The 34th Year of the Jiajing Reign (1555) - A Bizarre Story
Author: Zhu Anfeng. Originally published on QQ Zone on January 8, 2010.
On a weekend during a business trip, I happened to see a newer edition of my hometown's county gazetteer. A quick glance suggested it had too much "main theme" material, which was a pity. But one section was still worth mentioning. In fact, I had seen it in a Qing-dynasty edition of the gazetteer too, but I was young then and had no real sense of what it meant.
It described the following:
In the seventh month of the 34th year of the Jiajing reign (1555), a small band of sixty to seventy Japanese raiders moved west from Hangzhou. They passed through Chun'an, Shexian, and Jixi, burning, killing, looting, and abducting along the way, "ranging back and forth as if entering an empty land." When they reached Jingde, local residents in the south rose up in resistance, and the magistrate Cen Shu also dispatched the sub-magistrate Cai Yao with more than a thousand troops to block them at the General Temple in Banshu. With the joint effort of troops and civilians, the raiders were besieged at the temple for a full day and night. At dawn the next day, heavy fog fell, and the raiders used it to break out, killing dozens of civilians. They escaped to outside the south gate of the county town (which at the time had gates but no walls), set fire to several houses, and then fled toward Jingxian and Nanling.
The thousand troops under Cai Yao managed only to cut off the head of one raider who had already died of illness, and to pick up one sick horse. Yet Cen Shu, following the advice of a clerk named Liu Bangda, reported the head and the sick horse as trophies and claimed merit. When the superior authorities investigated the facts, they replied: "Cutting a pirate head after he was already dead, and picking up a bow and horse abandoned on the road, is deception." Cen Shu was then impeached and dismissed from office.
Since this appears in an official gazetteer, it is not entirely baseless. But what fascinated me was not the magistrate's defense tactics. It was how a group of only sixty to seventy raiders managed to reach southern Anhui at all.
After some quick searching, I found a more detailed account of this group:
On the 13th day of the seventh month of 1555, a small group of raiders moved west from Hangzhou and looted Shexian, Jixi, Jingde, Jingxian, and Nanling in present-day Anhui. On the 24th of the same month, they attacked Nanjing unsuccessfully and then moved toward Moling Pass. From Nanjing they looted Liyang and Yixing. Hearing that Ming forces were mobilizing from Taihu, they advanced to Wuxi and camped at Huishan. They then marched more than 180 li in a day and night, reaching Hushu Pass (northwest of today's Suzhou). Meanwhile, another band of raiders at Zhelin in Songjiang attempted to flee by sea, but storms wrecked their ships and more than three hundred landed again at Taozhaizhen. The governor Cao Bangfu personally led forces to prevent the two groups from merging, surrounded them from all sides, and killed nineteen raiders. The raiders, frightened, tried to slip toward Taihu under cover of darkness.
On August 30, 1555, Ming forces caught up at Yanglin Bridge and wiped out the raiders who had occupied Hushu Pass. This group, only sixty to seventy men, ran thousands of li: from Zhejiang into Anhui and Jiangsu, even attacking Nanjing. Over more than eighty days, they allegedly killed and wounded four to five thousand Ming soldiers, killed several officials, and were only then eliminated near Taihu.
In simple terms: a band of sixty to seventy raiders roamed the heartland of the Ming empire for more than eighty days, moving across multiple provinces, reaching Nanjing, and only then being destroyed, while inflicting shocking casualties.
This episode has several notable features:
The sources describe complex actions: night breakouts, movement through unfamiliar mountain regions of southern Anhui, and a long forced march of 180 li in a day and night. This suggests the core fighters were likely trained warriors rather than ordinary desperate civilians.
Their mode was mobile warfare without a base. They rarely stayed in any one place for more than a day. Under the communication conditions of that era, this made it hard for Ming field forces to locate and strike them quickly. Correspondingly, the raiders tried to avoid fighting Ming mobile field forces directly. Many of the Ming forces they defeated along the way were more like local garrisons or militia.
The greatest damage occurred along the southern Anhui–Nanjing corridor, which was densely populated and not a traditional coastal piracy zone. Local governments and civilians there lacked practical experience in resisting such raiders, and could not form effective defense and blockade quickly the way coastal regions could.
Although the raiders' actual strength was wildly disproportionate to the destruction they caused, the political impact was huge precisely because the outcome was so unexpected.
I sincerely hope local gazetteers can contain more history that is worth savoring.