The History of China - #243 - Ming 29: Ahh, Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal!

Episode Date: November 5, 2022

Great Ming has a pirate problem on its hands. Unable to effectively suppress it militarily, the officials in charge turn to wheeling and dealing to get the seabooters to give up their outlaw ways. But when the Jiajing Emperor starts sticking his nose in to such affairs from way up in Beijing, suddenly all bets are off... Time Period Covered: 1549-1567 CE Major Historical Figures: Ming: The Jiajing Emperor (Zhu Houcong) [r. 1521-1567] Grand Chancellor Yan Song [1480-1567] Nanjing Minister of War Zhang Jing [d. 1555] Censor Zhao Wenhua [d. 1557] Censor Hu Zongxian [1512-1565] Commander Yu Dayou [1512-1579] Commander Qi Zhiguang [1528-1588] Pirates: Wang Zhi, CEO of the High Seas [d. 1559] Captain Xu Hai [d. 1556] Lord Shimazi of Osumi Province Works 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. Four hundred years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the History of China. Episode 243, Ah, Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal. Product's weak, but, you know, it's weak all over.

The thing is, no matter what we call it, it's gonna get sold. Product's strong, we're gonna sell it.. Product weak, we'll sell twice as much. You know why? Because a fiend, he's gonna chase it no matter what. It's crazy, you know? We do worse, and we get paid more. Russell Stringer Bell, the wire. Why, you slimy, double-crossing, no-good swindler. You got a lot of guts coming here, after what you pulled. Lando Calrissian. The Empire Strikes Back. Come a day there won't be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all. This job goes south, there may well not be another.

So here's us, on the raggedy edge. Don't push me, and I won't push you. Dong Le Ma. Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly. Last time, we traced the formation and consolidation of piracy up and down the South China coasts, and especially around the port of Ningbo. We also looked at the central government's response to such enterprise, at first lackadaisical, but increasingly serious into the 1540s. That had culminated with the Ming Dynasty's successful raid against the freebooter port of Shuangyu Anchorage, led by the Imperial General Zhu Wan, who proved rather overzealous in his bloodletting of captives to his eventual downfall. Another figure to play heavily into our last outing was that of Wang Zhi,

he who had been largely responsible for introducing the Japanese business consortiums come pirate organizations to their mainland ports of call all along the South Chinese minor islands. Wang Zhi was every bit a businessman, and his principal interest was in generating as much profit as was possible. In the short term, that may indeed mean having to sully one's hands with such quote-unquote illegal elements of trade and importation. But in the long run, what Wang wanted to be was not a pirate lord, but a respectable, and here's the really important part, filthy rich, business mogul. As such, between 1549 and 1552, Wang Zhi did everything he could to cooperate with the Ming's local and regional military intendants and civil authorities. This included, yes, indeed, turning on his own fellow pirates, or, put more correctly, his direct business competitors.

For arrest, prosecution, and, of course, punishment. His objective and expectation in so doing was, of course, to shore up his own position, get in on the good graces of the Ming authorities, and then use that influence to get them to relax the ban on overseas trade. In this, he would wind up rather disappointed. Rather than relaxing the ban, the noose tightened. In 1551, for instance, a new decree came down that even fishing boats, previously excluded from the bans, were henceforth forbidden to go out to sea. Any and all overseas trade was to be utterly forbidden.

What was a businessman to do? Well, Wang Jie figured, if manners and good graces couldn't do the trick, then perhaps terror and pillage could. Thus, casting off his amenable CEO persona, he and his fleets began in 1551 a campaign of plunder up and down the Chinese coasts. From Geis, quote, This campaign of piracy would last from late 1551 all the way through 1556, and Wang Zhi had little trouble in finding crews to man his fleet of ships. The prior decade had been extremely rough on the Chinese populace of the coastal south. The raids, quote, followed several years of natural calamities and general unrest.

Famines were reported in Zhejiang during 1543 and 1544, and there were severe droughts in the Yangtze Basin during the summers of 1545 and 1546. The thousands of people who had lost their livelihoods and who were roaming in search of food made ideal recruits for raiding parties and bandit gangs, end quote. It had become so bad, and so regularized, that the towns and villages along the Zhejiang coasts had taken to erecting barricades and makeshift walls around their settlements just to try to dissuade such bands from seeking to exploit them any further. In the summer of 1553, the pirate fleet of Wangzhe

launched the first widespread and simultaneous attack all along the Zhejiang coasts, from Taizhou northward. It involved hundreds of ships and thousands of crewmen, and was by every measure a great success. In fact, several garrisons were briefly taken and held by the pirate band, and even a few of the district seats were put under siege. The takeaway from such a probing attack was clear. Coastal Zhejiang was ripe for the taking, and permanent coastal bases could be established. From these camps, larger raiding parties comprised of sailors, pirates, Japanese warriors, foreign adventurers, Chinese bandits, and drifters set out on long inland campaigns. And they made rapid, significant, and worrisome progress.

By 1555, these bands of brigands were approaching even the greatest strongholds of the Southlands, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and even the southern capital itself, Nanjing. And in the year to follow, the whole region slipped out of imperial control entirely in all but name. By 1554, the pirate strongholds contained as many as 20,000 men altogether. In an attempt to combat this, the Ming government dispatched Zhang Jing, Nanjing's own Minister of War, to be placed in charge of the military deployment across the coastal southeast, as well as being given, quote,

discretionary powers and made solely responsible for the suppression of piracy, end quote. First and foremost, of course, he would need to raise an army capable of standing against the truly phenomenal size of the pirate forces. As such, he recruited from among the aboriginal tribes of Guangxi and Huguang in order to supplement the imperial regulars already stationed across Zhejiang. He was able to supplement his local force with an additional 11,000 troops. However, it would take a significant amount of time to arrive and wouldn't be present and ready until the spring of the following year, 1555. In the meantime, it was to remain pandemonium across the provinces. The imperial troops were only able to hold and defend the walled cities and grain depots. Everything else was, by necessity, left for

the pirates to pillage to their hearts' content. Zhang adamantly refused to launch any kind of counter-offensive, or even foray outside of his well-defended green zones, until all of his auxiliary troops arrived, to the point that even when the pirate army attacked the countryside immediately outside of Hangzhou and massacred thousands of peasants, he refused to let his troops defend against such a brazen incursion and slaughter. This seemingly callous indifference to innocent suffering and death raised more than a few eyebrows across the realm,

so much so, in fact, that it aroused the attention of the imperial censoret. In March of 1555, Censorate Zhao Wenhua was dispatched from Beijing to see just what exactly was going on with the military situation down south. How was it, for instance, that the imperial tombs surrounding Nanjing were under threat by pirates? How had the situation gotten so out of hand that imperial grain barges transiting the Yangtze Delta were under threat of capture or destruction? Censor Zhao arrived in Zhejiang and began his inquiry, appropriately enough, by taking up the issue with the regional commander, Zhang Jing himself. Commander Zhang, for his part, seemed to think that there was nothing to discuss. Citing the fact that he technically outranked the imperial censor, he brusquely dismissed Zhao and

refused to so much as even explain his long-term strategy for dealing with the pirate threat. As you might well imagine, that did not wind up going over very well for Commander Zhang at all. Censor Zhao secretly sent his report back to Beijing that, quote, Zhang Jing had misappropriated funds and had failed to defend the region, end quote. This was no small charge, and so the capital followed up in order to reassess and independently confirm this high allegation. In the meantime, apparently having caught wind of the charges now leveled against him, Commander Zhang at long last ordered his army to advance against the pirate strongholds. Their target was a particularly

large raiding party that had encamped north of Jiaxing City. The imperial force surrounded and then defeated the pirates, taking more than 1,900 heads as proof. This was, in fact, the first time that a Ming imperial army had defeated such a large group of marauders in a straight engagement. Under typical circumstances, that would, of course, have been considered a tremendous victory. But, oh yeah, those pesky charges of criminal negligence. When the follow-up report came back affirming such heinous allegations, that was all she wrote for Zhang Jing. He was arrested by order of the emperor himself.

When reports of the victory at Jiaxing came, the emperor began to question the charges against this apparently good commander? To this, however, Grand Secretary Yan Song, who had ordered the dispatch of Censor Zhao in the first place, explained that Zhang had only mobilized his forces after he'd found out about the initial condemnation for his lack of action and dereliction of duty. Chancellor Yan soothed the Jiajing Emperor that, actually, the victory truly belonged to Censor Zhao and another local censor, Hu Zhongxian, who Yan said had waded into the thick of battle

without even wearing armor. This was, it would turn out, a pure fairy tale, as Hu Zhongxian was nowhere near the battle and actually much further south in Hangzhou at the time. Nevertheless, that was good enough for Jiajing. He thoroughly ignored Zhang Jing's pleas for clemency when he was slated for ignominious execution by Chancellor Yan Song. And in due course, that very fall of 1555, his body was relieved of its head. With Zhang Jing gone, overall control of the Southeast military command fell to Zhao Wenhua and Hu Zhongxian. The two of them were actually rather sympathetic to the underlying problem that had produced such a piracy issue. They recognized that such a menace had not sprung up whole cloth from nothing, but was a symptom of, and reaction to, a market need not being met. Namely, a reaction against the total ban on overseas trade.

As such, between 1554 and 1556, Zhao and Hu pressured the central government to relax its trade prohibitions and to send a delegation of envoys to Japan, ostensibly to request the King of Japan's assistance in fighting piracy. In truth, however, the real reason behind the mission was to seek out the pirate lord, Wang Zhe, and solicit his surrender. The pair of censors understood that he was, in many regards, the head of the serpent. As such, since he was clearly too slippery to grab a hold of and simply cut off, they needed to send him a love letter and get him to agree to stop. As a proof of good intentions, therefore, Hu had Wang's family released from prison and moved them to his headquarters that May of 1555, soon after he became the governor of Zhejiang. That was all well and good in itself,

but unfortunately for Hu Zhongxian and his efforts to build trust between himself and the pirate lord, the Jiajing emperor had other ideas. Just before Hu's envoy to Japan set out, the imperial court issued an order renewing its bounty on Wang Zhe's head, dead or alive. Governor Hu dispatched his envoy anyway, even though he was certainly aware that he was doing so in direct contravention of the new imperial order. The following spring of 1556, Hu's envoy returned in the company of Wang Jie's adopted son, who acted as a piratical emissary of sorts. He reported Wang's favorable reaction to Hu's offer,

and gave his reply, saying that in exchange for a full pardon and official permission to engage in overseas trade for his organization, Wang would see that all pirate bands in and around Zhejiang would be wiped out. As a further measure of good faith, Wang also conveyed a warning to Governor Hu that a certain captain within his syndicate, one Xu Hai, was moving ahead with a large-scale raid on the Zhejiang coastline, and Wang had been unable to stop him. Though this warning was surely appreciated, it did further complicate Hu's already precarious plans, as such a raid would undoubtedly cause a serious military crisis and further imperial scrutiny of the piracy situation.

That same year, Hu Zhongxian was promoted to the very succinctly named triple position of Supreme Commander of the Armies in the Southern Metropolitan Region, Zhejiang and Fujian. This sounds fine and dandy, but he was actually stepping into something of a disaster in progress. Geist puts it, quote, Imperial armies had been badly defeated during the last months of 1555. The aboriginal troops that Zhang Jing had brought from the southwest were attacking imperial troops and pillaging the countryside. The military situation was deteriorating, and raiding continued, end quote. In fact, it had been Zhang Jing's idea to, ahem, promote Hu in the first place, after he'd realized that he'd hopelessly lost control of the situation and hadn't planned to stick around long enough to be caught holding

the bag when the whole thing collapsed. In that sense, then, Hu Zhengxian's big promotion was intended as little more than setting him up to be the fall guy. And boy oh boy did Hu start his tenure off as Supreme Commander with one doozy of a problem. The first half of the year of the job would be utterly consumed just trying to rein in and contain the chaos of the pirate Xu Hai's attacks along the Zhejiang coasts, which was launched as of mid-April. Xu Hai had not, of course, began his life as a swashbuckler. He seems to have been born and grew up in or around Hangzhou in northern Zhejiang, and when he reached adolescence, started down the path of being a Buddhist monk at a local monastery. As of about 1551, however, Xu decided that monastic life was

not for him, left the temple, and took up a position within his merchant uncle's trading consortium. This proved to be quite the lucrative career path, in spite of, or indeed because of, its gray area legality. And between 1551 and 1554, Xu Hai voyaged back and forth and back and forth between Zhejiang and Japan, amassing a significant personal fortune in the process. Things took a turn for the far more serious and dire in 1555, however, when Xu's uncle disappeared while on a trading mission down south to Guangdong. Did tragedy strike while at sea, or perhaps at port, or did dearest uncle just pull a vanishing act? That last one seems like a possibility, because it left young Xu Hai holding the bag.

And in due course, then, who should come a-knocking but the consortium's patron and creditor, Lord Shimazu of Osumi province, on the southernmost tip of Kyushu. Lord Shimazu demanded that Shu Hai make good on his vanished uncle's debts and obligations. And by make good on, he meant launch a large-scale raid on Zhejiang. What else was there to do then but go a-pirating? Just this one last job, and then he would be out for good. Meanwhile, Supreme Commander Hu Zhongxian had made a study of the situation and determined that he definitely very much had exactly zero chance of being able to stop Xu Hai from pillaging every town, port, and city from Hangzhou all the

way to Nanjing. He didn't have anywhere near the manpower, nor the firepower, to do anything other than get himself badly routed and or killed. And so, it was time for a different strategy. Diplomacy. That is to say, convince Xu Hai that it would be in his best interest to simply surrender without a fight. It was with that in mind, then, that this military commander, ostensibly placed in charge of, you know, getting rid of the pirates, steadfastly refused to attack or allow his subordinates to attack the pirate captain Shu Hai's forces over the course of 1556. Instead, he holed them all up at his headquarters in Hangzhou and waited for Shu to reply favorably. Not everyone was on board with Commander Hu's sit-and-wait approach, however.

One such official, no less than the newly installed governor of Zhejiang province himself, named Ran Ou, decided that if Hu was just going to sit on his hands, well, then that meant more glory and victory for him. Such delusions of grandeur didn't last terribly long. Governor Ran's hastily assembled anti-pirate task force was soundly defeated in its first encounter with Shu Hai's marauders, and they were forced to fight-slash-retreat their way into the walled city of Tongxian, which was then put under siege by the pirates. Therein, Governor Ran and the remnants of his men sat and waited and waited and kept waiting for more than a month. Meanwhile, less than 60 miles away, Commander Hu Zhongxian had heard about

all of this, but decided that instead of sending relief or reinforcements to the harried governor, he would just rather not. He justified this refusal to lift a finger in aid of his fellow imperial official by saying that the only resolution to such a tricky situation was through a negotiated settlement with Captain Shu and the other pirate leaders. Hu sent yet another missive to Shu Hai, informing him that, actually, Wang Zhi had already accepted his oh-so-generous terms of surrender, and that since all the cool kids were doing it, he should jump on board while the getting was good. This turned out to be super effective.

And in June of 1556, Xu Hai replied back, accepting Hu's terms and ordering his men to withdraw from the siege of Tongxian as a show of good faith. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over 10 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. Now, it might sound a bit like Hu Zhongxian was planning to double-cross or otherwise screw over Shu Hai from the start, but that doesn't really appear to have been the case. In point of fact, much of the evidence points to Hu operating at least mostly in good faith, and meaning to follow through with all the promises and agreements that he was making with these pirate leaders. Because at their core, they were all businessmen, and this was just a big business agreement. Getting the pirates to stop pirating was his mission parameter,

and he'd figured out that negotiating with them was a far better use of his, and therefore the Empire's, time and resources than trying to duke it out on the high seas. It's nothing personal, Sonny. But alas, there were goings-on happening well over even Supreme Commander Hu Zhongxian's head, and well outside of his purview, all the way up in merry old Beijing. Up in the capital, Hu and our good friend Censor Zhao Wenhua had suddenly found himself on the outs of that most precious, mercurial, and capricious of resources, imperial favor. And it all had to do with one tiny little exaggeration on his part. Geist writes, quote, early in 1556, he had reported on his success in eradicating piracy.

But in June, after reading reports of Shu Hai's invasion and requests for reinforcement, the emperor ordered Yansong to explain what was going on. End quote. Well, you see, your majesty, when I said the pirates were exterminated,

I wasn't being exactly literal, more metaphorically aspirational. It would seem that the Jiajing Emperor did something to the effect of roll his eyes at yet another incompetent lying official, and told Zhao that he had better get his rear end back down to Zhejiang on the double, and fix this pirate situation in a very literal, immediate, and permanent sense. He was ordered to use all measures of aggression to eradicate the sea dogs without exception. And so, as luck would have it, all of a sudden all those deals and guarantees promised to the likes of Wang Zhe and Xu Hai went up in a puff of imperial smoke. Jia Jing would surely never agree to any such conditions at this point. So, yeah, that was gonna be an awkward explanation.

Meanwhile, still none the wiser, Shu and Hu were busily hagging out the specific terms of their deal. Some of Shu's fellow buccaneers were a bit more wary of trusting the government to actually follow through on its end of the bargain once they'd placed themselves at its mercy. And side note and possible spoiler here, good thinking, boys. They wanted no part of it. In fact, they wanted out. Well, all right,

no problem. It was agreed that those who didn't want a Ming pardon and would rather return to Japan would be given ships to do so and be seen off on their merry way. But those who didn't want a Ming pardon and would rather return to Japan would be given ships to do so, and be seen off on their merry way. But those who did want in on this sweet, limited-time offer would not only be pardoned, said Hu Zhongxian, but given primo-military appointments to drive off any other pirates who might get any zany ideas to move into the territory. And toward that directive, Xu Hai and his cronies were to begin right away. Quote, Meanwhile, Xu Hai's forces took part in campaigns to wipe out pirates along the Wusong River between Suzhou and the sea.

And this campaign was coordinated with attacks on pirate strongholds along the coast carried out by Wang Jie's adopted sons. End quote. Yeah, great, we are totally planning on hiring you, but we just like a little, um, unpaid probationary period first, just to see if you're a good fit, trust me. And to be perfectly fair, had things just kept on as such, it seems likely that it all would have worked out swell for the Ming government and the pirates and everybody. I mean, except for the pirates that were getting killed. Quote, whose strategy seems to be working? The overseas merchants were doing what imperial troops could not. End quote. Shu Hai said he'd have all his forces withdrawn if he could be given enough resources to pay off his

debts to Lord Shimazu of Osumi. And who agreed to this? Everything was shaping up nicely. And then Zhao Wenhua returned and just ruined everything. Shortly after his arrival back in Zhejiang, Zhao officially and publicly repudiated Commander Hu's policy of appeasement by imperial order. There was really nothing after that. No grand alternative strategy of, well, then what should we do instead? Nope. Hu's strategy was officially a dead letter, and the wherefores and the whences of what might replace it, well, that was Hu Zhongxian's problem as well. Clearly, this left Hu in a tight spot. Between his two remaining options, betray his deal with the pirates, or

go against government directives, there was really no choice at all. Obviously, it was going to be the pirates' head that rolled, not his. But that didn't mean that he had to, you know, like it. He'd worked long and hard to hammer out this good and equitable deal, and it had been working. But whatever, orders are orders. And so he got down to work. The pirates hadn't heard of this change of circumstances yet, and so who knew that this informational gap could be used against them? At least to contain them and keep them bottled up until a more permanent solution could be devised. Quote, by this time, the various groups in the raiding party had begun to fight among themselves, and Hu took advantage of this to eliminate some of

the leaders through various deceits and ruses, end quote. Meanwhile, Xu Hai himself, still none the wiser, continued to cooperatively play his part alongside the government forces, and even after the new set of orders were made known to him, he still expected to be permitted to at least be able to withdraw from the Chinese coasts peacefully. It was, however, not to be. Zhao Wenhua had sent agents of his own to inform Shu's remaining pirates that they would be permitted to retreat back to the coasts, but simultaneously ordered another official to await their coming at a predetermined point and then ambushed them as they traveled by. Xu Hai was able to take refuge in a nearby estate. Once ensconced within, he then tried to parley with the government forces and work out some

new terms by which he and his men would be allowed to leave and return to sea. For his part, Commander Hu still vocally supported such an arrangement with Shu, but Zhao Wenhua had his marching orders and would not be deterred. None of the pirates were to be allowed to escape with their lives. The imperial forces encircled the estate and laid it to a siege that would last for a week. Finally, the assault came. The battle was very evenly matched, with the results up in the air right up until the final day of the battle, when the Ming forces finally breached the compound and found within it Shu Hai face down and dead in a stream, either having drowned himself rather than face capture and

execution, or having simply been cut down perhaps by his own men or perhaps by the Ming attackers. As for the others, several of the pirate leaders, including Xu's brother, were taken alive, only to be executed thereafter, and the remaining pirate forces ruthlessly pursued and exterminated. Now, when it came to the question of the big kahuna himself, Wang Zhi, things were still much more up in the air in terms of his eventual fate. Even with his recent heel turn regarding Xu Hai, censor Zhao Wanhua was still convinced that Wang was a different case, and that he could arrange a pardon for this, let's call him freelance entrepreneur. Indeed, in this, he also had the support of Grand Secretary Yansong,

up at the imperial court, who agreed with his overall analysis of the coastal situation now that the Great Pirate Raid had been taken care of. The rationale was thus, quote, By pardoning people engaging in trade, by enlisting them to attack pirates, and by allowing them to pursue their livelihoods, the number of people who were driven to piracy would decline and the number of people willing to suppress it would grow. End quote.

What if we lift the oppressive boot heel of the state off the necks of the people? Maybe they would be less inclined to break the law then. Worth a try at least, eh? As such, Wang Zhou was to be recruited into the Ming military as the local chief anti-pirate fighter. Done and done. Until, that is, just a few weeks before Wang was scheduled to arrive in Zhejiang to formally surrender that following September of 1557, when Zhao Wenhua found himself, quite unexpectedly and unceremoniously, dumped from his post.

And the details of this are just bizarre. So, the previous May, the main gate of the Forbidden City had, yes, yes, everyone together now, caught fire and burned to the ground. I mean, we all know the tune. The judging emperor had ordered that it be reconstructed at once, because, of course he did. Now, in addition to being one of the chief censors and in charge of the military operations along the southern coasts, Zhao Wenhua was also the Minister of Works, and thus technically in charge of such imperial construction projects.

Again, even though he was currently 1,300 miles away in Hangzhou at the moment. Cut to four months later, and the emperor notices that the gate rebuild is still unfinished and has something of a conniption fit. Quote, he told Yansong to inform Zhao that he should be asked to retire, and then reduce Zhao to the status of a commoner and exile him along with his son. But Zhao died before the sentencing could be imposed, end quote. And thus exits Zhao Wenhua from our tale. But it goes even further than that. The emperor was royally ticked off, not only at the slow reconstruction of his precious gate, but also that Chancellor Yansong hadn't reported Zhao's obvious malfeasance

at being so bad at gate-building while suppressing piracy 1,300 miles away. As such, in spite of the fact that Chancellor Yan had a long and spotless career record of imperial service, Jia Jing began to rather loudly wonder whether or not he was trustworthy after all. Feeling his own neck coming dangerously close to the imperial axe, Yan Song felt that he was now in no position to try to press the idea of sparing Wang Zhe, or reversing the imperial policy of Yansong felt that he was now in no position to try to press the idea of sparing Wang Zhe, or reversing the imperial policy of total extermination on all pirates. So, yeah, to sum it up, Captain Wang Zhe's deal with the government is about to totally come

undone at the cost of his and all of his men's lives because one of the Forbidden City's gates burned down and the Emperor was irked about how long it was taking to rebuild. Life can be pretty strange sometimes. And so it was that in October of 1557, Wang Jie and his crew, none the wiser, arrived at the prearranged meeting point off of Zhou Shan Island with his large trading fleet. From there, he sent forth a messenger to Hu Zhongxian's office to announce his surrender and get in on that sweet, sweet anti-piracy task force action. To this, Hu wasn't quite sure how to respond, so he just, um, responded with, wait a minute, I'll be right with you, don't go anywhere. After thinking it through, though, Hu opted to accept Wang's

surrender and then keep his fingers crossed that, somehow or another, the emperor could be brought around to reversing his execution order? It probably should have been pretty clear which direction all that was going to go by the fact that the Jiajing emperor repeatedly referred to Wang Zhe as Qiangdao Wushi, meaning bandit sorcerer. Nevertheless, for the time being, he left Wang Zhe temporarily up to Hu Zhongxian's personal discretion. As such, Wang Zhe would languish in prison for a further two years until December 1559, when Hu finally received and then carried out an imperial order to terminate him. His own fate remained uncertain to him right up until the day of his execution. The aftermath of this grand-scale rug pull was pretty much what one might expect.

Huang Jie's adopted son and followers who had escaped the Ming's clutches retreated to their headquarters of Zhoshan Island and tried to work out just what had gone so terribly wrong. One thing was certain, never ever trust those government bastards about anything. Peaceful trade? Totally off the menu. From that point on, what remained of Wang Jie's fleet resolved to head back to Japan, re-equip, recruit, and re-arm, and then join up with another large raiding force to commence with a campaign of terror and looting up and down the coasts of Zhejiang and Fujian. The Emperor, upon the wildly overconfident promise of Hu Zhongxian,

ordered in July of 1558 that all pirate activity along the coasts must be totally wiped out within a month. Yet that, unsurprisingly, ran aground when the Ming fleet failed to take Zhoushan Island by force, taking heavy casualties in the attempt. This would surely have been the end of Commander Hu's career, and possibly life, had he not lucked into finding and capturing an albino deer while on the island. When Hu presented this animal to the Emperor, Jiajing was quite taken with it as an auspicious sign from heaven, and chose to overlook Hu's ignominious failure to adequately suppress piracy in the time allotted. Instead, and in true Jiajing form, he turned his ire onto Hu's sub-commanders, Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayu. Yu was arrested in April

of 1559 for having not sufficiently pursued the pirate ships that had retreated from Zhejiang Island, even though it had been at Hu Zhongxian's command that they be allowed to withdraw. Hu, sensing that this would not go over well at the imperial court, judoed his own order onto Yu Dayu, impeaching him on the same charges and then letting him take the fall for it. Yu was dismissed from his post in disgrace. Nice going, Hu. As for Qi Zeguang, he was likewise relieved of his command in the summer of 1559, but ordered to train up an army and redeem himself via combat.

He would subsequently recruit some 3,000 men from the countryside, a particular region south of Hangzhou infamous in its day for a large number of quote-unquote troublesome farmers, and drilled them up on special tactics designed to counter the fighting styles of Japanese warriors specifically, that Qi was particularly intimidated by for their swordsmanship. This army, which would come to be known appropriately enough as the Qi army, would prove to be exceedingly good at its job, and would serve as one of the vanguards of anti-piracy and banditry actions across the region for much of the subsequent decade. Across the 1560s, the Ming anti-piracy efforts continued to improve upon their earlier blunders and refine their actions. By early 1563, for instance, the Qi army was able to eradicate the last major pirate bases in the Fujianese coasts. A series of campaigns from 1564

to 1666 saw the pirate bands of southern Jiangxi and Guangdong ground down to almost nothing, and as many as 80,000 peasants reclaimed by the empire from pirate control, which is to say, put back on the official tax registers. In fact, by 1567, piracy was deemed to be no longer a major problem along the southeast coasts, though illicit overseas trade remained an issue, as the Jiajing Emperor still refused to budge on his staunch anti-import-export stance. It would take Jiajing's death that very year to finally see the ban on overseas trade substantively relaxed, and the courtly debate on the issue that had raged for some four decades at last favorably resolved. The wild and woolly days of 16th century piracy had at last wound themselves down to something of a conclusion, at least for now.

And so, next time, we'll be headed back to the mighty northern capital to inaugurate our first new emperor in a very long time, the Longqing Emperor, whose reign will be, well, not all that long. Thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast.

Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.