page_title: History of the Ming dynasty
section_title: Illegal trade, piracy, and war with Japan
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Ming dynasty / Isolation to globalization / Illegal trade, piracy, and war with Japan
caption_attribution_description: English: Sixteenth-century Japanese pirate (Wokou) raids against China &amp; Korea. Based on Map 23, from The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7: The Ming Dynasty 1368-1644, Part I (Cambridge University Press: 1988) Modern provinces of China are shown. Created and copyright (2004) by Yu Ninjie, with thanks to suggestions from Ran. Released under the GNU FDL. 中文（繁體）‎: 16世紀倭寇侵襲中國以及朝鮮。
context_page_description: The Ming dynasty, officially the Great Ming or Empire of the Great Ming, founded by the peasant rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang, known as the Hongwu Emperor, was an imperial dynasty of China. It was the successor to the Yuan dynasty and the predecessor of the short-lived Shun dynasty, which was in turn succeeded by the Qing dynasty. At its height, the Ming dynasty had a population of 160 million people, while some assert the population could actually have been as large as 200 million.
  Ming rule saw the construction of a vast navy and a standing army of 1,000,000 troops. Although private maritime trade and official tribute missions from China took place in previous dynasties, the size of the tributary fleet under the Muslim eunuch admiral Zheng He in the 15th century surpassed all others in grandeur. There were enormous projects of construction, including the restoration of the Grand Canal, the restoration of the Great Wall as it is seen today, and the establishment of the Forbidden City in Beijing during the first quarter of the 15th century. The Ming dynasty is, for many reasons, generally known as a period of stable effective government.
context_section_description: In 1479, the vice president of the Ministry of War burned the court records documenting Zheng He's voyages; it was one of many events signalling China's shift to an inward foreign policy. Shipbuilding laws were implemented that restricted vessels to a small size; the concurrent decline of the Ming navy allowed the growth of piracy along China's coasts. Japanese pirates—or wokou—began staging raids on Chinese ships and coastal communities, although much of the acts of piracy were carried out by native Chinese.
  Instead of mounting a counterattack, Ming authorities chose to shut down coastal facilities and starve the pirates out; all foreign trade was to be conducted by the state under the guise of formal tribute missions. These were known as the hai jin laws, a strict ban on private maritime activity until its formal abolishment in 1567. In this period government-managed overseas trade with Japan was carried out exclusively at the seaport of Ningbo, trade with the Philippines exclusively at Fuzhou, and trade with Indonesia exclusively at Guangzhou. Even then the Japanese were only allowed into port once every ten years and were allowed to bring a maximum of three hundred men on two ships; these laws encouraged many Chinese merchants to engage in widespread illegal trade and smuggling.
  The low point in relations between Ming China and Japan occurred during the rule of the great Japanese warlord Hideyoshi, who in 1592 announced he was going to conquer China. In two campaigns (now known collectively as the Imjin War) the Japanese fought with the Korean and Ming armies. Though initially successful, the Japanese forces were pushed back southward after the intervention of Ming China. With the combined strength of Ming and Korean forces on land, and the naval prowess of Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin at sea, the campaign ended in defeat for the Japanese and their armies were forced to withdraw from the Korean peninsula. However, the victory came at relatively large cost to the Ming government's treasury: some 26,000,000 ounces of silver.
caption: 16th century Japanese pirate raids.
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