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By Root 2944 0

’s harbor was full of small islets, sandbars, and other shipping hazards. Because of the area’s notorious haze, navigation was difficult—when I puttered about the harbor during my visits, I sometimes couldn’t see boats that were only a few hundred yards away. The main docks were several miles up the Jiulong, in water so shallow that ships had to be towed in on the incoming tide. The location was an anti-piracy measure: criminals would not dare raid the docks, because the incoming tide that permitted entrance was too strong to allow escape. At the same time, many Yuegang shipowners were pirates—the harbor protected them from people like themselves.

The old city, full of Tang dynasty shrines, was connected by a raised walkway to the newer Ming city, built further inland with larger walls. Inside both were packed huddles of houses—“bandit dens,” sneered one official in the 1560s, whose inhabitants “have collaborated with foreigners to spread chaos to the detriment of the local area for a long time now.” Indeed, Yuegang was such a pirates’ paradise that at one point Beijing divided the populace into groups of ten families that had to account for their members every five days; if one family did something illegal, all ten would be punished.

Imperial China’s day-to-day history is largely recorded in the annual gazetteers sent to Beijing from each of the nation’s counties. Yuegang’s county had so much wokou trouble that the gazetteer’s compilers eventually devoted a special appendix to it: “Bandit Incursions.”

Bandit Incursions began in 1547, when a Dutch merchant/pirate/smuggler group set up a base on Wu Island, a recently shuttered naval base just south of Yuegang’s harbor. “Dutch” is a bit of a misnomer; the traders flew a Dutch flag, but they were a hodgepodge of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch hustlers with some semi-enslaved Malays. Chinese and Japanese wokou happily sent ships to trade with them, as did legitimate businesspeople from Yuegang; a busy, multilingual market sprang up in Wu Island’s small but serviceable harbor. Unenthusiastic about the encampment was Zhu Wan, governor for both Fujian and Zhejiang, the province to the north. He dispatched soldiers to drive out the foreigners.

Wu Island consists of two rocky, steep, scrub-covered mounds with a low “saddle” between them. The Dutch had ensconced themselves in an improvised fort atop one of the mounds, forcing the Chinese to attack uphill. In a brief skirmish, the merchant/pirate group beat back the Chinese forces. Zhu changed tactics: he imprisoned ninety local merchants who had traded at Wu Island. In a gesture that even the unsympathetic gazetteer described as altruistic, the Dutch sent emissaries to plead for their allies’ lives. Dismissing the entreaties, Governor Zhu beheaded all ninety. The Dutch abandoned Wu Island and gave up their attempt to trade openly; later they roamed the region, preying on the very Fujianese merchants and smugglers with whom they previously had collaborated.

A former pirate stronghold, Wu Island, in the hazy waters off of Yuegang, is now a center for fishing and aquaculture. (Photo credit 4.8)

Zhu Wan was anything but satisfied. A rigid, moralistic former magistrate, Zhu irritated his superiors by denouncing corruption at every level in a spray of angry memoranda. He was such a stickler that when his subordinates gave small gifts to his visiting family he punished himself with a hefty fine. Late in 1548 Zhu assaulted a major smuggling base in Zhejiang, scuttling more than 1,200 illicit boats. Led by the infamous “Baldy” Li, wokou fled by the hundred to a new base in the extreme southern end of Fujian. Three months later Zhu’s men hunted them down there, killing almost 150 and capturing scores of Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese smugglers.

Many of Li’s gang turned out to be from influential Yuegang merchant families.3 Angered by this evidence of routine collusion among local elites and foreign smugglers, Zhu ordered all the captives to be summarily executed—the second round of executions in two years. The executions united Zhu