Zhejiang Piracy

In the winter of 1799-1800 When Ruan Yuan first arrived in Zhejiang as governor, his most urgent task was the suppression of coastal piracy. the initiation and implementation of a comprehensive program to halt the piracy off the southeast coast of China within the directives of Jiaqing remained a major challenge for him during hsi tenure in this province, 1799-1805, and again in 1808-9. This task was more difficult because the program had to be implemented without drawing from the regular tax revenue of the province.

However, piracy was rarely mentioned in local biji and poetry collection, and even local gazetteers.

Did local elites not recognize the problem?
Did they made some adjustment to their writing? if so, why?
Can we find any local records on pirates?
biji
吴昌炽 客窗闲话
查氏女（吴， 18－21），万历倭寇， 盐官。
姚幕府 （吴，235－238），台逆，
吴昌炽 续客窗闲话
难女 （吴， 253－256）

胡宗宪与徐谓曾在尖山练兵以御倭，乾隆有否诗句？记得《海塘录》中古迹一栏中，曾经记录此句，不知乾隆有否有诗句？

海宁县志（1776）
卷十六，杂志，兵寇，

海昌备志
艺文志

Piracy in Zhejiang was a serious problem to the Qing empire in the eighteenth century. In the winter of 1799-1800 when Ruan Yuan first arrived in Zhejiang as governor, his most urgent task was the suppression of Coastal Piracy (Wei, 81).

pirates had plagued the south China coast throughout the history. The goldern age of Chinese piracy appeared in the Ming and the Qing, roughly the sixteenth century thorugh nineteenth centuries. at teh time there was an unprecedented growth in chinese piarcy unsurpassed in size and scope anywhere else in the world. Antony points out that piracy surged in three great waves:One from 1522 to 1574, another from 1620 to 1684, and the last from 1780 to 1810 (Antony, 19).

Wokou in the mid-Ming:
the first pirate epoch emerged as a result of the imperial state' embargo on most maritime commerce. Piracy and smugglign became the chief means for conducting trade. Correspondingly, large-scale piracy was dominated by merchants who had littel choice but to turn to piracy to conduct business. piracy was intensely internationlized and highly politicized.
wokou pirates composed of Japanese, Chinese, and other foreign freebooters. Piracy was largely an inherent by-product of the Ming sea bans, which forged legitimate merchatns and seamen into criminals. great merchant-pirates such as Wang Zhi, Hong Dizhen, Wu Ping, and Xu Chaoguang, who combined trade with plunder.

haikou: Ming-Qing Dynastic Transition
Piracy was symptomatic of the political anarchy, economic instability, and social dislocations of the era. Many of the sea rebels(haikou) fused commerce with piracy and insurgency. The Zheng family, who took advantage of the choas to build up a huge maritime empire, exemplified the pirates-cum-merchants-cum rebels of this epoch.
Wei argues that it was the anti-dynastic character of piracy during the early Qing that added a political dimension to their threat in the mid-Qing. This is because the coast of Fujian and zhejiang had provided a strong base for the Ming loyalist movement in the wake of the Qing conquest. One example is Zheng Chenggong (1625-62), who had pledged himself to the Ming cause, had organized the province of Fujian into military unites and staged expeditions against the Manchu troops from there.
In 1658 he landed in zhejiang and Jiangsu with a force estimated to be between 100,000 and 170,000 men. After some initial success, his campaign ended in a disaster. he then retreated to Xiamen and from there to Taiwan because he needed a territory that was larger and more secure from the Qing, but which still was located proximate to the major east Asia maritime trade routes. After defeating Dutch and convinced his subordinates some of whom thought that Taiwan lacked "supplies and ship building facilities, Zheng and hsi successors settled in Taiwan and continued to raid the Zhejiang and Fujian coast with munitions sold to them by Dutch and English traders. The Qing court declare an embargo against all foreign imports later that year and ordered all coastal ports cloased to foreign trade and all inhabitants evacuated thirty to fifty li inland in order to cut off supplies to the Zheng group. This embargo was lifted in 1685 when Zheng's successors surrendered Taiwan to the Qing and the coast was considered safe from organized attacks once more. However, the Provincial officials were told to continue their vigilance for any possible sign of a resurgence of such activities. (Wei, 83; Struve,190-192)


Jiangyan dadao: Piracy in the mid-Qing
This era is marked by the rise of several major pirate leagues, composed of thousands of vessels and more than seventy thousand individuals. The nature of piracy had changed significantly in China. European free-booter and the great merchant-pirates of the earlier epochs had all but disappeared;instead, this was an age dominated by commoner seafarer-pirates.

Natural disasters, famines, money shortages, local self-defense efforts, embargoes, and military campaigns, coming together, produced severe hardships not only for the pirates but also for the people on shore. When the pirates, who by the summer of 1809 had become desperate for food and other supplies, attacked coastal and delta villages and market towns, local communities stepped up their defensive measures to protect what had become increasingly scarce resources. The pirate incursions into the prosperous heartland of the delta worked to unite local communities and the state in the fight against the pirates.

In the 1780s, the pirates preying on coastal residents and offshore traders were primarily men from localities in Southern Zhejiang and coastal Fujian. Residents of this region, living "along the irregular and inhospitable shore," turned to the sea (Wei, 83). These Chinese pirates had come from fishing and seafaring element of the populace. Natural disasters such as the severe flooding along the zhejiang and fujian coast in 1794, the worst in one hundred years, further disrupted the already depressed economy for the region. The price of rice, for instance, rose by eigth hundred copper cash per shi in the spring of 1795 (Qing shi lu, Qianlong, 1489:4; GZD, JQ000182 (JQ1/1/17) [1796/3/25]) the rice prices fluctuated seasonally in China. heavy exaction and drastic depreciation in the value of copper cash in terms of silver further added to the peopole's burden. the displaced persons joined the ranks of the populace who sought to supplement their income by robbing travelers and traders along the coast. their activities were disturbing for the authorities, but were not menacing as the pirate organized into groups (Wei, 83; Antony, ).

Bibliography:

Antony, Robert J. Like froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and seafarers in Late Imperial south China.
wei, Bety. "Internal Security and Coastal Control: Piracy Suppression in Zhejiang, 1799-1809"
Ruan Yuan 1764-1849: The Life and Work of a Major Scholar in China before the Opium War, 2006

Lynn A. Struve. The Southern Ming 1644-1662 (1984).

Fitzpatrick,Merrilyn. 1979. "Local Interests and the Anti-Pirate Administration China's South-East, 1555-1565." ch'ing-shih wen-t'i 4.2:1-50.

Guan Wenfa. 1994. "Qingdai zhongye Cai Qian haishang wuzhuang jituan xingzhi banxi"[ An analysis of the nature of the maritime armed groups of Cai Qian in the mid-Qing period]. zhongugo shi yanjiu 1:93-100.

宗族、市场、盗寇与蛋民——明以后珠江三角洲的族群与社会，《中国社会经济史研究》2004年第三期。（与萧凤霞合作）

Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan: Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of South China, in Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, Donald S. Sutton (Ed),Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China，University of California Press,1995.(与萧凤霞合作)