Silver, Piracy, Conspicuous Consumption, and the Transformation of Ming China in the 16th Century

Sixteenth-Century Ming China and the Hongwu Emperor’s Legacy

China historians have long recognized that the 16th century marked a significant shift in the economic, social, and cultural development of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).¹ By then the policy of the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang (also known as Ming Taizu, or Emperor Hongwu [“Vast Martiality”]; r. 1368–1398) to recreate the autarkic village economy envisioned by early Confucian thinkers and thereby curtail (and potentially even eliminate) the market economy, had crumbled.² Within 150 years of its formation, Ming Taizu’s fiscal system encompassing in-kind tax payments, conscripted labor service, and remuneration to officials and soldiers in goods rather than money gave way to a thriving commercialized economy of urban and rural markets, cash-cropping, specialized handicraft industries, and extensive interregional and illegal overseas trade, as well as a certain social fluidity that allowed merchants easier access to wealth and status.³ Nevertheless, despite these economic and social changes, the vitality and growing prosperity of 16th-century China faced a number of challenges which proved to be major sites of political debate and, eventually, violent conflict.

At the beginning of the 16th century two major problems originating in Emperor Hongwu’s governing strategies continued to affect the well-being of the empire. In 1371 the Emperor had decreed the haijin (maritime prohibitions) which forbade private sea trade and confined all foreign exchange to formal tribute trade missions.⁴ Given that maritime trade had been an important source of revenue during the Tang (618–907), Song (960–1279), and Yuan (1279–1368) dynasties, the Ming fiat against sea commerce seems an anomaly.⁵ One reason for the haijin proclamation may have been the upsurge in piracy along the Chinese coast where Japanese pirates known as wakō, in collaboration with local people, caused havoc during the Yuan–Ming transition period, compelling Emperor Hongwu to consolidate and strengthen his power over the littoral.⁶ But it is also likely that another reason for the sanction was the Emperor’s motivation to prevent the flight of precious metals and coins to foreign countries at a time when the Ming government was trying to establish a fiduciary monetary system.⁷

Both policies, that is, to prohibit maritime commerce and to create a paper currency, failed. The inconvertible paper currency (banchao), which in effect banned the use of gold and silver as well as state-issued bronze coin as money, could not function as a viable means of exchange, and by 1425 the notes were worth only 2 percent of their face value.⁸ Meanwhile, clandestine exchange along the Chinese littoral as well as overseas trade to and from Southeast Asia and the Ryukyu islands, continued unabatedly and intensified the numbers of ever-expanding smuggling enterprises that defied the control of local coastal authorities. By the close of the 15th century, with state-sponsored silver mining dwindling to insignificant levels,⁹ but rising levels of commerce that increased the demand for silver as currency, the economy was operating under severe monetary constraints. Un-coined silver which had deeply infiltrated the private economy already by the 1430s had become the principal means of exchange.¹⁰

It would take decades before the haijin was finally lifted in 1567 until which time the Chinese littoral experienced the first of three “great waves” of piracy, from 1522 to 1567, the age of the so-called wokou (wakō in Japanese).¹¹ Unlike the earlier piratic incursions of the 14th century along the coasts of northern China and southern Korea, these later expeditions were much more widespread: the frequency of incidents and the geographical extent of these forays, that included inland pillaging, made a mockery of the official maritime policy.¹² By the mid-16th century piracy had become endemic, and drew all strata of coastal society, from fishermen and sailors to merchants and gentry, into a web of smuggling, trafficking, and illegal protection rackets along the coasts of Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang provinces. “Pirates in caps and gowns” (yiguan zhi dao) became a common expression in contemporaneous writings which analyzed how the same persons shifted from trade to plunder back to commerce, with the protection of local gentry and related officials.¹³ With the discovery of silver in Japan during the 1530s smuggling and piracy intensified, and the littoral’s illicit network expanded into large-scale stealthy enterprises exporting large amounts of high-quality silks and other textiles from Jiangnan (literally, ‘South of the Yangzi; i.e., what is modern Shanghai and surrounding localities) in exchange for Japan’s precious ore.¹⁴

The influx of silver into China boosted the mid-Ming economy and helped launch what one scholar has termed “China’s second commercial revolution” whereby regional specialty products reached markets all over China, and peripheral locales were absorbed into far-reaching commercial networks.¹⁵ With more silver available than ever before, the fortunes of the landed gentry elite as well as merchants steadily advanced, leading them to engage in increased levels of conspicuous consumption of goods and services. Commerce and connoisseurship fed off each other, as more and more rich people were able to acquire things and thereby distinguish themselves socially from others less well-off.¹⁶ At the same time the trappings of conspicuous consumption impelled a segment of Confucian-oriented literati to engage in discourses highlighting the market’s erosion of traditional mores.¹⁷ By mid-16th century this learned elite wrote explicitly about how the fruits of commerce—greater social mobility, rising living standards, easier access to luxuries, including the symbols of refinement—had more appeal to people of all classes than Emperor Hongwu’s dream of well-being based on frugal customs and a stable social hierarchy.¹⁸

Commercial profit in both the agricultural and handicraft sectors propelling ever-increasing levels of economic prosperity and social fluidity became the hallmark of 16th-century China despite the Ming government’s refusal to revoke the haijin and to legitimize foreign trade, thereby insuring a regular supply of silver. Such obstinacy on the part of the regime calls into question what barriers prevented policy changes. To be sure, the two emperors who ruled the first seven decades of that century were not exactly adept figures capable of coping within a changing world. Both the Zhengde (“Upright and Virtuous”) Emperor (r. 1506–1521), and the Jiajing (“Excellent and Serene”) Emperor (r. 1522–1566) gained reputations in their lifetimes for alcoholic excess and self-indulgence, respectively.¹⁹ And yet, notwithstanding sixteen years of the Zhengde Emperor’s irresponsible free-living style that drew him to Muslim girls and Tibetan monks while arranging for the abduction of hundreds of Chinese women for his Beijing harem but dying heirless,²⁰ and forty-five years of the Jiajing Emperor’s autocratic mismanagement of the court that tolerated no interference by his bureaucratic advisers which left him in the long term without counsel and the government prey to ambitious officials protecting their littoral-based relatives involved in smuggling and brigandage, the imperial administration survived and maintained its resilience for another seventy years or so.²¹ Where the Ming government failed was to exploit for its own revenue the silver windfall that would have boosted imperial finances, and perhaps added yet another seventy years to the 276-year regime.

China’s Transition to a Silver Economy

China’s transition to a silver economy is a watershed in its long-term development, but its genesis began well before the 16th century during the time when large amounts of silver, first from Japan and then during the 1570s from the New World, penetrated the country and increased monetization and commerce. According to Richard von Glahn, it was the monetary changes China experienced from the 12th to the 14th centuries that primed the Ming dynasty’s turn to silver as the basis of its financial system. He argues that as the Southern Song (1127–1279) and Yuan governments initiated “moneys of account,” that is, multiple currency systems that allowed weights of silver as the basis of the fiscal regime, the foundation of a silver monetary standard was established.²² Both the bronze coins issued by the Song regime and the paper money of the Yuan government were backed by silver as a hard currency reserve, a condition which ultimately facilitated the shift to a silver unit as a standard money account in both public finance and private trade during the Ming.

The fiscal system inaugurated by Emperor Hongwu, which focused on the use of inconvertible paper money, was not altered by his successor the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–1425). He overspent government revenue for foreign ventures—for example, Zheng He’s seven maritime expeditions, the invasion and occupation of northern Vietnam, and repeated military campaigns against Mongols on the northern border—all of which helped erode the value of paper currency even further. By the 1430s, the Ming government could no longer rely on its paper money system. Increasing amounts of the grain tribute tax from rich areas such as Jiangnan were commuted to payments of silver, and un-coined silver became a new monetary standard.²³ During the 15th century, domestic peace and a relatively efficient communications infrastructure (canals and courier systems) ensured the movement of goods and services, and helped eradicate rural self-sufficiency, but it would still take decades before the Ming government conceded to accommodate its fiscal system in response to these changes. Even the attempt by the Ming statecraft scholar Qiu Jun (1420–1495) to convince fellow policymakers, based on his reading of the classical text Guanzi, that currency reform would facilitate commerce as well as increase state revenues, failed.²⁴ He could not persuade others to recognize the central role of silver as a measure and store of value.

The discovery of copious silver deposits in Japan at Iwami and Sado in western Japan during the 1530s inaugurated East Asia’s “silver century,” and changed Ming China’s monetary system.²⁵ Silver output in Japan grew dramatically after a Kyushu-based merchant Kamiya Jutei engaged Korean mining experts familiar with a Chinese cupellation technique to extract silver from ore.²⁶ But the silver, however much wanted and needed in China, could not enter the country legally because the Ming government had suspended all trade with Japan in 1523, and thus the only way the silver could permeate China was by smuggling. It was at this point that bands of pirates, known as wokou, originating in southwest Japan, Korea, and China, and supported by Portuguese seafarers with sophisticated weaponry, built up extensive trading networks that exported raw silk, silk fabrics, lacquerware, and ingredients for Chinese medicine to Japan in exchange for silver.²⁷ At Shuangyu, an island near Ningbo, the Europeans, who had been barred from China since 1522 after trying some five years first peacefully and then belligerently to engage in trade at Guangzhou, built a trading emporium with their Chinese allies, facilitating the exchange of Chinese wares for the Japanese precious metal.²⁸

In 1548 government forces destroyed Shuangyu, propelling the smuggler pirates (including the Portuguese) back to southern coastal Fujian at Zhangzhou’s infamous port Yuegang, which for decades had “funneled” Southeast Asian exotic goods into a market there, attracting Jiangnan merchants eager to exchange raw silk and silk textiles for these items. The Portuguese who had reached Japan in 1543 thanks to their close ties with Wang Zhi (?–1560), the so-called “pirate king” of Japan, started to import guns and other weaponry (along with Chinese saltpeter and textiles) in exchange for Japanese silver, which they exported to Shuangyu until its annihilation. Thereafter they too switched their smuggling operation to Zhangzhou. In the next seven years or so, however, they tried and succeeded to distance themselves from Chinese pirates, transferring their enterprises to Shangchuan and Langbaigang, small islands off the coast of Guangdong province.²⁹ It was from there that the Europeans were able to negotiate with the authorities in Guangzhou and secure a permanent leasehold in 1557 at Macao, which became their East Asian trading hub for the next 442 years. Their so-called “black ships” (kurofune) regularly sailed from Macao laden with Chinese silks to western Japan in exchange for Japanese silver, and thus the Portuguese became China’s monetary envoi. Such largesse on the part of the Ming government to allow a foreign power to convey the precious ore and thereby deny Chinese traders the same privilege is indicative of the Jiajing court’s bungling of its financial administration. Fiscal mismanagement throughout the Jiajing reign along with tremendous costs for frontier defense had left the imperial treasury completely depleted.³⁰ Meanwhile, at Yuegang tens of thousands of inhabitants continued their smuggling businesses as the Chinese appeal for silver vastly exceeded the capacities of the Portuguese to meet the demand for the metal. Arguably too, the expansion of China’s commercial economy, “by raising the demand for media of exchange, attracted silver from abroad and promoted foreign trade.”³¹

The influx of silver into China added to the country’s already burgeoning commercial expansion, prompting changes in agricultural production from rice to cash crops for export, including silk, sugar, and later tea and tobacco.³² Ming popular literature registers the triumphs of ordinary people who expanded their business networking, in Jiangnan’s mercantile hubs: selling Songjiang-made cloth in Yangzhou and buying grain there to market in Suzhou, and thereby profiting by the silver-fed commercial economy.³³ The place of silver in 16th-century China also entered the discourses of the scholar-literati. In his essay “The Silver Obsession,” the Hangzhou-born writer Tian Yiheng (1524–?) wrote about the allure as well as the toxicity of silver which he thought sent men to “self-destruction.”³⁴ Tian Yiheng was not alone with his critique of silver imports—another outspoken critic included Feng Zhang (jinshi 1538) who was convinced that foreign trade furnished little of value. In 1551, he memorialized to the court: “What we get from the trade is nothing but some cheap and useless things.”³⁵ Such remarks, however well meant to buttress the value of self-sufficiency and to discourage smuggling practices, would become rare once the repeal of the haijin in 1567, one year after the Jiajing Emperor’s death, came into effect. But the lifting of the ban brought other worries to the fore concerning counterfeit specie and the authenticity of silver ingots.³⁶

By the 1570s, China also acquired silver from the New World via Manila where Chinese merchants brought silk and silk products, other textile fineries, metals, and porcelain in exchange for the silver produced in Mexico and Peru and shipped to the Philippines.³⁷ The arrival of Latin American silver carried by Chinese merchants from Manila to Chinese ports would only add to Portuguese deliveries of the Japanese product. The peak of the heyday of silver importation from the Philippines to China was 1595 to 1615. With soaring amounts of silver entering China from both Japan and Manila, late 16th-century China was, as one historian writes, “awash with money.”³⁸ Von Glahn estimates that in the second half of the 16th century, China imported at least fifty tons of silver per year, but during the first four decades of the 17th century, the annual import reached 115 tons or more, with Japanese silver overtaking that from Latin America after 1620.³⁹ Silver also had great arbitrage value: in 16th-century China, the market value of silver was double its value elsewhere.⁴⁰ During the “silver century” gold flowed out from China, and with an average gold/silver ratio of 1:6,⁴¹ while silver rushed in. Arbitrage also meant that 100 catties (1 catty = 0.6 kg) of silk might be sold for 100 ounces of silver in China, but the same amount of silk sold in Manila would fetch 200 ounces from Spanish buyers.⁴²

Such silver riches did not cause a reorganization of the Ming economy in the interests of the state, however. Despite the expansion of agriculture and commerce, the government did not inaugurate any new kinds of taxes to generate extra revenue nor did it incorporate the vast silver quantities of silver importation into its fiscal strategies. Although the Ming authorities did replace many in-kind taxes with silver payments, tax rates remained the same as those established in the first decades of the dynasty.⁴³ One may argue, as does Von Glahn, that with the falling purchasing power of silver as imports of the metal flooded China’s domestic market, the value of silver revenues actually declined compared to the 15th century.⁴⁴ This situation may have directed Ming fiscal authorities to fear a dependency on foreign silver and to distrust the ability of precious metals, or any commodity money, to fulfill the necessary functions of money.⁴⁵ In any event, the tide of illicit maritime trade and piracy that had spurred the illegal importation of silver in the first place came to an end by 1570 and Ming China’s silver economy “flowered” for the next fifty years.

Piracy and China’s Silver Economy

The wave of piracy that hit the Chinese littoral starting in the 1520s began on a small scale, with local merchant-smugglers from Guangdong and Fujian provinces joining Portuguese and other foreigners based in Southeast Asia and Japan, taking advantage of the irregular coastal terrain of narrow coves, inlets, and offshore islands, to hide both exotic goods and daily necessities, and from there to deliver these items to offshore communities economically dependent on these cargoes. The seemingly sudden rise of piracy along the Chinese coast after nearly 125 years of relative peace and stability may be attributed to three events:⁴⁶ the expulsion of the Portuguese from China in 1522 and the prohibition of Chinese people engaging in trade with them;⁴⁷ the 1523 Ningbo incident whereby rival Japanese trade missions vied with each other to present tribute which resulted in widespread pillage to the city, a naval battle between Chinese and Japanese forces ending in Chinese defeat, and the expulsion of all Japanese;⁴⁸ and the creation of the international smuggling emporium circa 1523 at Shuangyu island, which served maritime traders from Portugal (and their international crews), Japan, Southeast Asia, and China.⁴⁹ One should also add to this list the installation of the Jiajing Emperor who came to the throne at age thirteen with little grasp of maritime issues and thereby fell easily under the sway of the court’s anti-trade faction persuading him to enforce the haijin strictly.⁵⁰

These occurrences highlight several universal political, economic, and cultural facets of piracy: first, piracy is closely related to commerce; second, piracy is tied to the actions of states anxious to prevent political disorder; and third, piracy interacts with cultural claims to legitimacy, that is, piracy may represent a challenge to the norms of traditional authority.⁵¹ The close connection between commerce and piracy is summed up in the observation by Chinese literati pronounced even before the 1520s: “Pirates and traders are the same people. When trade flourishes, pirates become traders; and when trade is banned, traders become pirates.”⁵² The ambiguity of this distinction intersects with the history of one of China’s most eminent trading groups, the Hokkien merchants of southern Fujian (mainly the prefectures of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou), who since the 10th century had built up extensive maritime commercial networks all over Southeast and East Asia, from Sumatra to Korea, and continued to flourish, although in certain cases clandestinely, during the 15th century.⁵³

The covert trade in which Hokkiens engaged during the 15th century relates to Emperor Hongwu’s move to turn the Ryukyu kingdom into a tributary state of China in 1372.⁵⁴ The Emperor’s goal here was twofold: to channel the smuggling activities of the Kyushu-based wakō, who during the 14th century used Naha, the harbor of what is now Okinawa, as an operating station, into the lawful framework of tribute trade; and to dampen the effects of the haijin policy for his own household and military needs. The Ryukyu tribute offerings included horses and sulfur obtained from Japan for use in gunpowder-making, as well as precious goods such as sappan wood, pepper, and ambergris (used for making perfume and aphrodisiacs) from Southeast Asia, in exchange for Chinese gold silk brocades, permission to use the Chinese calendar, and most importantly, thirty Chinese-built ships and well-trained officers (of Hokkien descent) to direct these vessels.⁵⁵ From the southern Fujian port Quanzhou, which was the official entry site of the Ryukyu tribute mission,⁵⁶ the Ryukyu traders (and their Hokkien collaborators) carried Chinese medicinal herbs, minted coins, glazed ceramics, brocades, and textiles to Southeast Asian ports, including Malacca, Gresik (Java), Kalapa (Sunda), Palembang, Pattani, Ayutthaya—all Hokkien trading posts—and returned not only with these tribute items, but also rhino horn, tin, sugar, iron, Indian ivory, and Arabian frankincense.⁵⁷ Thus, the Ming government outsourced foreign trade to Ryukyu, allowing that kingdom both access to the riches of Southeast Asia and the rights to convey Japanese goods such as swords to China, thereby serving as a diplomatic intermediary with Japan, while it officially censured the seafaring exploits of the Hokkien traders as smugglers. In sum, the trading activities of the Ryukyu kingdom demonstrate the economic integration of the East and South China Seas into a series of maritime networks but also the incongruities between Ming state policy and the realities of commercial exchange.

By the last quarter of the 15th century, however, the golden age of Ryukyu “tribute trade” began fading, and so the Hokkien merchants could no longer count on safe passage via the kingdom’s profitable “tribute missions.”⁵⁸ During the 1520s, with the illegal infiltration of Portuguese along the Fujian coast, smuggling became more frequent while coastal security relaxed. The Ming dynasty Veritable Records document hundreds of instances of military men of all ranks not only disregarding those who engaged in smuggling and piracy but also participating in such illegal practices themselves.⁵⁹ Coastal fortifications and patrol ships were in disrepair, while troop desertion and even mutiny became more frequent.⁶⁰ The 1520s also saw the first established cartels of “maritime trade-cum-piracy” whereby Fujian natives banded with other well-known smuggling groups such as the infamous Xu brothers from Huizhou (Anhui province) who had extensive trading operations in Southeast Asia. This alliance helped lead the Portuguese to the international smuggling entrepȏt Shuangyu island. Here local gentry and merchants collaborated with Portuguese traders who supplied exotic items from Southeast Asia and employed Chinese intermediaries to oversee transactions between themselves and their customers. Besides sappan wood, spices, and ivory, the Europeans delivered weapons, including muskets, swords, and even naval cannon, and used bribes to procure government-regulated commodities such as rice and other necessities from local people.⁶¹ The Portuguese also received support from local magnates, including Lin Xiyuan (c. 1480–1560; js 1517), who became a wealthy and powerful “sea overlord,” operating from his southern Fujian base after having been a once respected official.⁶²

One may consider these developments in relation to what is known as the “pirate cycle” whereby piracy slowly drifts from small and independent groups of individuals to a more complex organized hierarchy involving alliances with diversified peoples, and finally a powerful structure bonding with a recognized political state.⁶³ Until the 1540s, the pirate depredations along the Chinese littoral featured diverse merchant-pirates, the wokou (or wakō; literally, “dwarf bandits”), the same pejorative name given by Chinese and Koreans to Japanese maritime raiders in the 14th century, but who in the 16th century were predominantly Chinese. At Shuangyu Japanese brought silver and weapons in exchange for Chinese silk, silk brocade, porcelain, fans, and pearls. As the wokou became more numerous and violent, their smuggling more intense and widespread, and their support from coastal gentry and local officials more vociferous and resolute, a number of court officials debated the virtues and vices of the haijin, which resulted in the decision to execute a military solution (as opposed to the lifting of the ban) to punish violators of the law.⁶⁴ Grand Secretary Xia Yan (1482–1548) appointed an experienced career bureaucrat Zhu Wan (1494–1550) as Grand Coordinator (xunfu) of Zhejiang and, concurrently, Superintendent of Military Affairs for Zhejiang and Fujian Coastal Defense, to restore order along the littoral and rid the sea borders of smugglers, pirates, and their powerful supporters.⁶⁵

Zhu began his mission in late 1547 in Zhangzhou where local officials refused to cooperate with him, despite an incursion by Portuguese there. In February 1548 while Zhu was still in Fujian, a large band of pirates raided Ningbo and Taizhou, “killing, burning, and looting without encountering any effective opposition from imperial forces.”⁶⁶ This incident revealed the complexity of the relations between the pirates and the local elite: in exchange for their offer of warehouses to store their goods (which could be quite valuable), the trader-pirates gave cash deposits to local gentry in advance of their maritime expeditions. But often the local elite would refuse to return the deposits to the traders, and called in government troops to drive them away. In retaliation, on this particular occasion, the pirate-merchants raided these areas, destroying government buildings and private homes and killing their former business associates. According to the local officials’ point of view, they might turn a blind eye to the illegal trade itself, but as the violence grew worse, they recognized the need for help from the central government forces to prevent further conflict.

Zhu Wan attacked Shuangyu in June 1548, a time of the early southern monsoon when trading ships departed for Japan. Although Zhu destroyed the trading enclave, many of the pirates were able to escape to Japan, including the leading figures Li Guangtou and Wang Zhi. The Ming government approved Zhu’s actions, but local gentry and their political allies did not, and thus, not surprisingly, when Zhu’s own political ally Xia Yan was executed, he himself fell into difficulties, accused of exceeding his authority by executing a number of pirates in Fujian. After Zhu Wan committed suicide, a military vacuum ensued, unleashing the wokou’s large-scale attacks on Chinese cities and even long-distance expeditions inland along the Yangzi River.⁶⁷ The wokou plunderers (estimated in the tens of thousands), said to have originated from Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, Fuzhou (Fujian), and Ningbo and Shaoxing (Zhejiang) wreaked havoc during the 1550s.⁶⁸ In the meantime Wang Zhi had established his Japanese bases on the Goto islands and Hirado where there was already a Hokkien community present since 1535.⁶⁹ With the support of several powerful daimyo groups, Wang Zhi directed his Chinese and Japanese followers to pillage the Chinese littoral. By 1555 his raiding parties were approaching the Jiangnan’s economic centers, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nanjing, with the entire region south of Hangzhou out of control.⁷⁰

Wang Zhi’s motive was to convince the Ming authorities to revoke the haijin. Wang commanded a large trading fleet that was well armed, which he could turn into a private navy if need be. But his primary business was commerce, and thus it was in his interest to reduce piracy along the Chinese littoral. As a former minor military official, he had become familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of military leadership, while he had a keen sense how to mediate in business as well as among political-power holders.⁷¹ From 1555 Wang Zhi was in contact with Hu Zongxian (1512–1565), the most powerful civil and military official in the southeast at the time, and the leading figure in the campaign against him. Hu’s confidence to rid the littoral of pirates was raised after he defeated one of the most formidable wokou, Xu Hai, whom he tricked into believing he was on his side.⁷² Hu, who was aligned with government officials open to amending coastal trade policies, including Grand Secretary Yan Song (1480–1567), negotiated with Wang a proposal to open trade on the condition that Wang would help the government fight the remaining wokou.⁷³ Wang Zhi returned to China aboard a large Japanese fleet led by Ōtomo Sōrin (1530–1587), considered the most aggressive of the Kyushu daimyo involved in maritime trade, who believed China was now ready to engage in regular trade with Japan.⁷⁴ But after Wang turned himself over to the authorities, the Beijing court changed its mind about any kind of cooperation with him, and had him executed. Hu Zongxian went on to defeat those wokou remaining in Zhejiang and chased them to Fujian with support of the generals Yu Dayou (1503–1579) and Qi Jiguang (1528–1588), who were directing campaigns against the pirates.⁷⁵ From 1563 to 1566 Ming forces were able to crush the remaining wokou forces, and soon after the Jiajing Emperor died in January 1567, the government set in motion a number of decrees repealing the haijin and introducing a number of statutes legalizing trade, including that entering Fujian’s main port Yuegang (Moon Harbor) now called Haicheng (Clear Seas), and re-establishing maritime customs offices and taxation and tariffs,⁷⁶ although direct trade with Japan was still forbidden to Chinese shipping. Portuguese vessels operating from Macao provided the major conduit of Japanese silver in exchange for Chinese silk.⁷⁷

The heyday of the pirate incursions during the 1550s and 1560s coincided with difficulties along China’s northern border where a Mongol federation under the leadership of Altan Khan raided frontier regions in order to obtain silk and foodstuffs, and forced the Ming government to defend itself in a costly military campaign.⁷⁸ Despite the differences in terrain and the invaders themselves, the Ming state considered both problems in terms of boundary violations leading to lawlessness and violence. In both instances, the Ming government did not see the northern frontier and the littoral as opportunities for gaining revenue, and instead enacted military solutions which heightened ever greater levels of conflict and tension at court as well as along the peripheries.⁷⁹ But once the government was able to put down the worst excesses of both incursions, and military security was assured,⁸⁰ it could choose to innovate, and in the case of the littoral, move forward toward the legalization of maritime trade at Haicheng, allowing a certain number of Chinese ships to sail to foreign ports, mainly to Southeast Asia each year, on the condition they paid license, customs, and cargo fees to the state.⁸¹ For the next fifty years, peace and prosperity brought ever more rising wealth to China, and with the influx of American silver, its greater importance to the global economy.

Conspicuous Consumption

Sixteenth-century China’s affluence manifested itself in myriad ways: in clothing and accessories, food and drink, houses and gardens, as well as art and book collections.⁸² What distinguished this phase of material opulence from earlier episodes of rising prosperity in China were twofold. First, the degree by which those with wealth indulged their desires and fantasies from the mid-Ming onward defied the scale of earlier manifestations of extravagant lifestyles, even those originating in the Song dynasty, as described by Marco Polo. The second way Ming conspicuous consumption differed from earlier displays of luxury and riches was its violation of government regulations concerning such spectacle: Ming sumptuary legislation, originating once again in the same dirigistic ambitions of Emperor Hongwu, aimed to maintain the symbols of the Ming hierarchical social order and to curb “useless luxury,” notably by members of the ruling elite. In the second part of Emperor Hongwu’s Great Proclamation (Ta kao) of 1386, there is a section “Going Beyond One’s Status in Life” in which the Emperor criticizes “those who ought to use silver tableware and yet use gold, those who ought to dress in cotton but prefer to wear brocaded silk, or those who wear golden jewelry when they should not.”⁸³ Ming Taizu was particularly concerned with sartorial rules. Not only did he see clothing as a means to re-establish Han Chinese identity after the Yuan Mongol regime’s violation of Confucian dress and ritual prescriptions, he also considered the regulation of attire a tool to maintain social class structure, and thereby ensure social stability.⁸⁴

But just like the original fiats that curbed the use of silver in the economy and prohibited overseas trade, Ming sumptuary rules were no longer enforceable in the 16th century. And like these two matters that transcended Emperor Hongwu’s visions, conspicuous consumption was discussed in the writings of 16th-century contemporaries in terms of moral discourse. On the one hand, there were those writers who saw “economic justification for spending,” such as Lu Ji (1515–1552), a Songjiang scholar who defended conspicuous consumption with the premise that those who supply the luxury market profit too through payment for their labor.⁸⁵ Thinking of the weavers and sellers of fine silk textiles, or those who provide services, such as steering sightseeing boats, carrying sedan chairs, or selling sex (i.e., singsong boys and dancing girls) to the wealthy, Lu Ji argues for the economic utility of lavish spending because it boosts the incomes of producers and purveyors of goods and services. Similarly, the Huizhou scholar Ye Quan (1522–1578) considered the economic lifeline of Hangzhou’s West Lake to be the rich and indulgent people who frequented the place as a tourist spot and gave work and income to the local people.⁸⁶ On the other hand, some 16th-century contemporaries wrote about their displeasure with men whose passion for “things” contradicted traditional values and ways of life. For example, Fang Feng (js 1508), critiqued the social decadence and, by implication, moral turpitude of pursuing wealth and luxury, extravagant fashion and sexual pleasures, and overspending on entertainment and family occasions such as weddings in his native Suzhou.⁸⁷ Also, Tian Yiheng, mentioned for his negative comments on the impact of silver, expressed his disapproval of those who flagrantly disregarded the Ming sumptuary laws governing private home decoration and women’s clothing, complaining that even “singsong girls” were known to dress in brocaded silks and embroidered gowns.⁸⁸

Changing clothing fashions were, in particular, an obvious rebuke of the Great Proclamation, which regulated dress according to sex, class, and occupation. Sixteenth-century China was an age and place when and where the cut of a hat, the style of a tunic, or the length of an over-gown expressed great significance for the both wearer and the observer.⁸⁹ Various editions of the Collected Statutes of the Great Ming (Da Ming huidian) perpetuated the rules of dress in minute detail for each social rank—from scholar-official to peasant, from empress to common woman—styles and materials for tops and skirts, and decorations (including rank emblems), jewelry, and headdresses. By the mid-16th century women of the lower classes were emulating the sartorial privileges of the scholar-gentry class and dressing in silk and fur.⁹⁰ In China’s wealthiest cities, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Yangzhou, commoner and merchant families flaunted their wealth in clothing and accessories which demonstrated how they too had profited from the technological improvements in textile-making and its commercialization.⁹¹ One of the best portrayals of what was wrong with such fashion displays, as well as other facets of conspicuous consumption in food, housing, and not least erotic behavior, is in the novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei).⁹² This work is a powerful critique of materialism and social fluidity in 16th-century China.

The mid-Ming thrust to obtain “things” was also accompanied by a desire to demonstrate the ability to procure the unusual, the exotic, which preferably came from afar. The products smuggled by the pirates at Shuangyu for sale to the Jiangnan elite included the precious goods of Southeast Asia that were once delivered as tribute by the Ryukyu kingdom: tropical woods (favored by the Suzhou elite for their furniture), ambergris, perfumes, and rare aphrodisiacs. The acquisition of such items by Jiangnan-based buyers was an indication not only of their wealth but also the stature of their knowledge about imperial preferences and household inventories. Thus, not only how to behave as a consumer of things mattered to the rich and well endowed, but also how to gain possession of particular items with cachet was important for their self-identification. As such, those in the know about what was genuine and what was fake propelled some scholar individuals to compile handbooks for members of the elite to guide them along in the discourse according judgments of aesthetic taste and connoisseurship, a kind of “exercise in the invention of taste,” meant to soothe their anxieties over their place in the wealth-driven fluctuating Ming social hierarchy. As art historian Craig Clunas writes in his investigation of Ming-era connoisseurship literature, it was just not enough for the elite to own “superfluous things”—paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, ceramics, carved jade—members of this stratum also had to know how to talk about them, as a means to establish their superior knowledge vis-à-vis others within this rank. For their enlightenment, a number of writers “in the know” produced a series of texts beginning around 1550 to help restrict the downward extension of knowledge about “things” to the hoi-polloi.⁹³

The diffusion of wealth and material prosperity in 16th-century China, born out of the inflow of silver, greater agricultural prosperity, the expansion of silk and cotton textile production, the increasing availability of specialized handicraft and luxury products, and not least, a relatively efficient transportation system that could move goods and people from both far away and nearby and thereby serve both local and interregional markets, prompted members of the learned elite to engage in debate about notions of frugality (jian) and extravagance (she), with the orthodox position: “only frugality ensured a fair dispersion of wealth.”⁹⁴ But given that the most powerful men at court and beyond, such as the onetime Senior Grand Secretary Yan Song accumulated so much wealth—an exact list of which survived after his political downfall—it would seem moral torpor outweighed censure, and more and more 16th-century scholars and officials enjoyed the fruits of commerce and the marketplace.⁹⁵ While the claim made by the scholar official Zhang Han (1511–1593) in 1593 that “the customs of the present age have reached an extreme of extravagance” was endorsed by others⁹⁶—especially those like the scholar-gentleman He Liangjun (1506–1573) who wrote about the vulgarity of over-ostentation⁹⁷—the power to display was never curtailed either by existing legislation or social rebuke. And one may argue, as does Clunas based on comments by Tian Yiheng, that “unrestrained hedonism,” typified in gambling, the procurement of handsome boy prostitutes favored by Beijing-based high officials, or the lavish meals enjoyed in expensive urban restaurants, had become the norm among those who could afford such pleasures.⁹⁸

Reflections

The influx of large quantities of silver, the pacification of the wokou, and the consumption of luxury goods and services all contributed to a certain magnetism and dynamism that distinguished 16th-century Ming China from the regime’s earlier history. How conscious contemporaries were aware of the differences between their age and that before may be assessed in both local gazetteer writing and personal memoirs expressing nostalgia for the “old days,” that is, before the Zhengde era when, according to these writers, “decay” had set in and “the moral conventions governing social life began to erode.”⁹⁹ The decline of standards, according to some observers, originated in the growing gap between simple countryside life where chunhou fengsu (good and simple customs) prevailed and urban excess lured the uninitiated into easy ruin.¹⁰⁰ Some writers mourned the old days of strict society hierarchy, when everyone knew his or her place and did not go above their station dressed in expensive fineries, riding in sedan chairs, and attending lavish banquets with innumerable courses of food and drink. On a local level, there was nostalgia for the years of peaceful trading (however illegal) between Fujian ports and Southeast Asia before 1522 when the Zhengde Emperor’s successor the Jiajing Emperor closed down foreign trade. Such action unleashed decades of smuggling, political discord at court, and violence along the littoral. And even after the import of silver was legalized and the economy stabilized, numbers of observers such as the Grand Secretary Xu Jie (1503–1583) who was one of Jiangnan’s richest landlords, lamented the decline of owner-cultivators and the rise in the numbers of tenant farmers. No doubt the old elite stratum who gained their wealth principally through land-holding felt under threat in the “commercializing whirl of the mid-Ming . . .”¹⁰¹

What is missing in these analyses is any expression of doubt about the consistency of Ming governance, which, during the period under review, revealed contradictory policies and strategies. For example, in less than thirty-five years, Portugal went from the status of foe to that of friend—how does one explain that after barring Portuguese traders from China and even recognizing their close alliance with the wokou, the Ming government granted them the license to import silver from Japan, and a few years later a leasehold (Macao) on Chinese territory? And earlier, during the 15th century when the haijin officially banned any private maritime commerce, how can one explain the Ming authorities employing Hokkien merchant seafarers to foster the Ryukyu tribute mission into a viable (and lawful) enterprise that supplied the imperial household with exotica and rarities from Southeast Asia as well as desirable goods from Japan, but turning a blind eye to the extensive (illegal) maritime networks these Fujian traders had built up in Northeast and Southeast Asia thanks to this arrangement? And finally, how could the Ming authorities for such a long time ignore the need for a regular supply of silver, and then once in possession of the precious ore not revise its own financial system to gain revenue from its importation and the commerce it spurred? In answer to these questions, one may reflect upon the regime’s weak ties between center and periphery, which, ironically, explain the strength of the Ming Empire’s resilience—the search for a viable currency and then the illegal importation of Japanese silver, the Ming court’s fluctuating policies on piracy between accommodative gestures toward gentry involvement and harsh putative military action against the marauders, and not least, a lax attitude toward the wealth and social mobility spawned by commercialization of the economy, demonstrate that whatever challenges Ming rulership faced during the 16th century, there was enough room within the polity to allow for inappropriate and even illegitimate local power suzerainty while the day-to-day business of running the central government persevered and survived.¹⁰²

Discussion of the Literature

Early 21st-century scholarship on silver, piracy, and conspicuous consumption during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) may be considered the outcome of several decades of historiographical shifts in research about that era’s socioeconomic development. Until the second half of the 1970s, the Ming dynasty did not receive the same amount of attention in the academy as that afforded to the earliest periods by classical sinology, or to the last regime, that is, the Qing (1644–1912), by American scholarship under the aegis of John K. Fairbank (1907–1991) and his students, who became the first postwar generation to communicate the importance of the study of Chinese history.¹⁰³ With the establishment of the journal Ming Studies in 1975 and plans made during the 1980s for two Ming volumes in the Cambridge History of China series, the “field” of Ming studies rapidly began to take on its own identity, with social-economic development now one particular facet of a broader interdisciplinary panorama of historical writing that drew from philosophy and thought, religion, and literature to construct new ways to analyze this era.¹⁰⁴

During the 1980s too, the central narrative in Chinese-language scholarship that had dominated studies on Ming socioeconomic development, that is, the “sprouts of capitalism,” originating in a Marxist paradigm which identified the robust commercial energy of the late Ming and early Qing but argued its failure to reach fruition into capitalism because of the forcible intrusion of the West, began to lose its allure. While China historians throughout the world appreciated the detailed specific studies, the large compendia of relevant primary sources, and the extensive debates published in Chinese-language journals and books the “sprouts” viewpoint had generated, historians based in North America and Europe in the last decades of the 20th century tended to be less convinced of the idea that the Ming period was on the threshold of some kind of capitalist transformation. Many of these West-based scholars were also familiar with a somewhat similar Marxist approach to Chinese history in Japanese academic circles that claimed the Ming period as “feudal,” after what had been the “medieval economic revolution” in the late Tang–Song eras but which did not produce further changes, and even in some local cases intensified servile rural labor relations from the 14th century.¹⁰⁵ Ideas of Japanese Marxist scholars, known as the “Tokyo school,” were assimilated by Mark Elvin into his 1973 book The Pattern of the Chinese Past, which captivated a large reading public and argued the 14th century was a turning point because by then the Chinese economy’s structural and cultural constraints inhibited a breakthrough to self-sustaining growth: China had become stuck in what he termed a “high equilibrium trap.”¹⁰⁶

In the second half of the 1980s, as historians both in China and EuroAmerica began to turn away from Marxist slavery-feudalism paradigms, they paid more attention to modes of local control and governance, and in particular, the role of the so-called gentry local elite, which became the focus of demographic studies by Robert Hartwell and spatial analyses by G. W. Skinner who mapped China’s long-term regional economic cycles.¹⁰⁷ China scholars also took note that commerce was integral to economic growth from the Song era onward, and that during the Ming dynasty, contra-Elvin’s claims, both domestic and overseas trade boomed, merchants thrived, and the economy expanded thanks to large quantities of imported silver from Japan and the New World. The opening of archives in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the 1980s also allowed researchers to investigate new kinds of sources, including those writings about Ming merchants and their relations with their gentry relatives.¹⁰⁸

By the 1990s Ming specialists focused on key elements in the economic, social, and cultural history of the dynasty that reflected the enormous changes the regime began to experience in the 16th century, including the import of foreign silver on a large scale. The first Western scholar to attempt to quantify the amount of silver entering China in the 16th century was William Atwell, who already in the 1970s and 1980s began publishing about the impact of foreign silver on the domestic Chinese economy.¹⁰⁹ Atwell also linked late Ming economic decline with a fall in the amount of imported silver, economic depression, and ultimately the fall of the dynasty because by the 17th century China was integrated into a monolithic global economy, and thus subject to the general economic and political crises that engulfed the world in the first decades of that century. Challenging Atwell’s analysis of the available quantitative data and his monetary theory of the crisis idea, Richard von Glahn, in his 1996 book Fountain of Fortune, calculated that silver imports did not drop so significantly after 1630, and that China’s foreign trade and silver imports remained vibrant until 1642. Like the Taiwan scholar Li Longsheng, who had also studied the economics of the Ming collapse, von Glahn argued in his 2016 volume The Economic History of China that poor harvests due to climate change bringing cold weather which sparked off subsistence crises, popular rebellions, and epidemic diseases were all more relevant to the Ming regime’s final days than certain fluctuations in the amount of imported silver.¹¹⁰

The study of Ming piracy has deep roots in China’s modern struggles with Japan; Chinese historians writing in the 1930s likened the wokou attacks to their then ongoing experiences with Japanese colonialism, while Japanese scholars around the same time dwelt on the failures of the Ming tribute system which only increased smuggling and violence.¹¹¹ Postwar Chinese scholarship on the littoral disturbances emphasized the proto-capitalist state of China’s economic development, which was thwarted by the anti-feudal piracy struggles. From the 1980s Japanese scholarship on the wokou contextualized the phenomenon in terms of competing maritime societies of East Asia.¹¹² In the meantime, So Kwan-wai published his important 1975 study Japanese Piracy in Ming China during the 16th Century, which narrated the history of the incursions and offered copious translations from the relevant primary sources. In his 2003 book Like Froth Floating on the Sea, Robert Antony considered the wokou as social actors who were forced to endure the tensions that overall prosperity had brought to the marginal elements of seafaring society, but later studies, such as those by Ivy Marie Lim and Michael Szonyi, have stressed the connections between local lineage society along the littoral and the central government’s ideological and practical aims to control coastal defense.¹¹³ Lim demonstrates how Confucian-inspired temple-building in Haining (Zhejiang) increased local lineage solidarity in the face of piracy, which ultimately goaded lineage leaders to finance the military campaigns to defend the prefecture. Szonyi shows how the central government’s military guards system along the Fujian littoral competed with individual lineages’ own material and social needs which piracy met and delivered. Both volumes indicate how people on the periphery engaged with the web of local institutions that both supported and disavowed the aims of the Ming court.

The theme of conspicuous consumption has attracted different kinds of disciplinary treatment, and has raised questions about how Western ideas may influence the study of Chinese history. While both Timothy Brook’s publication The Confusions of Pleasure and Craig Clunas’s book Superfluous Things examine the “new wealth” and material abundance of the Ming, and demonstrate how the acquisition of “things” deepened anxiety over the corrosive influence of prosperity on social hierarchy and boundaries, Clunas argues that the achievements of Ming material culture and the commoditization of knowledge are not unlike similar realizations of the “early modern period” (1500–1800) in Europe, a particular idea of periodization that first evolved within the French Annales school of scholarship. But unlike Europe, according to Clunas, where “early modern” shifted into “modern” by 1800, China’s “early modern” ended with the Qing conquest which produced a discourse that evoked the decadence and rottenness of the Ming, and “so consumption went out of fashion . . . and talking about things had become superfluous.”¹¹⁴ By the beginning of this millennium the use of the “early modern” paradigm to analyze cultural changes in the Ming dynasty also became “superfluous,” and nowadays scholars are inclined to utilize the expression “late imperial China,” referring to Ming China from its origins to c.1930s. This periodization challenges the idea that modern China began with the Opium War, and signifies the roles of the market economy, urbanization, rising literacy, and the informal character of local society governance, in China’s long-term development.¹¹⁵ Nevertheless, whatever conceptual freedom the idea of “late imperial China” has exuded, the situation remains that the consequences of commerce and the market economy in China from the 16th century onward are still not completely understood and await further examination.