1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [75]
Emboldened by Zhu’s absence, pirate gangs seized entire towns, pillaging “until the stench of rotten flesh forced them to leave.” In one city north of Yuegang more than twenty thousand people died after a pirate assault. Across southeast China, the Ming historian Luo Yuejiong recalled, terrified families “ate without cooking their food, and slept unsoundly on their pillows; farmers left behind their pitchforks and women dozed off on their looms.” When the wokou attacked, Luo wrote,
fathers and sons, young and old, were taken prisoner and followed the pirates on the road. As for the dead, their heads and bodies were found in different places, bones left out in the grassy swamps, heads stiff. Looking on the horizon, the coastal counties were almost nothing but hilly ruins.
Wokou were “ burning homes, seizing women and children, and stealing huge quantities of valuables,” wrote the chronicler Zhuge Yuansheng in 1556. “Officials and common people alike were killed with weapons, their bodies, numbering in the tens of millions [an idiom for “huge numbers”], filled ravines. Government troops dared not oppose them.” At the mere appearance of wokou in an area, he wrote, “people scream in panic and take flight.” In a scene straight out of a Stephen Chow martial-arts comedy,
[a] messenger from Songjiang [near Shanghai] rode at a gallop into town and cried out to his followers, “We’re here! we’re here!” The locals misunderstood him and thought the [pirates] were coming. Men and women scurried like ants, nothing could stop them. Women and children were separated, families lost countless valuables and possessions. At the time, more than 600 soldiers were garrisoned at the city, stationed on the bastions along the walls; they all threw down their weapons and armor and ran away. Not until the next day did calm return to the town.
In Yuegang the wokou didn’t strike back at the government until 1557, according to the county gazetteer, when a disgruntled farmer secretly opened the city gates to two pirate gangs. Overwhelming all resistance, the wokou “abducted more than a thousand people and burned more than a thousand homes.”
Dire as it was, the assault was a sideshow. Even as wokou beset Yuegang, twenty-four of the city’s merchants pooled resources and built a fleet to work with the pirates in what amounted to an interlocking network of joint ventures. The traders had access to domestic markets; the smugglers, to foreign goods. Known as the Twenty-four Generals, the merchants decided to control access to their home markets by carving up Yuegang, gangland style, into neighborhoods, each dominated by a single “general” in an earthen-walled fortress. Three hundred imperial soldiers were sent to dislodge them. The Twenty-four Generals beat back the attack. Observing this success, other smugglers in other parts of Fujian followed the Generals’ lead, forming the Twenty-four Constellations and the Thirty-six Bravos. The region became a bewildering, violent amalgam of overlapping loyalties and betrayals, as business gangs and pirate gangs from different neighborhoods, regions, and nations vied among themselves for control of the smuggling trade.
For Coastal Surveillance Vice Commissioner Shao Pian—the late Zhu Wan’s subordinate—the last straw occurred when Fujianese traders invited three thousand Japanese and Portuguese smugglers to reoccupy the former Dutch base at Wu Island. Shao had no good options. Bled by cutbacks, the imperial navy was outgunned and outmanned by the wokou—indeed, for its missions it often hired smugglers, who had superior skill and experience. Worse, he could not trust