Kingdoms at China’s Edge - Why Pirates Disappear from the National Story
Yifu Xing
Quanzhou is home to China’s rich, dynasty-spanning maritime history.[1] Today, it has become a thriving tourist location, where people come to visit the commercial ancient city, museums holding relics of traded goods and navigational equipment used by sailors, and historic religious sites such as the Kaiyuan temple.[2] Among these landmarks is Chongwu with its Ming city wall (崇武墙) on the southeastern coast of the Fujian Province.[3] Constructed in 1387 to deter pirate invasions, it is a gateway to a powerful story, one that can stand its ground as one of the most important aspects of Chinese maritime history: the story of pirates.[4]
However, compared to the other popular landmarks in Quanzhou and Fujian, Chongwu doesn’t see as many tourists. During the 2025 National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival, the Quanzhou Culture and Tourism Bureau reported low visitor numbers.[5] Across Quanzhou, the dominant heritage narrative tends to highlight the city’s history of “legitimate” maritime trade, with museums emphasizing government records and archives from Ming trade offices. But rarely is there any detailed information on piracy, with only Koxinga and Japanese pirates being occasionally mentioned.
This phenomenon is not unusual. In conventional wisdom, pirates are often seen as insignificant sea bandits, or individual and isolated groups of rebels that merely pose as a nuisance to empires.[6] However, this is misleading, as piracy was an integral and often overlooked part of Chinese maritime history, spanning across the Ming and Qing dynasties.[7] These sea lords took the form of flexible, powerful rogue states which influenced nearby land empires and took advantage of them for their own gain.[8] The earliest evidence of this were the “wokou” pirates in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.[9]
In the mid-sixteenth century, the Ming court repeatedly reported that the southeastern coast was overrun by “wokou.”[10]Despite the literal translation of the term being “Japanese pirates,” the term covers maritime raiding groups operating along the China coast, composed largely of Chinese smugglers and merchants (especially from Fujian and Zhejiang), along with some Japanese warriors, traders, and occasionally Portuguese or other foreign intermediaries.[11] By the sixteenth century, the scale of piracy dwarfed anything that had come before as fleets consisting reputedly of thousands of pirates attacked the southeast coast of China and engaged in illicit raiding trading expeditions.[12] The most powerful pirate leader at this time was a man called Wang Zhi. By 1552, he was powerful enough to suppress rival pirates, as expatriates flocked to join him from Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces.[13] He was also able to actively negotiate with Ming officials for trade privileges; by the mid-1550s, Chinese officials said his name “reverberated across the seas” and that pirates who did not accept his authority “could not survive.”[14]
Notably, Wang Zhi was able to achieve this overwhelming control of the seas by strategically portraying himself as a righteous sea lord. At the time, Jiang Zhou and Chen Keyuan were Ming intermediaries and emissaries connected to Hu Zongxian, the Ming official trying to deal with the wokou crisis. Their job was to go find Wang Zhi and persuade him to return to China, using promises of pardon and possible trade liberalization with Japan.[15] But when they reached him in the Gotō Islands, Wang staged the meeting like a royal audience.[16] An account of this encounter survives in Zheng Ruozeng’s 1562 Illustrated Compendium of Maritime Defense [筹海图编].[17] It described how Wang Zhi came out from his mansion surrounded by guards, flags, fine clothing, and the symbols of command, making himself appear less like a criminal and more like a ruler of the seas.[18]
What made Wang Zhi, and the vast majority of pirates so effective was his ability to shift between identities. To the Ming officials, he could admit that he was a “fugitive official,” suggesting that he still belonged, in some way, within the world of Chinese political order.[19] But at the same time, he called himself a maritime ruler—even “King of Hui”—and presented himself as someone whose authority was recognized across the seas.[20] This allowed him to turn his outlaw status into bargaining power: he was dangerous enough to be feared but organized and powerful enough to warrant negotiation.[21]
During the height of the wokou crisis, the Ming court framed piracy as foreign invasion and treason. Yet along the coast, the distinction between pirate and trader was far less rigid.[22] Often, “the pirates and the traders were the same people,” and when maritime prohibitions intensified, “all the people on the coast had become pirates.”[23] Indeed, Fujian’s economy depended heavily on overseas trade, especially for grain imports and silver inflow.[24] When trade was banned, merchants lost their livelihoods and shipping networks were forced underground. Thus, piracy often represented the continuation of commerce by other means. Coastal communities that depended on maritime exchange were therefore more likely to see pirate networks as necessary intermediaries rather than existential enemies.[25] Perceptions hardened only when violence directly disrupted local stability—when raids burned villages or disrupted food supply.[26]
By the early 1600s, under figures like Li Dan and especially Zheng Zhilong (Koxinga’s father), piracy had become uncontrollable for the Ming. Specifically, by 1627, Zheng Zhilong had become a major maritime threat. Historian Tonio Andrade claims that he was leading “four hundred junks and tens of thousands of men,” and that his forces attacked the Chinese coast, seized merchant ships, raided cities, and defeated Ming forces.[27] A Ming official described him as “extraordinarily cunning” and skilled in sea warfare, with more than 30,000 followers, large warships, and powerful foreign-made cannons.[28] He became so powerful that Ming officials complained that government ships were too few, too small, and too weak to resist him.[29] Furthermore, by forcing nearly all ships to buy immunity passes from pirates, Zheng Zhilong made merchants behave as if pirate power, rather than imperial authority, governed the sea lanes.[30]
Historian Tonio Andrade notes that Zheng’s power rested on reputation. He enforced discipline and provided protection and security to merchants, thereby attracting followers, including many fleeing starvation during famine years.[31] For coastal communities facing economic volatility, trading with pirates proved to be more profitable, circumventing maritime trade restrictions by the Ming government.[32] By the height of Zheng’s dominance in the 17th century, nearly all ships in the South China sea were willing to pay protection payments for his promise that pirates would not raid them. Even the Ming state ultimately acknowledged that coastal stability could not be achieved “without the help of the Zheng.”[33]
Zheng also became the main facilitator of Ming and Dutch relations. Zheng Zhilong became the gateway between Dutch and Ming trade because the Dutch wanted Chinese silk and coastal commerce but could not trade directly with Ming China on easy terms, especially after being pushed out of Penghu in 1624. Taiwan gave the Dutch an offshore base, but they still needed Fujianese brokers, sailors, merchants, and protection networks to connect them to the Chinese coast.[34]As it turned out, Zheng was exactly the person they needed. He had spent his teenage years as a Dutch translator and pirate partner, and the Dutch allowed him to use their ships to build his own maritime organization.[35] He then used his pirate army to facilitate Dutch and Ming trade, in return for access to Dutch ports to build fleets and ships, and access to advanced weaponry and resources.[36] At this time, Ming officials began to realize they couldn’t counter his power, so they offered to recruit him, under the dubious justification that a virtuous emperor and could turn rebels to the side of the good. It was used as a last resort.[37]
However, rarely is any of this massive story mentioned in the conventional version of Chinese history. The latest issue of the public school textbook used to teach Chinese history describes the wokou as primarily constituting Japanese pirates (日本海盗), combined with some other miscellaneous groups, even when historians have concluded that the vast majority of the wokou were Chinese, such as Wang Zhi.[38] Even Koxinga is only mentioned in the textbook solely as a “Southern Ming general” (南明将领) who “expelled the Dutch colonizers and recovered Taiwan.” The fact that he was arguably the most powerful sea-lord to ever sail the South China sea, and that his family had virtually independent control of Taiwan until 1683 is something that is left out of the textbooks.[39]
So why is all this history largely glossed over in the modern Chinese story? Perhaps the pirate story, and the ways in which maritime powers threatened the unity of the Chinese nation, does not fit easily into the Chinese national narrative. This may partially explain why cities such as Chongwu are failing to fully build a compelling historical identity around piracy. Historically, piracy has never cohesively fit into the Chinese story. In the Ming dynasty, for example, the phrase “Japanese pirates” served to define the maritime world as an uncivilized, peripheral region excluded from China proper, and correspondingly made China’s land-based, agricentric regimes seem normal.[40]
This creates a problem for the status quo, in which China has curated for itself a unified identity. To acknowledge that there once existed a separate, detached kingdom or sea-based order on the border of China, one that the state could not fully control, risks making it appear weak. Pirate power complicates the image of continuous sovereignty. Zheng Zhilong, Wang Zhi, and other maritime leaders’ existence suggests that the sea could become an alternative political space, one where state authority was negotiated.
This difficulty is not unique to pirates. The idea of “nomads” in general is also very difficult for official state histories to acknowledge in their true power. Throughout history, there has existed a civilizational bias against nomads: the bias of settled states against mobile peoples.[41] Because history is often written by settled states, we have largely come to accept this form of society as the norm.[42] Whether it was Sima Qian on the Xiongnu, or Tacitus’s Germania, nomadic groups were repeatedly labelled as barbarians, not as the distinctly powerful political formation many probably were.[43]
The struggle of popular imagination with the legitimacy of nomadic states is no regional issue. A similar problem can be traced in American history, where indigenous groups such as the Comanches are often imagined as passive victims of the expanding frontier, and “savages” rather than as active political and military powers.[44] In many popular narratives, Indigenous peoples appear only when settlers arrive, as though they were simply obstacles or victims of colonization. But indigenous groups such as the Comanches were not passive.[45] Modern historians such as Pekka Hämäläinen now show that they built a powerful mobile empire across the southern plains, and often wreaked havoc on Spanish, Mexican, and American authorities.[46] However, you do not see them on modern maps of the 19th century – which in reality show the claims of European settled states to rule America rather than the administration on the ground.
This civilizational bias towards settled states has blinded us from a world that is heavily influenced, and in many ways kept together by “nomadic” groups.[47] Domination of Filipinos in global seafaring has led to unique ship cultures across the globe; the world of universities are shaped by mobile professing and international student networks; digital nomads travel the world, creating transnational communities. Perhaps the pirates teach a teach us a lesson: that we need to be alert to these global cultures, and to recognize that they are a permanent feature of the world we live in, not just to look at them with aberration, as people who have temporarily left a homeland.
Notes:
[1] Centre, UNESCO World Heritage. n.d. “Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China.” UNESCO World Heritage Centre. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1561/.
[2] “Things to Do in Quanzhou, UNESCO World Cultural Heritage City_ News_ 福建省人民政府门户网站.” 2024. Fujian.gov.cn. 2024. https://www.fujian.gov.cn/english/news/202402/t20240207_6393886.htm.
[3] “Chongwu Ancient City: A Photographic Haven for History Enthusiasts.” 2025. Cifparts.info. September 4, 2025. https://www.chinahistorytrip.com/chongwu-ancient-city-a-photographic-haven-for-history-enthusiasts/.
[4] Ibid.
[5] “创新高！泉州游客超1000万人次！总花费超90亿元-泉州要闻-泉州动态-政务公开-泉州市人民政府.” 2025. Quanzhou.gov.cn. 2025. https://www.quanzhou.gov.cn/zfb/xxgk/zfxxgkzl/qzdt/qzyw/202510/t20251010_3216675.htm.
[6] Kenneth M. Swope and Tonio Andrade, Early Modern East Asia: War, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange (London: Routledge, 2017), 87.
[7] Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang, Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550-1700 (2016), 7—8. Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 2—6.
[8] Andrade and Hang, Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai, 6.
[9] Ibid., 38—39.
[10] Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates, 89.
[11] Andrade and Hang, Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai, 7—8.
[12] Patrizia Carioti, “The Zhengs’ Maritime Power in the International Context of the 17th Century Far Eastern Seas: The Rise of a “Centralized Piratical Organization” and its Gradual Development Into an Informal “State”,” Ming Qing Yanjiu 5, 31.
[13] Andrade and Hang, Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai, 54—58.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Kwan- wai So, Japanese Piracy in Ming China during the 16th Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1975), chap.! 4, esp.! 70–71; and Kanbe Teruo, “Tei Shunkō to Shō Shū,” Ōita Daigaku Kyōiku Fukushi Kagakubu kenkyū kiyō 21, no. 2 (1999): 109–124.
[16] Andrade and Hang, Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai, 55.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Zheng Ruozeng, Chouhai tubian, 619.
[19] Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills, From Ming to Ch'ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-century China (Yale University Press, 1979), 210--213.
[20] Zheng Ruozeng, Chouhai tubian, 619.
[21] 林仁川, 血拼的海路: 明末清初私人海上贸易 (2024), chap. 3, sec. 1.
[22] Kwan W. So, Japanese Piracy in Ming China During the 16th Century (1975), 214.
[23] Ibid.
[24] 林仁川, 明末清初私人海上贸易, chap. 1, sec. 1.
[25] Tonio Andrade, Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 52.
[26] Kenneth M. Swope and Tonio Andrade, Early Modern East Asia, 152—153.
[27] Tonio Andrade, Lost Colony, 29.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Andrade and Hang, Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai, 138.
[30] Tonio Andrade, Lost Colony, 52.
[31] Ibid., 29.
[32] Ibid., 52.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Weichung Cheng, War, Trade and Piracy in the China Seas (1622-1683) (Leiden: BRILL, 2013), 47–61, 63–74, 247–249
[35] Tonio Andrade, Lost Colony, 28.
[36] Ibid., 30.
[37] Ibid.
[38] 教育部组织编写, 普通高中教科书：历史 必修 中外历史纲要（上） (北京: 人民教育出版社, 2019, 85.
[39] Ibid., 90.
[40] Andrade and Hang, Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai, 41.
[41] “Nomadic Empires,” Nomadic Empires | A World-Historical Perspective, accessed July 2, 2026, https://nomadicempires.history.ox.ac.uk/?page_id=4.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 1—3, doi:10.2307/2650990. Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” American Progressivism, 2008, 67—90, doi:10.5040/9781978740280.ch-005.
[45] Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2—5.
[46] Ibid.
[47] “Launch of the Review of Maritime Transport 2025,” UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), last modified September 24, 2025, https://unctad.org/meeting/launch-review-maritime-transport-2025.
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"创新高！泉州游客超1000万人次！总花费超90亿元-泉州要闻-泉州动态-政务公开-泉州市人民政府." 泉州市人民政府. Last modified October 10, 2025. https://www.quanzhou.gov.cn/zfb/xxgk/zfxxgkzl/qzdt/qzyw/202510/t20251010_3216675.htm.
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