page_title: Jiajing wokou raids
section_title: Military action in Fujian
hierarchical_section_title: Jiajing wokou raids / The end of the wokou crisis / Military action in Fujian
caption_attribution_description: General Qi Jiguang
context_page_description: The Jiajing wokou raids caused extensive damage to the coast of China in the 16th century, during the reign of the Jiajing Emperor in the Ming dynasty. The term "wokou" originally referred to Japanese pirates who crossed the sea and raided Korea and China; however, by the mid-Ming, the wokou consisted of multinational crewmen that included the Japanese and the Portuguese, but a great majority of them were Chinese instead. Mid-Ming wokou activity began to pose a serious problem in the 1540s, reached its peak in 1555, and subsided by 1567, with the extent of the destruction spreading across the coastal regions of Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong.
context_section_description: Hu Zongxian turned his attention to Fujian after the situation in Zhejiang settled down, however, as he did so, his ally Yan Song began to fall out of imperial favour and finally lost his position as Senior Grand Secretary in June 1562. In the following purge of Yan's associates, Hu Zongxian was impeached for being too friendly to Wang Zhi and mishandling military funds, among other perceived transgressions. The Jiajing Emperor interceded on his behalf and allowed Hu to retire with all his titles intact in 1563. In any case, Hu Zongxian's supreme commander position overseeing three provinces was considered too powerful especially since the wokou had moved away from the crucial Jiangnan region, so the position was abolished after Hu Zongxian left office — grand coordinators became the paramount figure in those provinces again. Later, in November 1565, new evidence arose incriminating Hu Zongxian of trying to bribe Yan Song's son, and Hu died shortly after while in prison.
  In Fujian, Wang Zhi's followers from Zhoushan took over Kinmen and made that island their base to raid up and down the coast in alliance with Cantonese pirates. In December 1562, the prefectural city Xinghua (present-day Putian) was taken after a month-long siege, along with many major towns surrounding it. The general Qi Jiguang was made vice commander while his fellow wokou-fighter Tan Lun was made the Grand Coordinator of Fujian in 1563. Qi Jiguang had by this time assembled his own army from able-bodied farmers of Yiwu and devised the mandarin duck formation (鴛鴦陣) to counter the formidable Japanese contingents among the wokou. This army proved successful in successive battles, and Qi continued to train Fujianese recruits the same way. With his highly disciplined troops, Qi Jiguang retook the city of Xinghua and destroyed the last major pirate base in Fujian by May 1563. Those pirates who had managed to escape and to sail farther south were gradually killed or captured in a series of campaigns conducted in southern Jiangxi and Guangdong between 1564 and 1566. Through these campaigns, the mountainous region between Guangdong, Fujian, and southern Jiangxi, which had been a haven for bandits since the early years of the sixteenth century, was brought under imperial control. By 1567, piracy was no longer seen as a serious threat on the Chinese coast.
caption: Qi Jiguang
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