with the likes of Henry Morgan,  Jack Rackam, and Edward Teach  

achieving larger-than-life status. Despite  this, the impact of European piracy in its  

most famous Caribbean theatre pales in  comparison to its Asian counterpart.  

Throughout the medieval and early-modern  eras, from the shores of Honshu to Malacca,  

great pirate bands dominated the oceans, where  they mastered both commerce and carnage, brought  

ancient Empires to their knees, and connected  countless cultures from China to Portugal  

through barter and blood. Welcome to our video on  the Wokou, the seminal pirate lords of the East.

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The name 'wokou' translates roughly to 'Japanese  pirate', with 'Wo' (倭), meaning 'dwarf',  

being a long-standing derogatory term by  which the Chinese referred to the Japanese.  

However, as we will see later in this video,  the wokou were neither entirely Japanese,  

nor even entirely pirates. But before we get into  that, let us discuss the earliest origins of our  

eponymous sea lords. Although the first use of the  term wokou dates back as early as the 4th century,  

our story begins in the 13th century. Like most  stories set during this particular century,  

this one begins with the Mongols. As Chingis  Khan and his successors put increasing pressure  

upon Korea from 1218, the ailing Kingdom  of Goryeo found its military manpower  

stretched thin, leaving its southern coasts  largely undefended. This coincided with a wave  

of drought and starvation in Japan's Kyushu,  Iki, and Tsushima isles, which compelled its  

denizens to abandon their farms and estates  and plunder foreign shores to survive. 

From 1223 onwards, Japanese pirate vessels from  these islands, manned by rogue peasants and  

masterless Samurai alike, raided the southern  coast of Korea with consistent regularity.  

By 1259, the Chingisids had achieved  the submission of the Goryeo dynasty,  

and in the following decades, would assume control  of the whole peninsula. Afterwards, it is very  

likely that Korean testimonies of sea-raiders  from the land of Wa were what first put Japan  

as a whole on the Mongol Empires' radar-  which eventually led to the two failed Mongol  

invasion attempts of the land in 1274 and 1281. In the immediate decades after the divine winds  

shredded Kublai Khan's invasion fleet, wokou raids  declined. The reasons for this were manyfold:  

Korea was now under the suzerainty  of the world's biggest Empire,  

while Tsushima and Iki had suffered widespread  destruction during the Mongol invasions. Moreover,  

the bakufu of the Kamakura Shogunate had undergone  great centralization reforms across Japan, which  

included clamping down on the extrajudicial pirate  gangs operating off of their shores. However,  

by the mid 14th century, the authority of the  Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty was crumbling. Meanwhile,  

Japan's central authority was facing challenges  of its own, with the new Ashikaga shogunate being  

embroiled in the rivalry between two schismatic  Imperial courts competing for each others' throne.  

This, compounded with a series of natural  disasters that rocked Japan between 1346 and 1349,  

created another perfect storm upon which  wokou activity could flare up once more. 

From 1350 onwards, wokou bands of as many as 3,000  men, operating mainly out of Tsushima and Iki,  

began plundering the coastline of Korea.  Meanwhile, the Sō samurai clan, vassals  

to the Ashikaga Shogun and legitimate authority  on Tsushima, seemed content to turn a blind eye  

to the pirate activity in their domain. The wokou  principally targeted Korean vessels carrying rice,  

the main form of currency of the age. When the  Korean authorities began moving their tax rice  

overland, the wokou responded by penetrating  inland, raiding grain storehouses as far away  

from the coast as the environs of Pyongyang,  taking many slaves in the process. It was very  

unfortunate timing for the Goryeo dynasty, whose  beleaguered King Gongmin had just thrown off the  

Mongol yoke, only to now be dealing with a massive  surge of well-organized marauders from the sea.  

Indeed, the deeply traumatic impact the wokou  had on the social and economic landscape of Korea  

contributed heavily to the eventual collapse of  the nearly 500-year-old Goryeo Dynasty in 1392. 

Northern China also suffered endemic Wokou  attacks. From 1358 onwards, coastal areas  

like the Shandong peninsula and Jiangsu province  were the victim of large, well-organized raids,  

with the once mighty, yet now enfeebled Mongolian  Emperors of the Yuan Dynasty able to do little  

about it. The Koreans, however, did not sit idly  by in the face of pirate violence. Under generals  

like Choi Yeong and Yi Seonggye, they lashed  back against the wokou, destroying over 300  

ships in a raid on Tsushima in 1389. Yi Seonggye,  incidentally, would later usurp the declining  

Goryeo, becoming Taejo, the first King of Joseon.  His descendant, King Sejong the Great of Joseon,  

would oversee the fatal death-blow which would  end this most recent phase of wokou activity. 

In the summer of 1419, a large fleet of Joseon  ships carrying 17,000 men sailed for Tsushima,  

launching raids across the entire isles. This a  ttack was known as the Oei invasion, and finally  

prompted the Sō clan of Tsushima to actually do  something about the pirates in their backyard.  

Moreover, the Ashikaga Shogunate had resolved  the rift in the Imperial court back in 1392  

and was able to restore order  across the land once more.  

Meanwhile in China, a new dynasty, the  Ming, had since overthrown the Mongol yoke,  

and the Ashikaga Shogun had entered into  tributary supplication with the Ming Emperor  

in order to secure a legal trading relationship  with the richest country in the world.  

This meant the Shogunate had a vested interest  in clamping down on pirates who might jeopardize  

that relationship. All of this brought an end  to this second major wave of wokou activity. 

However, the ocean is ever a lawless place,  where desperate and ambitious people can go  

to seek their fortunes beyond the reach  of feudal laws. In the 16th century,  

the geopolitical situation had shifted to favour  paralegal maritime entrepreneurialism once more.  

After the Ōnin War of 1467, the authority of the  Ashikaga Shogunate had collapsed, causing social  

order in Japan to fail as the islands were torn  up into dozens of independent warring fiefdoms,  

most of which were unable to contain wokou  activity. Moreover, by the 16th century,  

Ming China had begun imposing extremely  strict regulations on foreign maritime trade.  

Ningbo was the only port city where the Japanese  were permitted entry to participate in the highly  

ritualized, tributary gift exchange proscribed  by Chinese court protocol. However, after a brawl  

between two rival Samurai clans, the Hosokawa and  the Ōuchi, caused widespread chaos in Ningbo and  

its environs in 1523, China seriously curtailed  commercial relations with Japan. Following this,  

black market smugglers and pirates surged into  a niche once occupied by legitimate authorities. 

The Wokou of the 16th century would prove  to be much different than their previous  

iterations. While the early Wokou were most  likely of predominantly Japanese stock,  

the wokou of the early modern era were a  far more international affair, with tens of  

thousands of Southern Chinese joining up, their  ocean going livelihoods having been dispossessed  

by draconian Ming Dynasty trade bans. According to  Ming Dynasty records, by the mid 16th century, as  

many as 70% of wokou were Chinese, mainly from the  southern province of Fujian. Malays, Filipinos,  

and even a smattering of Portuguese Catholics  would also colour wokou ranks. While previous  

iterations of the Wokou localized their raids to  Korea and Northern China, the 16th century Wokou  

had a far wider reach, maintaining a dominating  presence from Hirado to the Philippines. 

Although an undoubtedly cruel and brutal bunch,  the Wokou were never ones to seize through  

violence what they could obtain through business.  Nowhere was this more evident than at Shuangyu,  

China's seedy black market entrepot. This hub  of illegal trade was founded as a result of the  

entry of the Portuguese into the south  China sea in 1511. Having established  

colonial ports dotting Africa and the Indian  Ocean and conquered the Sultanate of Malacca,  

the Catholics were now seeking to  breach the closed markets of China.  

Having failed to do so by force, they instead  collaborated with Japanese sailors and Chinese  

smugglers from Fujian to create an illegal  offshore emporium on the tiny island of Liuheng,  

where clandestine trade could be conducted  in defiance of Ming maritime prohibitions. 

By the early 1540s, Shuangyu-  known as Liampo by the Portuguese,  

had come under the rulership of a Wokou syndicate:  the Xu, whose vast maritime commercial networks  

spread from Malacca to Kagoshima prefecture. The  Xu's chief lieutenant, the wokou lord Wang Zhi,  

is credited for helping lead the Portuguese to  Japan in 1543, thereby facilitating the first  

steps any Europeans had taken on the land of the  rising sun, while also popularizing the use of  

European-style firearms in not just Japan, but  China as well. Ultimately, the story of Shuangyu  

is indicative of the fact that the Wokou were not  just disruptive agents of chaos, but more often  

than not were crucial economic actors who greased  the cogs of a massive, pan-east-Asian economy. 

Of course, setting up an unsanctioned port city  inhabited by illegal smugglers on Chinese soil  

was not going to sit well  with Ming Dynasty authorities.  

In 1547, the Imperial court bestowed one Zhu Wan  with the crisp title of “Grand Coordinator of  

Zhejiang and Concurrent Superintendent of Military  Affairs for Zhejiang and Fujian Coastal Defense”,  

a role specifically created to combat  Wokou piracy. Zhu Wan embraced his new  

purpose with relish, and in 1548, assembled a  massive Imperial fleet and stormed Shuangyu,  

burning it to the ground and forcing its smugglers  to disperse among the southern Chinese coastline.  

Unfortunately for Zhu Wan, the Wokou had deep  connections with some of the most powerful  

families in Fujian, who utilized his unlawful  execution of prisoners to have him politically  

disgraced by the Emperor, forcing him to commit  suicide in 1550. For the pirates, an eloquent  

pen was often as effective a weapon to brandish  against their enemies as a well-tempered sword. 

That is not to say that swords would  not have their day, for the burning  

of Shuangyu would ultimately kickstart the  single most violent decade in Wokou history.  

With Shuangyu incinerated, the Wokou had lost  their means to smuggle goods in and out of China  

in an orderly, if still illegal way. Concurrently,  with Zhu Wan dead and his fleet dispersed,  

a massive power vacuum had opened up  in the Southern Chinese coastline,  

allowing the pirates to recuperate  their losses in the old fashioned way.  

Thus began the Jiajing raids, thusly named for the  Jiajing Emperor, during whose reign they occured.  

Between 1551 and 1560, Chinese archives  report no less than 467 separate Wokou raids,  

an average of over fifty per year. Most of these  were spearheaded by the aforementioned Wang Zhi,  

who had become the most powerful voice among the  Wokou clans, and was now operating off the Gotō  

Islands, where he had established solid  relations with the local Kyushu Daimyos,  

and had begun styling himself as the “King  of Hui.” Other notable pirate lords in this  

period included Xu Hai of the aforementioned Xu  syndicate, and admirals like Chen Dong and Ye Ma. 

During these excursions, Wokou ranks were  often swelled by the very people they raided,  

as peasants on the Chinese coast decided they  would rather throw their lot in with the pirates  

rather than deal with poverty, taxation, and the  abusive presence of the Imperial troops stationed  

quartered in their villages, who were often just  as exploitative as the pirates they were supposed  

to be protecting the peasants from. Despite the  fact that most of the chaos rended upon Chinese  

shores was caused by the Chinese themselves, Ming  officials tended to emphasize the Japaneseness of  

the raiders. That way, they could blame the  destruction on the of trespasses of barbaric  

foreigners, rather than as their failure to  control their own subjects. That is not to  

say that there were not still ethnic Japanese  who played a major role in the Jiajing raids,  

as according to sources of the time, plenty of  poor Japanese, particularly from Satsuma, Higo  

and Nagato, saw the potential to obtain Chinese  plunder a very attractive opportunity indeed. 

Eventually, over the course of several years, Ming  authorities were able to contain the Wokou tide  

through a policy of divide and conquer. By 1556,  a new Grand Coordinator of anti-piracy activity,  

Hu Zongxian, had been appointed by the Ming  government. Rather than trying to brute force the  

issue as Zhu Wan had, Zongxian cleverly exploited  the rivalries between the most powerful of Wokou  

lords. He appeased the pirate lord Xu Hai with  promises of lavish gifts and an official pardon in  

return for his help in betraying Chen Dong and Ye  Ma, who Xu Hai was on bad terms with after a feud  

over the rights to a captured slave girl. Chen  Dong and Ye Ma were subsequently betrayed and  

captured by the Ming authorities, and with Xu Hai  now subsequently isolated, Hu Zongxian went back  

on his promise and had him destroyed as well. In  1557, Zongxian turned his attention onto Wang Zhi,  

who he lured out of his Japanese island stronghold  and back to China by promising him a full pardon  

and offering to negotiate a relaxation of maritime  prohibitions so Wang could trade legitimately  

with the Ming state. This, of course, was a  trap, and Wang Zhi was subsequently captured,  

imprisoned, and beheaded two years later. After the elimination of all their most prominent  

captains, Wokou raids on Chinese shores were  seriously curtailed, and had more or less fully