The Golden Age of the Wakō

In the early sixteenth century, a merchant by the name of Wang Zhi carried out his family's salt trading business from the southern coast of China (Robert, 51). While there was a "haijin," or sea ban, that was supposed to stop many people from trading, it was hardly enforced and many along the coast knew this. As long as traders cooperated with the coastal patrols, merchants were allowed to continue with their non-tributary, foreign trade (Kung and Ma, 510). This all changed in the 1550s when the sea ban was enforced, and Wang Zhi's business was essentially destroyed. With no other choice, he turned to piracy. He was not alone in this transformation either, as over the years Wang Zhi would come to control a pirate syndicate that was rumored to have one hundred thousand pirates at his command (Kung and Ma, 513-514).

The years of 1550 to 1567 were much more than just a time of heightened piracy marked by an imperial decision. I will argue that those seventeen years, often referred to as the Jiajing Raids, mark the Golden Age for the East Asian pirates known as wakō because of the geographical breadth of their attacks, the number of those attacks, and the amount of people involved. Due to such factors, the sea ban that kicked off their raids was reversed, and many pirates reverted back to their former trading practices. However, those who remained pirates turned to helping European empires secure trade in East Asia and create the more interconnected world that we know today. In order to prove this, I will first begin with how a "Golden Age" can be defined, then I will move into the number of attacks before, during, and after the Jiajing Raids, and finally, the effect of those attacks.

There are two important components that need to be recognized to understand a "Golden Age." First, this term is always applied retroactively to a time period. Those who were pirates in the middle of the sixteenth century would never have thought of their era as a "Golden Age of wakō piracy." Second, there needs to be some sort of criteria that can establish this retrospective claim. Dr. Robert Antony, an expert on East Asian maritime history, has created such criteria. In his recently published book, Golden Age of Piracy in China: 1520 - 1810, he argues that three waves of Chinese piracy made up this "Golden Age." I examine a select few years (1550-1567) from the Ming Dynasty wave.

For Dr. Antony, a wave is defined as an "upturn in large-scale piracy" where "hundreds of thousands of people [became] involved directly and indirectly" (Personal communication). While he applies his definition to a much larger period of time, and a broader scale, I see no reason as to why it cannot be scaled down to a particular group of pirates as long as the requirements that have been set out are met.

In 1521 Zhu Houcong became emperor of China and would take the regnal name of "Jiajing," meaning "admirable tranquility" (Encyclopedia of Chinese History, 450), which is a bit ironic given that his reign was anything but tranquil since some decisions he made have been described as "draconian" (Kung and Ma, 515). One such decision was the enforcement of the sea ban in 1550. While it was put into place very early in the Ming Dynasty, it was never truly enforced (Kung and Ma, 510). Emperor Jiajing's decision to do so, though, essentially choked off maritime trade that many ordinary people along the Chinese coast participated in. It is unclear as to why he made this decision, but there are certain possibilities that may have motivated the emperor.

Although we are not certain of Emperor Jiajing's motivation, one possibility was that he wanted to curb European trade into China as they were making their first deep incursions into East Asia around the 1530/40s. Another possibility was the Ningbo Incident which saw opposing Japanese families enter into conflict about tribute to China, leading to the burning and pillaging of the port city of Ningbo, China (Shapinsky, 446). While that incident happened almost thirty years prior to the decision to enforce the sea ban, it did happen in the first couple of years of Emperor Jiajing's reign, which could have left a negative impression in his mind about foreign trade. It is impossible to say for certain if either of these events had any impact on his decision, but the possibility is there. Regardless, his decision shaped maritime history in East Asia during the sixteenth century, and would have a global effect in the seventeenth century.

As previously mentioned, one of the elements of a "Golden Age" is that there needs to be some sort of change. In this case, that change is an "upturn in piracy." China did not see much wakō activity prior to 1550, and while Korea did struggle with these pirates in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the shift that would occur in the sixteenth century was drastic. So, in order to fully appreciate a change, the 'norm' before the upturn needs to be discussed. The best way to do that is to start at the beginning.

The wakō's rise was not random. While there was no one particular moment that led to their 'creation,' factors such as natural disasters in Kamakura and Kyoto, attempted Mongolian invasions of Japan, and the Jōkyū War, all contributed to poeple turning to piracy in the thirteenth century (Ma, 269-270).

Those events created motivations such as impoverishment and revenge. Motivations that are certainly potent and pushed people to piracy. Even so, before 1550, the attacks in China were minimal. From 1370 to 1550, there were less than twenty pirate attacks a year (Kung and Ma, 510). In some instances, there are spans of time where there are hardly an attacks on the Chinese coast, such as the years from 1470 to 1500 when there were roughly ten reported raids in total (Kung and Ma, 510).

This does not mean that the wakō were inactive before Emperor Jiajing. While there is no record of their numbers, they were still a people that could not be ignored, especially in Korea.

During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, Korea saw its peak in raids. Between the years 1392 and 1411, the peninsula experienced one hundred and sixteen reported attacks (Ma, 274).

He ordered the construction of those buildings because in "recent years their [wakō] plundering has dwindled," and many commoners were leaving mainland Korea for those islands in order to avoid compulsory labor service (Veritable Records of the Choson Dynasty, 1418). This indicates two things. One, the King of Korea was aware of the fluctuation of the raids, highlighting their severity, and two, he feared that the raids would pick back up and put those people who were fleeing to the islands at risk. While they were avoiding labor service, it is safe to assume that he cared enough about their wellbeing for no other reason than he could still attempt to force them to work.

Although it is clear that both China and Korea suffered at the hands of the wakō between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, those years pale in comparison to what happened in the sixteenth century.

Between 1550 and 1567, China would experience an unprecedented surge of wakō attacks that would never be seen again. After Emperor Jiajing enforced the sea ban, its effects were not only immediate, but long-lasting as well. To get an understanding of how immediate the effects of the sea ban were, take a look at the map below.

The map above depicts wakō attacks in the years 1548/9 and 1555/6. These years are pitted against one another in order to depict how immediate the effect of the sea ban was on the rise of raids. There are some disclaimers, though. First, the reason the listed years are split between two years is because the source is not particularly clear about the date. Second, the heat distribution is an approximation of what each year could have looked like based off the pattern of their raids over seventeen years. These two stipulations, however, do not take away from the fact that in 1548/9, there were roughly three attacks along the coast of China, and in 1555/6, there was almost one hundred and twenty (Kung and Ma, 510).

While Korea suffered one hundred and sixteen attacks over nineteen years (1392-1411), putting the average around six raids per year (Ma, 274), China would have over five hundred raids in seventeen years, averaging roughly thirty attacks a year (Kung and Ma, 509). That is five times the amount of raids. However, Korea is obviously much smaller than China. In terms of coastline, the Korean peninsula is a little over 5,300 miles long (New World Encyclopedia), while China has a coastline of just over 9,000 miles (World Atlas). Yet, if the raids are averaged out per one hundred miles, Korea saw roughly 2 raids/100 mi, while China saw about 5.5 raids/100 mi, demonstrating that the situation was worse in the Ming empire.

Another way to comprehend these numbers is to look at pirate raids by Chinese county.

To fully appreciate the extent of the pirate raids in this seventeen-year period, visualizing the wakō's attacks by county is one of the best ways to do so as it can not only show the number of their raids, but also the geographical breadth of their attacks. However, there is a disclaimer with this map too. Due to the software needing an upper value in order to properly render this choropleth map, the top number is forty raids. In actuality, that is not the limit. The most saturated color is only meant to depict counties that experienced over thirty attacks. The real number for each area could be much higher. This does not take away from the fact though that almost every single coastal county was attacked at least once between 1550 and 1567, with the most saturated counties being those in the middle of China's shoreline. This is most likely not a coincidence as there were many silk-producing centers in that area (Kung and Ma, 519).

Silk was a valuable commodity. Since many people lost their businesses because of the sea ban and were driven to piracy due to impoverishment, they needed to make money another way. Those who were wakō before 1550 were certainly attacking these counties, but with the data of Chinese raids from the previous two centuries, they were obviously not attacking those locations often. This rise in raids per county then can be attributed to the number of people becoming pirates.

That request for extra patrol was written down on July 15th, 1564. On that date, the Chinese—both Mongolia Yuan China and Ming China—had been dealing with the wakō for almost three hundred years. They were not a new problem. The Ming alone had almost two hundred years of experience dealing with piracy. Yet, the number of the wakō were just too great, and Ming officials recognized this as an outcome of the sea ban.

As Xu Jie, the Grand Secretariat of the Ming Empire said in 1552: "'When people are impoverished, of course, they can become thieves... Then they ride tigers that they can't dismount, so they brave death and conduct plunder'" (Scott, 13). It is not a coincidence that Xu Jie is mentioning this to a grand coordinator of the anti-wakō force only two short years after the rigorous enforcement of the haijin. The haijin did impoverish people as it cut off many from their means of livelihood. Not only did it do that, but it pushed many people who would not have been pirates—even during the sea ban—into piracy. This is what made the haijin a draconian policy, because if one person "broke the sea ban [they] were put to death, usually by execution, and their family members and associates could face reprisals as well from the Chinese government... Many figured they might as well get to enjoy the benefits of being a pirate if they were already going to face punishment for being considered one by the Ming" (Scott, 11-12). With those two previous quotes, it is clear that many, most likely tens of thousands, were driven to piracy, either directly or indirectly.

With this information, there is no doubt that there has been an upturn in piracy, because not only were there more attacks, but there were more people getting involved as well. So many people got involved, in fact, that there were individual raids where several thousand pirates went against imperial troops (Kung and Ma, 509). It would actually not be unreasonable to label those attacks as battles because of the scale. In order to organize such numbers, though, captains were needed, and the Ming seemed to have understood that.

Leaders of wakō crews became high-value targets in this era, further demonstrating the intensity of this situation. When Wu Ping, a pirate captain of the time, was killed or committed suicide in 1566, Emperor Jiajing requested that "the Guang-dong regional inspecting censor be instructed to examine the matter to determine whether Wu Ping did in fact drown himself" (Ming shilu).

China was—and still is—a massive country with many people. The emperor had other geopolitical factors to worry about like European incursion. The fact that time and resources were dedicated to ensure that a certain pirate leader was dead, even though the wakō threat was not over, speaks volumes about the power that these captains wielded in terms of organizational capability. It is possible that if pirate captains were dead, it would be harder to wrangle the wakō into a cohesive unit. This would explain the Ming's behavior and decisions regarding these captains. However, this behavior would change.

When Emperor Jiajing died in 1567, the attacks of the wakō looked nothing like these past seventeen years. This did not mean that their activity stopped.

With the death of Emperor Jiajing, the sea ban was reversed, and the effect was instantaneous. Those who had mounted tigers they could not dismount actually found it quite easy to dismount them and stop conducting plunder. The number of attacks along the Chinese coast plummeted in the years immediately after 1567, returning to less than twenty raids a year (Kung and Ma, 510). However, the remaining wakō did not fade out of existence.

For instance, a pirate by the name of Lin Feng pillaged Zhe-lin, Jing-hai, and Hie-shi all in the same year. Yet, between 1576 and 1578, he was mercilessly hunted and weakened with almost two thousand of his pirate crew apprehended, and many of his ships burned (Ming shilu). He managed to escape, but seemingly did not attack for some time as he is not mentioned once in the Ming shilu after 1578 for over a decade, even though he was discussed sixteen times between 1573 and 1578. It is not surprising that he 'laid low' as the dwindling number of wakō forced the remaining pirates to shift their attention away from raiding, and toward facilitating trade.

Even with the sea ban reversed, and trade returning to a 'normal' status, Europeans were not exactly welcomed into East Asia for trading (Scott, 23). That did not stop them from forcing their way into this theater, and they would do so by any means necessary. In this case, they enlisted the help of the wakō, despite the pirates not being reliable. Zheng Zhilong and Li Dan, two merchants turned pirates, "tricked the Dutch [merchants] into many one-sided trade deals that benefited themselves [Zheng and Li]" (Scott, 35). Even though these men were untrustworthy, Richard Cocks, an Englishman who worked for a British trading company, wrote that he gave presents to Li Dan and his brother "in hope of their travill [sic] to procure trade into China," because the English, and generally other Europeans, needed the wakō's help (Thompson, 702). The map below demonstrates that plainly.

Created by cartographer Abraham Ortelius in 1570, this map depicts a European perspective of what they though East Asia looked like only three short years after the reversal of the haijin. While some parts of it are quite accurate, such as India, the further East the map goes, the more inaccurate it becomes. For instance, modern day Thailand and Malaysia are too wide in respect to the scale of China. Another example is Japan, which is not only a square, but misplaced. Also, the Korean peninsula does not even exist!

The geographical knowledge that Europeans had of East Asia was lacking, to say the least, and because of that, getting into China to trade was difficult. After all, it is hard to get to trading centers if one does not know where they are. While a myraid of factors would help the Europeans get a better understanding of what this part of the world looked like, the wakō's efforts should not be ignored.

Although figures like Li Dan and Zheng Zhilong may have still undertaken raids, the number of attacks was nowhere near the Jiajing era. With their lack of numbers making raiding more dangerous, these one-sided deals that deceived the Europeans became the bread and butter of the wakō as it was a lucrative way to survive. This is not to say that the wakō never helped facilitate trade. In fact, they played an integral role in helping the Europeans acquire East Asian goods and get a better sense of the geography.

An instance of this is with the Japanese port of Hirado, which was a haven for the wakō and "one of the few ports where European and Chinese merchants could both enter and carry out business with each other" (Scott, 41). In this example, the wakō had created a marketplace for two groups of people who were having trouble conducting trade, and whenever trade occurs, goods are not the only things that are exchanged. Knowledge is as well, and in this case, it was the geographical knowledge of East Asia. As Europeans sailed to Hirado, they would gain a better and more comprehensive understanding of the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the lands that surround those bodies of water, making their maps more accurate.

Created by cartographer Giorgia Widman in 1692, the Europeans clearly garnered a better understanding of what East Asia looked like. Not only is Japan more accurately drawn, it is also placed more precisely. Also, the Korean peninsula exists. The map still has its faults, but exploration of this part of the world, in large part due to trade, helped create this more accurate map. The wakō had a hand in this. Again, they are not the only factor, and certainly not the largest contributors to this change, but their role in helping Europeans navigate East Asian waters cannot—and should not—be overlooked.

After the reversal of the sea ban, the wakō's wealth depended on their ability to broker trade between European and Chinese merchants (Scott, 44-45). Therefore, while some deals were not legitimate, others were, as they could not lie every time. Europeans expected Chinese goods, and if the pirates could not help them, then the British, the French, the Portuguese, etc., would find another way.

The wakō no longer had the safety of their numbers, which led to signficantly fewer raids. So, they adapted their methods to survive and accumulate whatever wealth they could. In the process of doing so, they helped further globalize the world by connecting Western Europe and Eastern Asia.

When dealing with historical topics, the information that is on hand does not always provide the full picture. I have not been able to find any data regarding pirate attacks in Korea in the late sixteenth and early seventeeth centuries. Therefore, it is possible that these East Asian pirates attacked the Korean coast in great numbers; however, with no policy in Korea that severly hindered the quality of life for those who depended on the sea, along with a new course of action that proved to be lucrative—as can be seen by the actions of Zheng Zhilong and Li Dan—it is unlikely that any significant number of raids faded into obscurity, or went unreported.

Wang Zhi would be executed by the Ming in 1559 (Scott, 38). His death did not change the course of the wakō, despite the power he wielded. Had he operated and been killed prior to 1550 or after 1567, it is quite possible that his death would have had an impact on the already limited number of attacks. During the Jiajing Raids, however, there were so many pirates that Wang Zhi was just one of hundreds of thousands.

This era was more than just a time of heightened East Asian piracy. This marked the Golden Age for the wakō as they not only had free reign over where they raided China, but how many times as well, all of which was possible because of the sheer number of people involved. No decade or century, either prior to or after this seventeen-year period, came close to what happened when the sea ban pushed unprecedented numbers of coastal inhabitants to mount tigers and conduct plunder.

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Ma, Guang. "Re-evaluating the Wokou Problem in East Asia During the 1220s and 1390s from the Perspective of Environmental History." Journal of Asian History 54, no. 2 (2020): 261-280. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13173/jasiahist.54.2.0261.

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Abraham Ortelius map: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~275318~90048447:-48--Indiae-Orientalis-?sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No&qvq=w4s:/where%2FAsia%2Fwhen%2F1570;q:abraham%20ortelius;sort:Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=1&trs=2

Giorgia Widman map: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~290642~90062253:Il-regno-della-China-detto-presente?sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No

China Shape Files: http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/29302

Cover image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Een_zeeslag_tussen_Japanse_zeerovers_en_Chinezen.jpg

Book cover image: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59794950-the-golden-age-of-piracy-in-china-1520-1810