In 1551 even fishing boats, which had been explicitly excluded from
the original ban, were forbidden to go out to sea, because it was known
they were used to make contact with overseas traders and foreign
merchants.35 By this additional prohibition, virtually no-one engaged
in any sea-oriented activity was free from the threat of official action.
From 1552 onwards, after their attempts to have trade channels opened
had failed, Wang and his colleagues turned their large following to an
alternative course of action, and began systematically raiding the
south-eastern coast of China.36
The Pirates and Chia-hsing
The role of Chia-hsing in the rise of piracy was succinctly
expressed in the introduction to an eighteenth century account of the
pirate troubles at Cha-p’u, the walled port town of P ’ing-hu district:
At the beginning of the Ming (the port office at Kan-p’u) was abolished and never re-established. The important men of the business community went away, and the population of the two
towns (Kan-p’u and Cha-p’u) was desolated. But there were secret meetings at sea, for it was not possible to prevent completely the coming and going of foreign ships. One after the other they anchored close to the shore and met privately with the substantial people of the inland markets. These wealthy men of the interior cunningly amassed goods (received
from the overseas traders) without paying for them, so that the illegal traders hated them, and joined forces with bandits and induced them to invade both northern and southern
Chekiang, causing great trouble.37
For the author of this statement, writing two hundred years after the
recorded in STSL 28/7/5 (28 July 1549) . Quoted in Katayama, "Kasei kaiko":412, fn. 18. The entry notes that the magistrate of Yii-yao district in reporting this incident said that "Wo bandits came and plundered" (Wo-tsei ju k3 o u ), while the body of the report
describes Wang Chih and his colleagues as dishonest merchants
(chien-shang).
35 Wiethoff, Seeverbotspolitik, pp.104-5.
36 See Katayama, "Kasei kaik<5":416.
37 Cha-p3u chih 1757:6.la-b. On the history of the port offices at
K a n - p ’u and Cha-p’u, see Cha-p3u chih 1757:6.1a; H.F. Schurmann, Economic Structure of the Yuan Dynasty, Harvard-Yenching Institute Studies XVI, Cambridge, Mass. 1967, pp.223-4, 230.
event, the link between the Hang-chou Bay ports, the overseas trade, and the development of piracy seemed clear. In contemporary accounts,
however, such links are not immediately apparent.
In fact, contemporary local accounts of the first clashes in 1553 with the pirates on the Chia-hsing coast convey a sense of shock and surprise. The authors do not make explicit any prior connection between the area they lived in and the phenomenon they were experiencing. The impressions given by these accounts is reinforced by the local
gazetteers of the period which suggest an abrupt change in
administrative pre-occupations as officials responded to the crisis.
These suggestions, that the pirate attacks were somehow alien, unrelated to normal life and conditions, may be partly explained by the fact that the delta region was somewhat distant from those parts of the coast where in the late 1540s and early 1550s the final transformation of the overseas traders into pirates had taken place. By the time piracy erupted along the coast of Chia-hsing in 1553, the lines of conflict had already been sharply drawn: the pirates had become an invading force, directly hostile to the Ming government, attacking district offices when they could and clashing with government troops. Nevertheless the major premises of the passage quoted above — that the pirates were the culmination of an evolution beginning in the early years of the dynasty; that the invasions stemmed from the nature of the relationship between the overseas traders and those who were powerful in internal trade; and that Chia-hsing society and economy were involved in the evolution of that relationship — are borne out by circumstantial evidence of economic and social development in Chia-hsing prefecture in the decades before 1553.
In later gazetteers, the pirate invasions continued to stand out as the watershed in the sixteenth century history of the prefecture.
However, succeeding generations of local historians were able to suggest the connection of the phenomenon with developments within the prefecture in the first half of the century. In the late nineteenth century, the compilers of Chia-hsing gazetteers were still adding materials from the Cheng-te and early Chia-ching reigns; these threw light on social and economic conditions and provided a background against which the pirate
invasions into Chia-hsing looked less exotic. The society reflected in the 1549 gazetteer was peaceful and prosperous despite admitted
inequities in the tax system and a certain unease about the lack of military preparedness in the face of growing signs of disorder. Yet
from the 1879 gazetteer, Chia-hsing prefecture in the mid-Ming period emerges as a considerably more complex and less harmonious society.
Contributing to disharmony were groups within local society over whom the authorities had little control, and whose interests and loyalties lent themselves to smuggling and other illegal occupations. These groups formed power structures outside official oversight. Their patterns of life and values were unlike those of the agricultural
village communities whom the regime regarded as the basis of the empire. The major groups of this kind were the people of the coastal fringe
(particularly the salt workers), the boat people of the inland waterways, and the trading communities of market towns and city suburbs. Common to most of these groups was involvement in trade, transport and
communications, as opposed to agriculture or manufacture. •
The sea-side and sea-going population of Chia-hsing and Sung-chiang prefectures were renowned for their hardy and independent characters and
their economic vulnerability.39 Many of them were involved in salt smuggling and some in local piracy. Administrators were aware that if the livelihood of these people were threatened, civil disorder could be expected to follow. The most readily identifiable group among them were the salt workers. Under the Ming there were thirty-four salt-pans in the Liang-Che salt area, which covered the whole of Chekiang and that part of Nanchihli south of the Yangtze. Seven of these pans lay within
the jurisdiction of the Chia-hsing salt office. They were scattered along the coast from Chin-shan Guard just inside the Nanchihli border to close to Hangchow itself, with the greatest concentration in the vicinity of Hai-yen.40 At the beginning of the dynasty, several
38 See fn. 1.
39 For example, Li Kuang-ming, Chia-ching yü-Wo Chiang-Che ohu~k3 o-ohiin
k3 ao (An investigation of the local and extra-provincial troops in
Chiang-Che in the anti-pirate campaign of the Chia-ching period), p.24; p.139, quoting the Ming shih kao\ and p.139, quoting the
thousand families registered as salt households (tsao-hu.) had lived in the Chia-hsing area. A few, like the Kuo family of P ’ing-hu, had since made money and entered the scholar-official class through the salt
trade; the great majority were low status and poor.
In the early sixteenth century, when a gazetteer of the inland district of Chia-shan was compiled, so little was internal security on
the minds of the editors that not a single reference appears on the subject or any related topic. In the section on population registers, however, an estimated "several thousand families" of boat people
(ch3uan-hu) are mentioned for that district alone. These boat people
were not included in the li-chia organization of population for tax purposes. Attempts to register them and to tax them had been generally unsuccessful.42 In other words, the local authorities had no way of controlling where they went, what goods they carried or whom they dealt with. Although there is no direct evidence that the boat people were a
regular source of trouble, there is little doubt that besides their legitimate petty trading activities, they were involved in smuggling and other potentially subversive activities.
Sources of potential disruption were also found in the market towns. In the sixteenth century as many as thirty towns within Chia-hsing
prefecture had been officially designated as population centres of strategic or economic importance {chen).h3 Several of these towns in the wealthy silk-producing area close to the Grand Canal had populations of forty or fifty thousand people. Besides wealthy merchants, many scholar-gentry families lived in these towns, with the basis of their wealth lying in silk production and trade rather than in land-owning. With their large populations, wealth, and influential scholar-gentry,
40 Hsü Hong, Ming-tai ti yen-fa (The salt regulations of the Ming dynasty), Ph.D thesis, National Taiwan University, 1973, p p . 7 f f. ; Cartier, Une reforme locale, p.32, quoting Wada Sei, Minshi
shokkashi yakuchü, pp.421-2.