PIRATES IN GOWNS AND CAPS: GENTRY LAW-BREAKING IN THE MID-MING

Abstract

In 1548, a high-ranking Ming dynasty civil official named Zhu Wan was serving as the grand coordinator for coastal defense in the two provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian. In a memorial to the throne he summed up the difficulties he was facing with the following turn of phrase: “Doing away with foreign pirates (wai guo dao) is easy, but doing away with Chinese pirates is difficult. Doing away with Chinese pirates along the coast is still easy, but doing away with Chinese pirates in gowns and caps (yi guan zhi dao) is particularly difficult.” These words, still startling and intriguing to modern ears as they must have been to Zhu Wan's contemporaries, are by far the most famous words attributed to this still somewhat obscure Ming official. Nearly all of his biographers cite these well-known lines. In recent years historians such as Bodo Wiethoff and Kwan-wai So have paid renewed attention to Zhu Wan's activities on the coast, but they have not considered this statement's importance for understanding what task Zhu Wan was commissioned to undertake. These words had special significance for Zhu Wan because he spent the last two years of his life struggling to eradicate piracy. Especially difficult, as he stated, was the problem of eliminating those peculiar “pirates in gowns and caps,” which in this case can only mean the gentry-officials or gentry-scholars, members of the elite class who supported if not piracy itself, at least the illegal smuggling trade on which piracy thrived. After two years of intense anger and frustration, Zhu Wan gave up and committed suicide. This was his only reward for trying to clean up what must have been the Ming equivalent of the “underworld,” the murky side of Chinese coastal society.