one might slip through were many and cavernous. On the other hand, a lack of any kind of above-board marketplace for maritime trade necessarily meant that all such business was of the gray-to-black variety, the sorts of business with very little oversight and virtually no official service to turn to if things went wrong.

Traders and businessmen were on their own, in a dangerous world, and it paid to have an overabundance of caution. Caution in the form of armed guards, big guns, an eat-or-be-eaten attitude, and a nice, safe place to store your goods, ill-gotten or otherwise, away. Maybe a nice hidden cove on a tiny unpopulated islet somewhere. Or maybe with one of the many regional lords in a cash-strapped and warring region like warring states era Japan. And if that doesn't sound like the perfect ecosystem for widespread piracy, robbery, looting, and violence, well then I don't know what does.

The first period of this era of piracy on the high seas of East Asia is exactly the time period that we've already been covering pretty much the totality of the judging emperor's reign era, from about 1521 to about 1567. This early period constitutes the real Wild West era of the Eastern Sea, if you will forgive the mixed directional metaphor, during which pretty much none of the landlubber authorities could be bothered to even attempt to regulate or stem the tide of pirates, smugglers, black market merchants, and hey, good old-fashioned adventurers who plied the seaways looking to make their fortune and glory, or die trying. In this era, and well beyond, might made right, and it paid to set sail with as big of a crew, and even fleet, as one could reasonably muster. The kind of person who took up such a life was as varied as you could

imagine, and just from about every walk of life as I earlier mentioned. What tended to be a unifying factor in many of these people who chose to walk the line between legality and illegality, and often crossed it, must have been the sense that the government was not there to look out for them, and that they therefore needed to look out for themselves, regardless of what the law might have to say about it. As put oh-so-eloquently by the infamous Welsh swashbuckler Black Bart Roberts about a century and a half later, quote, In an honest service, there's thin commons, low wages, and hard labour. In this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power. And who would not balance creditor on this side,

when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sour look or two at choking? No. A merry life, and a short one, shall be my motto. End quote. Or to put it in a slightly more modern, less broguish tongue, An honest living offers little food, low pay, and hard work.

In piracy, there's plenty to eat, easy living, pleasure, power, and freedom. All in all, this is the far better life for me. After all, the worst they can do is kill me. In other words, I'm here for a good time, not for a long time. The people who formed the pirate crews of the Eastern Seas were in virtually every way similar to their Western counterparts of stage and film fame, or even more widely, the kinds of people who've operated along the fringes of quote-unquote polite society all across time and space.

Quote, Common people who'd been pressed into a life of outlawry for various reasons, and who had no plans or aspirations of their own. When they could make a profit through trade, they engaged in trade, or acted as brokers for other merchants and pirates. When they could not trade, they pillaged. And often, they both traded and pillaged. End quote.

Though the Ming maritime trade ban was ostensibly in effect, very few people across the coasts, official or otherwise, could be bothered to even pretend to care. Where this held particularly true was in China's trade relationship with Japan. The channels and services of the imperial court that were supposed to regulate official trade, aka tribute missions, from Japan were broken down to the point of virtual non-functionality by the early 1500s. This was at least in part because, well, Japan itself was broken down and right in the midst of its nearly 200-year-long civil war, known as the Sengoku Jidai, or the Warring States Period.

The competing warlords of the era were hungry to better their own odds at gaining power in their homeland, and so were very eager indeed to expand trade relations with the vast wealth of China across the sea. And wouldn't you know it, in the 1520s, and especially into the 30s, it just so happened that there was a whole slate of new silver load deposits discovered all across the archipelago, coinciding with the Ming government shifting the basis of its own currency away from bronze and towards silver. This meant that silver prices were higher in China during this period than anywhere else in the entire world. Of course, businessmen, Japanese and Chinese alike, were not going to let a little thing like legality get in the way of this once-in-a-lifetime profit bonanza. This trifecta of

circumstances—the profitability of Japanese silver in China, the Ming government's own unwillingness and inability to meet that demand due to its trade prohibitions, and Japan's own tumultuous, lawless situation—proved to be an almost laboratory-perfect set of conditions for massive and powerful smuggling and piracy rings to develop with near-total impunity. As I mentioned before, the very ambiguity of the seaways themselves between China, Korea, and Japan, and the governance thereof, exacerbated this situation. It led to an oceanic triangle of legal gray areas and effective dead zones that Michael Laver terms the space between. Of this, he writes, quote, This space was characterized by a Chinese empire very much on the wane, a process of state formation

in Japan whose culmination lay decades in the future, and a whole host of international characters who ran the gamut between merchant, pirate, patriot, and smuggler, end quote. Now, when it comes to the topic of violence, here we do tend to differ rather markedly from the Pirates of the Caribbean model of piracy. As is more and more widely known today, many of the most infamous transatlantic pirates and buccaneers were... Oh, let's say that they were very much more into the theatricality of the roles they inhabited than the nitty-gritty details. There's probably none more so, or more infamous, than Edmund Teach,

aka the Dread Pirate Blackbeard. Now, there was a man who was a showman through and through, and to very terrorizing effect. He was purported, for instance, to have lit wicks and incense sticks in his beard before boarding a target ship in order to appear more devilish, although that seems apocryphal. I mean, try lighting a flame on the open ocean if you want to give it a shot. In any event, he carefully stoked his reputation of having absolutely no mercy upon his enemies. And yet, for all that, there are no records of him ever actually killing anyone. Apparently, he wasn't even that good of a fighter in, like, a fistfight.

It was all a lot of showmanship. The old razzle-dazzle. Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and significant figure in modern history. Over 200 years after his death, people are still debating his legacy. He was a man of contradictions, a tyrant and a reformer, a liberator and an oppressor, a revolutionary and a reactionary. His biography reads like a novel, and his influence is almost beyond measure. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast, and every month I delve into the turbulent life and times of one of the greatest characters in history, and explore the world that shaped him in all its glory and tragedy. It's a story of great

battles and campaigns, political intrigue, and massive social and economic change, but it's also a story about people populated with remarkable characters. I hope you'll join me as I examine this fascinating era of history. Find The Age of Napoleon wherever you get your podcasts. Not so much with the pirates of the seas around China. They tended to be a lot less theater-oriented than captains like Teach, and instead relied on good old-fashioned murderous brutality to speak for itself. Again, from Andrade and Hong, Indeed, the pirates of this period formed organizations so large and powerful that officials in Korea and China grew deeply concerned

and began devoting considerable attention to military responses. The pirates deliberately stoked these fears, performing their bloodthirsty roles with gusto. Capitalizing on fear was a business decision. It helped the pirates expand their profitable smuggling and protection industries, end quote. In spite of this fearsome reputation, there were plenty on the mainland and Japan alike who were more than happy to do regular business of every sort with these pirate bands. Military officials, whose job it ostensibly was to suppress these bands of brigands, instead

regularly acted as their go-betweens, fencers, and brokers with contacts and merchants further inland. Wealthy families, particularly in and around the famous shipbuilding cities along the Fujianese coastlines, would finance the construction of ships for these marauders, and often ensure that they were fully stocked and armed with cannons. Even the common people were known to widely sign on to the crews of such fleets in order to make a quick buck, either trading or raiding, before going back to whatever their normal jobs were after a sizable payday. Time and again, when the imperial court heard of such activities, they would make a great big show of trying to stop it.

I mean, no, really, seriously this time, we mean it, guys. In 1529, for example, several regional commanders at the port of Wenzhou were banished into exile when it was found that they were acting as intermediaries with the pirates that they were supposed to be hunting down. Subsequently, the judging emperor issued an order that the local authorities were to immediately seize and destroy any and all large seafaring vessels that those influential families could be using to foster illicit overseas trade. Yet when the officials moved, almost certainly very slowly, perfunctorily, and half-heartedly, to comply with the imperial edicts, the powerful families and businesses resisted and simply refused to comply or cooperate. Quote, overseas trade comprised an important part of many people's

livelihoods, and it was in no one's interest to stop it. End quote. After what one must imagine to have been a comedically lazy shrug of, well, what are you gonna do? We tried, guys. The authorities gave up and went home, thereafter simply ignoring any such edicts coming out of Beijing. Geist writes, quote, in 1532, the governor of Guangdong was recalled because he had failed to eradicate local pirates who had been raiding the coasts for almost a decade. In 1533, the Ministry of War complained that the bans which had been promulgated were not being enforced and that armed fleets were pillaging at will along the coast, end quote. Yet, violent and lawless as they seemed, these pirates were actually well-organized

and capable of functioning in remarkably stable crews, especially considering the multicultural, multi-ethnic makeup of many of them. Though they would come to be derisively called wuokou in Chinese, a distinctly pejorative term consisting of the words huo meaning Japanese and dwarf, and kou meaning bandit, thief, or invader, essentially marking them out as being a foreign other who wanted to steal your stuff. In fact, the vast majority of the 倭 fleets were captained and crewed by Chinese. The History of Ming itself, published during the subsequent Qing Dynasty, cited that upwards of 70% of such piracy during this era was conducted by the

Chinese themselves, with just 30% being Japanese or other. The truth of the matter, however, was that it was always a significant mix. Such crews, though undoubtedly majority Chinese in makeup, were of a remarkably diverse cast. Quote, Portuguese adherents contributed their powerful arquebus muskets, and the bands were rounded out by members from Southeast Asia and the Ryukyu Quote, In fact, the very build of the ships themselves attest to that diversity of makeup. Though mostly constructed in southern China, and built with a more or less standard Fujianese hull and rudder design, as was typified by the treasure fleets of Zheng He, a typical ship from this period often incorporated elements of European style,

especially rigging, far more complex than standard East Asian designs, which themselves relied on the predictability of the seasonal monsoon winds and thus had very little need of the more dynamic sail systems that were common in Europe at the time. In terms of armaments, in addition to the Portuguese arquebusiers, it could as well be armed with imported European cannonry, which even by the 16th century was beginning to pull away from Chinese designs in terms of range and accuracy, and would as well be expected to have aboard a contingent of professional Japanese swordsmen to act as shock troops during a raid or shipboarding action. Quote, the navigator could be Chinese or Portuguese, and he would use Chinese and Portuguese charts with place names marked in Japanese and Chinese. In the cruise quarters,

Japanese, Spaniards, Dutchmen, Chinese, Siamese, and Ryukyens might live side by side. It was like a multicultural dorm, only with scurvy and beatings. Organized and armed as they were, these pirate organizations and fleets quickly grew to be the dominant force across the eastern sea. One pirate captain who'd been plundering the coasts of Zhejiang for years was finally taken captive after an especially bloody battle in the year 1534, and it turned out he had more than 50 ships under his command. The sheer scale of this pirate fleet sent shockwaves through the imperial court way up in Beijing. This problem was worse than the emperor or his ministers had realized, and Jiajing began to take a real interest in this issue. When he learned that the Zhejiang judiciary had sentenced the captain and his crew to exceedingly light punishments,

and though we can only guess as to exactly why, the judges themselves being on the pirates' payroll seems a rather likely explanation, the emperor personally intervened, ordering a review of the case and its sentencing, and then demanding that the entire crew be put to death. The judging Emperor intended this to serve as an object lesson and example to all the other pirates out there, that he was done playing nice, and that piracy was no longer a minor offense that would receive a wrist slap. The pirates got the message, though not quite in the way that the Jiajing emperor had hoped or intended. Rather than call it quits, they organized even more, and, oh yeah, offshored even more of their operations. If Jiajing had been worried about pirate fleets of 50 ships in the 1530s, then hoo boy, he was not going to like the 1540s and beyond. They began to headquarter

themselves off the coasts of Zhejiang, and in particular the Ningbo Prefecture to the north of the province. From these small, unoccupied, isolated, and largely unmapped islands, they had safe harbor and could load and offload supplies, arms, and merchandise, as well as meet with foreign traders of all stripes. Perhaps the oldest and certainly one of the most famous of the pirate free ports of the Ningbo area was known as Shuangyu, meaning Double Island, and which served as a kind of freebooter's paradise and port of call as early as 1524.

By 1539, foreign traders, primarily Portuguese, after their initial attempt to make trade relations with the Ming government at Guangdong had been rebuffed, were being guided to the island in order to conduct their business negotiations with such shady businessmen with exceedingly colorful noms de mer, such as Jinlaozi, or the Golden Elder, Li Guangtao, Baldy Li, and the fearsome Shu Syndicate. The Portuguese called this island Lianpo, apparently managing to rather badly mangle the name of the nearby trading city, Ningbo. As the Shuangyu Freeport continued to grow and prosper in spite of Ming prohibitions, and especially with the introduction of this worrisome foreign element, the imperial government began taking increased action to try to clamp down on this wretched hive of scum and villainy. Nevertheless, these early attempts by the Ming government were effectively repulsed by the very heavily armed syndicate,

thanks in no small part to their new deliveries of portees, arquebuses, and cannons. Shortly thereafter, as of 1544, a new player arrived at the port and added his extensive and lucrative trade network to the Shu Syndicate's operations there. This pirate lord-slash-merchant extraordinaire was named Wang Zhi, and he had amassed a sizable fleet of his own, as well as lucrative contacts from Japan itself. The arrival of the Japanese in 1545 to this potent, yet very unstable mix, in the words of James Geis, quote, "...changed everything. Prior to this, there had been not much private overseas trade with the Japanese. Although Fujini's merchants had established themselves at the port of Hakata as early as 1537,

and small bands of Japanese warriors had raided the coasts of China intermittently since the early 16th century, most contacts took place within the framework of the tribute system, end quote. Now, that tribute system had suited the Japanese well enough right up until about 1496, so about a half century earlier, when the Japanese envoys had wound up killing several Chinese during the course of their return journey from Beijing after having presented tribute. As reprisal, the Ming court had reduced the allowed size of the Japanese embassy from 400 members to just 50, and that was only to happen once every decade. For the subsequent four decades, time and again, the three most powerful families of the Japanese maritime trading industry, known as the Ise, the Hosokawa,

and the Aouchi, had vied to be the ones officially let in for each tribute mission, or if they weren't, elsewise to find other ways around the Chinese embargo against them. Now this frequently turned violent, though since it was most often Japanese on Japanese violence, and often conducted outside of China's proper borders, the Ming court took little interest in such trivialities. Thus, by arriving in Shuangyu, the powerful Japanese business interests had managed to find another way into the country they were so eager to do business with. Thereafter, such private missions became common to and from Japan from Shuangyu, and thereafter, southern China beyond. And the fleets continued

to grow comparably in size, as well as in violence. Quote, In many instances, violent altercations came about because wealthy families involved in illicit trade refused to pay their debts to overseas trading groups. In some cases, such families threatened to use their influence to force local officials into action against their creditors. Traders retaliated by looting and burning the properties of the wealthy families who defaulted, end quote. This was getting out of hand. As such, the Ming government upped its response against the smuggling and piracy based out of the Shuangyu Freeport.

By this point, the late 1540s, Shuangyu had reached its zenith, boasting a full-time population, according to official Ming records, of upwards of 600 wu kuo. These villagers, primarily local fishermen and subsistence farmers from the mainland, had found that they could make a heck of a lot more money, and for much less labor, by making and selling pirate stuff to pirates. Quote, They melted copper coins to make shot, used saltpeter to make gunpowder, iron to make swords and guns, and leather to make their armor. In 1547, a censor once again reported that the piracy throughout Zhejiang was out of control, and recommended that a special official be appointed to directly oversee and carry out the eradication of the piratical menace. This posting would be given to Zhu Wang, a career military man of 53

who had made his reputation by suppressing bandits and outlaws on the Jiangxi-Fujian border region. He would now be placed in charge of Zhejiang's coastal defense and the eradication of the pirates ensconced therein. He would arrive at his new post in Zhuangzhou, the principal center of overseas trade on coastal Fujian, that November. When he attempted to recruit from the local population in his suppression campaign, they all pretty much told him to take a long walk off of a short pier. As usual, they had no interest in helping to get rid of the business that was the basis of most of their livelihoods, legal or not. As such, General Zhu recruited his own staff, and once that was complete, made an inspection of the coastal defenses to the north.

This tour he concluded with the recommendation to the imperial court that, quote, the bans against overseas trade be strictly and vigorously enforced, end quote. As luck would have it, shortly after he reported, that large-scale pirate raid against the deader families in Ningbo and Taizhou that I talked about were carried out, resulting in widespread killing, fires, and destruction, end quote, without encountering any effective opposition from imperial forces, end quote. This put a very effective and urgent exclamation point on Zhu Wang's assessment of the situation and moved the imperial court to action and approval of the general's proposed methods. He drew up plans to conduct an attack on Shuangyu, as well as a lesser island port called Jiushan, using overwhelming force in order to utterly destroy the pirates therein, and discourage any others from returning. The attack was launched on April 15, 1548. Zhu's fleet set out from Wenzhou Harbor and sailed up the coastline where it arrived under cover of night and fog that June.

In the course of the attack, some 27 pirate and smuggler vessels were sunk, and between 55 and maybe as high as a few hundred residents of the Freeport killed, and many others taken prisoner, notably including two Japanese nationals. However, thanks to favorable winds, many others, including the heads of the operation, such as Baldi Li and Wang Zhi himself, were able to make good on their escape and live to fight, and more importantly trade, another day. Even so, the Ming task force was able to make good its victory by burning the entire pirate town to the ground and then filling in the harbor with stones to render it permanently unusable. Then, mission accomplished, they sailed back home to Wenzhou with backpacks all around.

As you might well expect, this did not permanently cease piracy or smuggling off the coast of Zhejiang. In fact, it was reported within days of the raid from an observation post in the Dinghai coastline, just north of Ningbo, that they had sighted more than 1,200 ships making for Shuangyu per day. So yeah, nice try, General Wang Ju, but you didn't exactly eradicate the pirate infestation. Shuangyu itself never really did recover from the raid, though. It had been made, after all, by the fuzz, which scared off business. As such, Wang Jie and the Shu cartel did what shady businessmen do. They pulled up stakes and moved to an already established Site B. It's not like the Chinese coast had any shortage of islands big enough

or remote enough to have a safe harbor, after all. Business continued, and if anything, picked up pace. As for General Zhu Wang, things did not go so well for him from this point on. As Geis explains it, quote, Zhu Wang's strict interpretation of his commission led to his undoing. He had executed everyone taken in the April 1548 raid, despite strong protest from local officials. One of the people executed was the uncle of a Ningbo prefectural judge, end quote. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a pretty major whoopsie-daisy. After ignoring calls that he was overstepping his authority in bounds,

Zhu conducted yet another anti-piracy raid against a fleet anchored off the coast of southern Fujian in March of 1549, resulting in many captives yet again taken, and again on Zhu's orders some 96 of whom were summarily put to death. By his own logic, he was doing great. He was cleaning up the scum of the sea one raid at a time. Great success. Backpats all around. Unfortunately for him, many others disagreed, not the least of which was that Zhejiang judge. A censor accused the general of killing people without proper authorization

and without waiting for official execution orders to arrive from Beijing. As such, Zhu Wang found himself swiftly removed from office and brought up on impeachment charges. Having been ill for quite some time, and doubtless certain that he was going to be found guilty, as the proceedings against him were being directed by a censor from Ningbo who very much disliked him, Zhu opted to commit suicide in January of 1550 rather than face conviction, disgrace, and probable execution. Quote, most of his work was quickly undone. His coastal defense fleet was dispersed, and early in 1550, local officials in Zhejiang requested that the bans against overseas trade be relaxed. End quote.

The pirates had been dislodged from their biggest and bestest freehold, but they'd not been wiped out. It'd soon be back, and in greater numbers. That is where we're going to leave this swashbuckling tale for today. I hope you've enjoyed it, and next time we will finish up this early era of Ming piracy over the next couple of decades to the conclusion of the Jiajing era in the late 1560s. Thereafter, we'll probably begin divesting this ongoing side series from the main show

so as to not totally derail either too much. After all, it's not like the pirates are going anywhere for the next few centuries. Until then, have some hard tack, a swig of rum, and an extra lime from me to you. Take what you can, give nothing back, and as always, thanks for listening. To be continued... civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast.