Introduction: Human Trafficking within and from Ming China

Human trafficking—the abduction, coercion, violence, deception, and exploitation to procure persons—is a significant focus of present-day global humanitarian concern.Footnote ¹ Its history, however, has deep roots in the past, not only in the colonial regimes that exported millions of persons from their native places and abused them in far-away agricultural and industrial enterprises, but long before, within the slave trading systems integral to the ancient societies of Europe, Africa, and Asia.Footnote ² In recent research about the history of slavery, a number of scholars have utilized the concept of a “slaving zone” to help explain what specific conditions—geographical, political, and social—create and sustain a location where slavery flourishes, or does not, as in a “no-slaving zone” where religious-ethical taboos may prohibit enslavement.Footnote ³ Integral to the “slaving zone” concept is the effectiveness of a state’s political organization to control the space where slave raiders are active, as well as the local merchants who facilitate trafficking.Footnote ⁴ The more stable and effectively a state operates, the less likely that free persons will be exposed to abduction and exploitation.

Since earliest times, both government and private slavery existed in imperial China, and over the ages, successive dynastic regimes, including the Han (206 BCE–CE 220) and the Tang (618–907), issued statutes regulating facets of slavery’s legitimacy and realization in Chinese society. Such legislation, however, did not prevent individual cases of trafficking and slave procurement among high-ranked officials and elite families or the acquisition of vast numbers of slaves in military battles. Documentation dating from the second century BCE to the mid-fifteenth century CE about human trafficking and slavery along the networks of the Silk Road land and sea routes confirms there was an extensive commerce in slaves in markets both within and outside of China.Footnote ⁵ By the time of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) human trafficking laws carried severe penalties for persons who engaged in maimai (buying and selling) or guaimai (abducting and selling) people, and explicitly forbade those practices.Footnote ⁶ The Da Ming lü [The Great Ming Code; first promulgated in 1374], clearly prohibited kidnapping, and selling people (including children), under Article 298. Nevertheless, fragmentary references in legal case studies and particular passages in Ming-era encyclopedias indicate that human trafficking was not uncommon.

Utilizing these sources, recent scholarship has directed attention to the trafficking of children for immoral purposes, the sale of wives and daughters into domestic bondage, and the recruitment of women for the imperial household as wet-nurses, nannies, and entertainers.Footnote ⁷ In his examination of life in Ming China, Wang Ermin has shown how daily-use encyclopedias such as the Wanbao quanshu [Encyclopedia of myriad treasures], which targeted the lower classes, contained practical information, including sample contracts, for selling relatives to outsiders, a practice that was entirely illegal.Footnote ⁸ What emerges from these studies of trafficking in Ming society is insight into its fluidity: stringent legislation against buying and selling human beings manifested the government’s aim to control and eradicate such behavior, yet the acceptance of marriage customs and adoption strategies of regional overseers (including local elites) rendered the sale of persons transactional and legitimate.Footnote ⁹

Understanding the intricacies of human trafficking within Ming China is complicated by the fact that not all trafficked persons became slaves, that is, persons categorized as jian (mean) as opposed to liang (good, or free). In late imperial China, indentured labor and bondservants, both groups classified as jian, were more likely to have inherited that status than having been sold into slavery,Footnote ¹⁰ while a high proportion of human trafficking victims who possessed “free” status were probably destined for work in the sex-for-sale venues flourishing in Ming China’s cities and expanding market enclaves.Footnote ¹¹ As Xie Zhaozhe (1567–1624), a well-known observer of Ming life, wrote about the ubiquity of prostitutes: “In the big cities they run to the tens of thousands, but they can be found in every poor district and remote place as well, leaning by doorways all day long, bestowing their smiles, selling sex for a living.”Footnote ¹² Given the paucity of records about human trafficking agents and China’s immense size, one can only speculate about the particular circumstances that delivered as many as a million persons into the Ming era’s bordellos and brothels.Footnote ¹³

On the other hand, documentation about the transactions in human beings along the Chinese littoral, dating from the Ming regime’s early years as well as later, is informative. Although evidence about such trafficking into and out of coastal regions is relatively sparse, the “slaving zone” model can help us expose specific factors that either encouraged or deterred people-smuggling within China and to destinations outside the Ming empire. As a political organization, the early Ming state was a highly centralized political authority with the military resources to prevent human trafficking along its maritime frontier. And so, it was there that the first Ming emperor Hongwu (1324–1398; r.1368–1398), through a series of powerful directives, ended the human trafficking along China’s northern littoral that had beleaguered the first years of his reign. But over the longer term his policies proved ineffective and were even conducive to human trafficking. They eventually connected China to the late sixteenth-century supply lines that carried slaves and indentured labor from North Africa, East Africa, and South Asia, and via the Asian seas, to the Americas, as well as from East Asia and Southeast Asia to Europe via India and Africa.

This essay examines recorded incidents of human trafficking along China’s littoral from 1370 to 1565 and argues that its presence and persistence were intertwined with the Ming court’s economic policies and problems, as well as those of regional authorities seeking financial support to promote military security and stability along the coast. While modern scholars have published extensively on the smuggling gangs and piracy that plagued sixteenth-century China, and the economic impact of imported foreign silver, there has been little to no interest in the role human trafficking played in them. In particular, one wants to know how and why, despite its strenuous laws against kidnapping, rustling, and unregulated international commerce, the Ming government turned a blind eye to this rogue business as its economy surged starting in the mid-sixteenth century. Here I will examine the history of human trafficking in early-to-mid-Ming China as a series of challenges to not only its economic well-being but also its ability to govern according to its own laws and norms.

This essay connects what may appear to be disparate institutions and actors into a complex tableau, which elucidates the competing forces whose pursuit of power and riches propelled the sixteenth-century expansion of China’s market economy. That expansion brought greater prosperity for some, but deepening poverty for others.Footnote ¹⁴

Such economic and social pressures fostered ever more human trafficking. This raises the questions, first, of how this phenomenon might connect to the envelopment of Ming China into burgeoning Asian slave trading networks linked to the emerging global economy of the later sixteenth century, and second, of what its significance for the slaving zone model is.Footnote ¹⁵ This study argues that the increase in human trafficking along the coast of Ming China reflects the broadening parameters of illegal maritime commerce and the ability of authorities to ignore the consequences of allowing safe havens for those bartering and selling human beings.

First Challenge: Emperor Hongwu’s Actions to Repress Human Trafficking and Piracy along the Northern Littoral

The last years of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) saw increasing levels of piracy along the northern littoral. Both Chinese and Korean coastal officials observed seafaring marauders and plunderers, known as waegu (Korean) or wakō (Japanese), wreaking havoc along the coasts of northeast Asia. They came from the Japanese archipelago, mainly Kyushu and Tsushima.Footnote ¹⁶ While their principal goal was to steal grain, they also kidnapped people, mainly coastal residents of Korea and China, who they sold into slavery in Japan.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus the actions of these brigands went beyond simply raiding and became an economic operation—a form of piracy. What distinguished piracy from other maritime predations were its commercial and political dimensions: pirates sold their plunder, often in collusion with land-based merchants, and undermined the authority and political legitimacy of nation-states.Footnote ¹⁸

Early in his reign, emperor Hongwu formulated a solution to end the wakō menace along the Chinese coast, and issued in 1371 the haijin (maritime prohibition), which forbade private sea trade, and Chinese from going to sea for any reason.Footnote ¹⁹ This policy thereby confined all foreign exchange to formal state-to-state relations and tribute trade missions.Footnote ²⁰ Tribute trade referred to a foreign court sending envoys and exotic products to the Chinese emperor, who in return gave the envoys gifts and permission to trade with China at designated ports. At these ports a customs tax was collected on goods by the shibosi (Office of Maritime Affairs) under the supervision of eunuchs serving the imperial household. The three ports assigned to receive tribute trade were Guangzhou for Southeast Asian countries, Quanzhou in Fujian province for the Ryukyu kingdom, and Ningbo in Zhejiang province for Korea and Japan.Footnote ²¹

Many China historians concede that tribute trade was not a standard, unchanging facet of late imperial international relations, and that it was one of several “foreign policy instruments” the Ming government used to achieve security.Footnote ²² However, they also recognize that its basic structure, channeling foreign contacts into a hierarchical framework, with the emperor at the apex, supported by periodic ritual gift-exchanges, was an instrument to promote and sustain Chinese economic and cultural hegemony in Asia. In essence, the tribute system permitted three types of trade: (1) diplomatic tributes of exotic goods that foreign countries presented to China, which were reciprocated with imperial gifts; (2) official trade that accompanied diplomatic missions, which allowed Ming officials to purchase (at prices which they determined) goods from foreign merchants; and (3) private trade that allowed these same foreign merchants to sell goods to Chinese merchants via government-assigned brokers who collected customs duties on them.Footnote ²³

The immediate circumstances of the wakō situation undoubtedly influenced emperor Hongwu to mandate the haijin, but there were other factors, such as his fear of the remnant supporters of his opponents—the two coastal warlords Zhang Shicheng (1321–1367) and Fang Guozhen (1319–1374)—and his own inland background in the western Huai region.Footnote ²⁴ The haijin decree also reflected the emperor’s disdain for trade and commerce and, not least, his distrust of foreigners. In general, his economic program was intended to recreate the autarkic village economy envisioned by early Confucian thinkers and thereby curtail, and potentially even eliminate, the market economy. In another directive Hongwu banned the use of gold and silver as money and introduced a system of inconvertible paper currency, and one can presume that another motivation for the haijin was 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.Footnote ²⁵ The paper money policy failed, and by the close of the fifteenth century, with state-sponsored silver mining dwindling to insignificant levels, but rising levels of commerce that increased the demand for silver as currency, the economy was operating under severe monetary constraints.Footnote ²⁶

Emperor Hongwu’s strategy to contain wakō attacks targeted not only the littoral but also the East Asian sea-lane network connecting Japan, Korea, and southern China. Aware that Japanese officials lacked the means to suppress piracy and human trafficking, Hongwu in 1372 authorized the Ryukyu kingdom (a chain of islands stretching from Taiwan to southern Kyushu) to become a tributary state of China.Footnote ²⁷ His goal here was twofold: first, to channel into the lawful framework of tribute trade the smuggling activities of the Kyushu-based wakō who used Naha, the harbor of what is now Okinawa, as a base of operations; and second, to mitigate the effects of the haijin policy on his own military and household needs. Japan was a rich source of sulfur for making gunpowder and horses—both crucial to China’s military security. Hongwu reckoned that the wakō would find it more practical, or even more profitable, to deliver these items to Naha in exchange for Chinese goods than to plunder the littoral and convey hostages for sale in Japan.Footnote ²⁸

For a long time the Chinese tribute system worked well for Ryukyu—it sent a relatively high number of missions from 1372 to the 1430s, with only Korea having more embassies.Footnote ²⁹ The wakō raids along the Chinese littoral subsided as did human trafficking, the repatriation of captured Koreans was regularized, and Ryukyu gained permission to send tribute embassies to Korea.Footnote ³⁰ To achieve these results, the Ming authorities gave financial support to the Ryukyu kingdom to purchase Chinese commodities such as medicinal herbs, minted coins, glazed ceramics, brocades, and silk. Their ships carried these products from Fujian to Southeast Asian ports, including Melaka, Gresik (Java), Kalapa (Sunda), Palembang, Pattani, and Ayutthaya, where the Ryukyu trade mission purchased exotic and precious items to give to China as tribute.Footnote ³¹ At Quanzhou, the Ryukyu kingdom presented the Office of Maritime Affairs with tribute items from Southeast Asia: fragrant woods, pepper, ambergris, rhino horns, tin, sugar, iron, Indian ivory, and Arabian frankincense, all commodities greatly valued by the Ming Imperial Household. In this way, the Ming government outsourced foreign trade to Ryukyu, allowing that kingdom access to the highly prized riches of Southeast Asia, as well as the rights to convey Japanese goods such as sulfur, horses, and swords from Naha to China. The kingdom also served China as a diplomatic intermediary with Japan.Footnote ³²

All that said, over the longer term, emperor Hongwu’s maritime prohibition, however beneficial to northern coastal residents during his reign, provoked discontent, and eventually large-scale violence. By the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the golden age of Ryukyu “tribute-trade” began to fade. The Ming government found their missions too expensive,Footnote ³³ and furthermore, as Southeast Asia became more commercializedFootnote ³⁴ human trafficking again became a problem for China, but this time along the southern littoral.

Second Challenge: Human Trafficking along China’s Southern Littoral, Tribute Trade Debates, and the Folangji

Notices of maritime human trafficking during the fifteenth century’s second half are sporadic, but by 1480 the problem was significant enough that the court in Beijing had become aware of its existence. According to an entry in the Ming Shilu [Ming veritable records; hereafter MSL] dated 19 August 1481: “When the envoys from the two countries of Siam and Samudera (Sumatra) were returning home after coming to the court to offer tribute, along the way, ‘their’ boat-men showed them how to purchase the sons and daughters of impoverished people.”Footnote ³⁵ Both Siam and Samudera in their tribute missions were substantial importers of pepper which was greatly desired in China.Footnote ³⁶ It would seem that as the regular Ryukyu-led tribute missions waned, Southeast Asian polities took the opportunity to increase their commerce in this commodity and engaged in private trade as much as possible during regular embassies. Those brought them into more frequent interaction with yahang (Ming government-licensed brokers) who, as the quoted passage implies, could help the emissaries’ trafficking business.

The escalating illegal trade from Southeast Asia exacerbated China’s growing fiscal instability in the early sixteenth century, during the reign of the Zhengde emperor (1506–1521).Footnote ³⁷ By then, emperor Hongwu’s ideal of self-sufficient rural communities was fading fast as agricultural and commercial production rose and extensive interregional marketing connected China’s interior with coastal locations. Nevertheless, despite the wealth these changes generated, the Ming economy was facing setbacks. During this reign era, the central government’s income began to decline while its expenses escalated. Emperor Zhengde had inherited his predecessor’s revenue problems and the imbalance between the imperial treasury’s income and disbursements grew steadily.Footnote ³⁸ Such fiscal difficulties, however pressing at the time, lead one to ask if they indicated some kind of imminent crisis. In response, one should consider the longevity of the Ming regime, which endured for another 123 years after the Zhengde reign. Given this, we clearly need to understand how the autocracy of the emperor institution interacted with the authority of provincial and local leaders to overcome economic challenges.

Outside the capital, regional finances were also doing poorly, since local administrators needed to find ways to meet provincial and county operating prerequisites.Footnote ³⁹ Provincial officials at Guangzhou, alert to the increase in smuggling along the littoral, especially in neighboring Fujian province, wanted to regularize more private trade and increase custom duties to raise more funds for military needs. With the support of the xunfu (grand coordinator)—a civil official who made decisions in provincial administrative matters, including of taxation, military defense, and disaster management—Guangzhou authorities gained permission in 1509 to lift some restrictions on private trade and charge 20 percent duties on incoming cargo.Footnote ⁴⁰

By 1514, however, according to MSL documentation, some Guangzhou officials questioned the efficacy of the cargoes from Southeast Asia. One memorial dated 27 June from that year notes: “The various trading goods found in Ling-nan originate from the foreigners of Melaka, Siam, and Java. These products are nothing but pepper, sappan-wood, elephant tusks, tortoiseshell, and such things. They are not things people need every day like cloth, silks, vegetables, and grain.”Footnote ⁴¹ At this point, the relaxation of tribute trade regulations had attracted ever more commerce to China’s southern littoral—not only were licensed Chinese merchants doing business with foreigners at Guangzhou, but non-certified traders were “wheeling and dealing” at off-shore sites where visiting ships paid no revenues.Footnote ⁴² This situation exasperated those local officials who had opposed moderating trade rules. To support their case, they expressed to the court their outrage that foreigners were in cahoots with “evil persons of Guangdong/Guangxi … [and] beguiled people into absconding, [and] kidnapped or purchased boys and girls….”Footnote ⁴³ This passage from the MSL indicates that a number of Guangdong authorities linked inland human traffickers with overseas commerce, and implies these officials had some knowledge of local people involved in the practice.

In the summer of 1517, amid this commercial hustle and bustle and rising discontent among Guangzhou officials accusing locals and strangers of trafficking Chinese persons, the first Portuguese expedition arrived in the Pearl River Estuary. It came from Melaka, a port-polity and a Ming tribute state, which these Europeans had conquered in 1511. Since then, Melaka had become Portugal’s commercial linchpin between the Indian Ocean and the Chinese seas. The Portuguese legation to China was led by Captain Fernão Peres de Andrade (d. 1552), commanding a fleet of four carracks armed with heavy artillery and three junks sailed by hired or forced laborers from Arabia, India, and Melaka. Its purpose was to prepare a tribute embassy to the Beijing court, headed by the apothecary-turned-ambassador Tomé Pires (1465–1524).Footnote ⁴⁴ For their part, the Chinese authorities at Guangzhou, viewing the motley crew, considered them not as representatives of any particular kingdom-state but as just another mixed merchant group from Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Chinese name for the Portuguese was Folangji (Frankish breech-loader), a name derived from a variant of the term “Frank,” from Persian Farangi or Arabic Firanji, also known in South and Southeast Asia as Ferenghi (Frankish intruders).Footnote ⁴⁶ Such misconceptions about Portugal’s geographical origins were long-lasting: the Mingshi, the Ming dynastic history published in 1739, records that the land of the Folangji is near Melaka.Footnote ⁴⁷

The Chinese officials showed good will toward Peres de Andrade and eventually allowed the embassy and even coached Pires in protocol requirements.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet they remained suspicious of the Folangji, especially after they asked for permission to build a fort on the island of Tunmen, presumably for commercial purposes. Still, they granted their request. The diplomatic mission did not go well. For one thing, ambassadors from Melaka were also in the capital, asking for assistance to drive the Folangji out of their kingdom.Footnote ⁴⁹ Peres de Andrade departed China in 1518, but his brother, Simão de Andrade, arrived the next year. He behaved aggressively—expanding the small Tunmen fort to accommodate heavy cannon, refusing to pay taxes on trading goods, and showing contempt for Chinese officialdom—and this further polarized the debate about free trade.Footnote ⁵⁰

The situation became intolerable for the Chinese authorities in 1520 when Simão de Andrade purchased children from “honorable families” and shipped them to Goa, India, a fact corroborated in Portuguese accounts.Footnote ⁵¹ While the buying and selling of persons were hardly unknown in China, the idea that a foreigner defied Ming law was infuriating and led to false charges against the Portuguese that endured long after this incident.Footnote ⁵² Simão de Andrade left China in early 1520 and was followed one year later by a fleet of Portuguese ships sailing, without permission, up the Pearl River to trade in Guangzhou. Chinese officials told them to leave, but they refused, which led to a series of armed confrontations ending in Portuguese defeat in 1522.Footnote ⁵³ Banned from Chinese waters yet still based in Melaka, the Portuguese decided their best strategy was to continue illicit trading with the complicity of local officials and gentry at various localities along the coasts of Fujian and Zhejiang. They became part of a tremendous upsurge in piracy that terrorized the Chinese littoral for the next forty-five years.

Third Challenge: Wokou Piracy, Japanese Silver, Human Trafficking, and the Ming Revenue Deficit

The origins of the wave of piracy that struck the Chinese littoral starting in the 1520s can be traced to several events, including not only the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1522 but also the 1523 “Ningbo incident,” when rival Japanese trade missions vied to present tribute. This resulted in widespread pillaging of the city, a naval battle in which Japanese defeated the Chinese, and a ban of all Japanese from China.Footnote ⁵⁴ But instead of leaving, the intruders established an international smuggling emporium at Shuangyu island near Ningbo,Footnote ⁵⁵ which facilitated clandestine commerce along the littoral.Footnote ⁵⁶ It was at this point during the late 1520s that groups of maritime marauders known as wokou (or wakō), some originating in southwest Japan and Korea but most from China, banded together. Supported by Portuguese seafarers with sophisticated weaponry, they spawned chaos along China’s coast, pillaged inland, and made a mockery of the official maritime prohibition.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Ming court was now under the suzerainty of the Jiajing emperor (r. 1522–1566), who came to the throne at age thirteen, had little grasp of maritime issues, and who fell easily under the sway of the court’s anti-trade faction. Its response was simply to call for stricter enforcement of the maritime prohibition. The Jiajing emperor, like his predecessor the Zhengde emperor, gained a reputation for misrule, but unlike the earlier ruler his problem was not wild behavior but self-indulgence and cruelty toward others. He did, however, see the value of a civil bureaucracy having influence over eunuchs and the military, and four powerful grand secretaries, in principle, successively aided him in his rule, which possessed “a modicum of stability and order.”Footnote ⁵⁸ It can be argued, as does one scholar, that during his long reign, the Jiajing emperor entertained an “incremental approach” toward relaxing trade restrictions. According to this view, the easing of strictures may have helped curb the entanglement of prominent families and officials—so-called “pirates in caps and gowns” (yiguan zhi dao)—in the web of smuggling, trafficking, and illegal protection rackets along the coasts of Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang provinces.Footnote ⁵⁹

The discovery of silver in Japan in the 1530s added new dimensions to this scenario.Footnote ⁶⁰ At Shuangyu, the wokou traded silver and weapons from Japan for Chinese silk yarn and fabrics, porcelain, fans, and pearls. Now, with so much Japanese silver at their disposal, the wokou expanded their trading networks across East Asia and Southeast Asia, while making alliances with Kyushu daimyō (lords) such as the powerful Satsuma prefecture-based Shimazu family. They offered the wokou safe harbors and sites to store goods, build and repair ships, and sojourn between voyages. The wokou also engaged in human trafficking. In 1556, the Zhejiang coastal commander Yang Yi sent his envoy Zheng Shungong (flourished in the sixteenth century) to Japan to ask Kyushu authorities to suppress piracy along the Chinese littoral. When Zheng arrived, he found in Satsuma some two to three hundred Chinese working as slaves. Originally from southern Fujian prefectures, they were kept by Japanese families who had bought them from the wokou some twenty years before.Footnote ⁶¹

Not all Chinese persons trafficked to Japan as slaves went involuntarily. The notorious wokou “pirate king” Wang Zhi (d. 1560), who from his Japanese hideaway in the Goto islands west of Hirado directed a large fleet of ships across East Asia and Southeast Asia carrying textiles, salt, sulfur, and European-made weaponry, was much admired in the 1540s by both Chinese and Japanese people for his exploits.Footnote ⁶² So much so, “…many people offered him their sons and daughters,”Footnote ⁶³ implying that parents sold their children into Wang Zhi’s overseas commercial network to advance their children’s prospects. Such behavior should be considered in light of the tensions China’s increasing affluence and growing economy had brought to those unable to reap the fruits of commerce and the marketplace in their native locales. They saw Wang Zhi as someone with agency who had successfully defied the restrictions that had barred them from easily accessing wealth. This kind of sentiment penetrated the popular and entertaining Ming vernacular fiction narratives, which imparted the fluidity of the maritime world of rags-to-riches stories, anti-government military heroes, exotic foreign women, and racial differences. But those stories also made evident to the broad reading populace that piracy and human trafficking were more than just fantasy; they were a manifestation of violent undercurrents in Ming life.Footnote ⁶⁴

By the late 1540s, there were ever-increasing incidents of violence engendered by heightened levels of marauding and raiding along the Chinese littoral and escalating illicit trade inciting more altercations between wealthy families involved in it. The Ming court responded by appointing the official Zhu Wan (1494–1550) as “Grand Coordinator of Coastal Defense” to organize a massive military campaign to eradicate the wokou. Footnote ⁶⁵ Until then, protection of the littoral had been monitored by another of emperor Hongwu’s schemes to reduplicate the earlier hereditary military household organization; that is, the coastal garrison system. But the officers who commanded that system had a propensity to engage in the very piracy and smuggling they were supposed to suppress, so there was probably little support for Zhu Wan’s mission.Footnote ⁶⁶ While he did manage to destroy Shuangyu and kill many of its exponents, his program to drive out the sea brigands aroused so much local opposition from scholar-gentry officials who profited from the illegal commerce that ultimately he lost support for his mission and committed suicide.Footnote ⁶⁷ Piracy continued and even expanded further with Kyushu-based Chinese sea chieftains such as Wang Zhi directing large-scale operations that attacked China’s economic heartland, Jiangnan, including the great cities of Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nanjing.Footnote ⁶⁸

As maritime defense costs in the 1550s soared, the institutional infrastructure created by emperor Hongwu, in which the land tax amounted to no more than 5–10 percent of yields, could no longer meet the income needs of the Ming state.Footnote ⁶⁹ The government’s inability to gain new revenue from the sixteenth-century thriving agricultural economy was aggravated by its commutation of taxes from in-kind to the silver that circulated in the form of irregular ingots varying widely in weight and quality.Footnote ⁷⁰ As a result, by the mid-Ming it appears that most revenue collected at local and provincial levels was reallocated without being deposited in central government treasuries.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1552 the Ministry of Revenue reported that the annual disbursement of silver for imperial and border defense expenses was nearly six million ounces of silver but that the annual silver revenue (in commuted terms) was less than half that amount.Footnote ⁷²

Silver mined in Japan could not enter China legitimately because Japan was not allowed to participate in the tribute trade system and attempts by individual daimyō to renew formal contacts were rebuffed. At this point the Guangdong officials stationed along the littoral, along with Portuguese eager to exploit trade with Japan, including human trafficking, made a “deal” that flouted the power and moral authority of the Ming court in Beijing even as it rescued the silver-starved Chinese economy.

Fourth Challenge: Silk-for-Silver, Intra-Asian Human Trafficking, and Macao

The court’s immediate reaction to the fighting and depredations of the 1540s was to strengthen the haijin policy in 1550, with revised penal regulations (wenxing tiaoli) containing rigorous measures to restrict private trade: the death penalty was prescribed for people who built large junks and sold them to foreigners, and for officials or civilians who shipped prohibited articles, including weapons, coins, and silk products.Footnote ⁷³ And yet, within four years of this legislation’s enactment, beginning in 1554, Portuguese traders began providing Japan with the Chinese silk, porcelain, and gold they purchased in Guangzhou in exchange for silver bullion and copper. The Portuguese so-called “black ship” (kurofune) sailed annually from Macao to Japan (at first to Hirado and later to Nagasaki) and returned with these metals, with the full knowledge of Guangdong officialdom.Footnote ⁷⁴ From the Japanese point of view, the delivery of high quality Chinese silk by the kurofune was of great economic importance, since the sale by particular daimyō of silk fabrics and yarn brought them great profits which enabled them to fund their military regimes.Footnote ⁷⁵

After the Shuangyu debacle Portuguese traders had moved southward. They went first to Zoumaxi, a deepwater inlet near the Guangdong-Fujian border, where in 1549, in a last-ditch effort to rid the southern littoral of these Europeans, Zhu Wan attacked, imprisoned, and in the end routed them.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Portuguese took refuge on two small islands close to the Pearl River estuary: Shangchuan (also known as St. John’s island or Sanchão) and Langbaigang (Lampacau).Footnote ⁷⁷ From there, beginning in 1550, they conducted clandestine commercial operations between Melaka, southern China, and Kyushu. This was a vulnerable situation, and in late 1552 a Portuguese fidalgo merchant, Leonel de Sousa (d. 1571), arrived in the Guangzhou region and began negotiations with Wang Bo (1538 jinshi), Guangdong’s haidao fushi (maritime surveillance officer), to secure permission for the Portuguese to trade at Guangzhou.Footnote ⁷⁸ The agreement they struck obliged the Portuguese to pay Guangdong customs administrators 20 percent duties on their cargo and hand over 500 silver taels per year to the serving official of the maritime circuit. Given that the Folangji were still banned from China, Wang Bo advised the Portuguese to represent themselves at Guangzhou as envoys of Siam, since that country was a bona-fide tributary state. Such camouflage would prevent interference from the Beijing court.Footnote ⁷⁹

Wang Bo’s pact with de Sousa was likely favored by other Guangdong officials who, after witnessing neighboring Fujian province ignoring the haijin restrictions and harboring the profitable foreign trade at Yuegang (Zhangzhou prefecture), realized the advantages of compromising with the Portuguese.Footnote ⁸⁰ Not only had cargos of untold exotic riches from Southeast Asia for decades entered the inlets and havens of Fujian,Footnote ⁸¹ but now a steady stream of smuggled silver specie was flowing into its coastal enclaves—opportunities denied Guangdong.Footnote ⁸² With this arrangement in place, the next few years saw the Portuguese moving their principal trade operations from Lampacau to Macao, which became their permanent settlement location in 1557. This “gentleman’s agreement” was never processed into an official document, but its terms were outlined in a letter Leonel de Sousa wrote in 1556 to Prince Luis, brother of King John III, posted from Cochin (India), in which he described the difficult negotiations with Wang Bo and confirmed the regular payment of 20 percent duty on all trade items.Footnote ⁸³

Unfortunately, contemporaneous Chinese local sources are sketchy about the origins of the Portuguese presence on Macao: several local gazetteers mention Wang Bo allowing Portuguese traders caught in a storm to land and dry their goods at Macao, but nothing about the silk-for-silver exchange or their carrying human cargo.Footnote ⁸⁴ Nevertheless, as early as 1555 Catholic Church authorities complained that Portuguese merchants in Japan had purchased women there for sexual purposes and shipped them via Macao to Lisbon, where they lived with them in sin.Footnote ⁸⁵ The closest definite documentation of Portuguese-Japanese commerce in Chinese is that recorded by Zheng Shungong in his Riben yijian, which noted, “Japanese barbarians came to trade in Guangdong waters in 1555 at the invitation of the Folangji, that they continued to come year after year, that the Folangji had the Japanese dress themselves as Folangji barbarians, and that they traded in Mai-mai street in Guangzhou.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Zheng’s statement suggests that aside from the “official” kurofune expedition to Japan, led by a Portuguese “captain major” (capitãe more), private merchants, including Japanese as well as Portuguese skippers, also participated in the silk-for-silver commerce. Further, as the complaints from the Church authorities indicate, the Portuguese traders were also engaging in human trafficking. The Portuguese involvement in slave commerce in Japan was recorded in sixteenth-century Japanese chronicles, and first cited by the Japanese scholar Okamoto Yoshitomo (1900–1972), who published the earliest historical study about slavery in his country.Footnote ⁸⁷ Okamoto spared no details from his reading of contemporaneous Japanese local sources which recorded “how the Iberians gain influence over the leaders of the Goto islands, Hirado, and Nagasaki, and lure them over to their vile faith. Moreover, they buy several hundred men and women and take them aboard their black ships: They place chains on their hands and feet and throw them into the holds of their ships. Their torments are worse than those in hell…. We hear that the local Japanese have learned their ways by imitating them and sell them their own children, parents, wives, and daughters.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Evidence of the circumstances within which human trafficking between Kyushu and Macao occurred was recorded by the Jesuit missionary Luís Fróis (1532–1597) in his História de Japam. Fróis recalled one incident when a Portuguese ship on route from Japan to Macao in 1560, carrying the Jesuit Balthasar Gago, encountered a storm, prompting the priest to prepare for the possibility of shipwreck and death. As he began to hear confessions among the crew, he realized there were also many women aboard who had been locked into a separate compartment. He later determined they were of Chinese origin, captured by the wokou and sold as slaves in Japan.Footnote ⁸⁹ Fróis also chronicled that two years later another Jesuit, the medical expert Luis Almeirda (1525–1583), reported an incident of numerous women held captive on another Portuguese ship departing Japan for Macao.Footnote ⁹⁰ In both instances it seems local merchants had shifted the Chinese women from the Japanese port of Bungo Funai (located on Kyushu’s northeast side, near silver depositories) to Portuguese agents who delivered them to Macao. The isthmus was fast becoming a crucial node in the intra-Asian human trafficking network that brought Chinese captured by wokou forces to Japanese markets and eventually to Hirado, from where they were shipped westward toward Macao, and eventually to Melaka, Goa, and finally Lisbon.Footnote ⁹¹

Macao, until the Portuguese came to settle there, was largely an uninhabited, narrow peninsula where only a few fishermen were based.Footnote ⁹² The Portuguese lived on the southern half of the isthmus, which was relatively empty terrain and distant from urban Guangzhou, but gave direct access to international shipping routes. There were two dimensions to their residence at Macao. First, from their earliest days there, the Portuguese were not confined in a specific space, like the fanfang (foreign quarters) that during earlier eras had customarily restricted the movements of overseas traders.Footnote ⁹³ Thus, in contrast to those previous visitors, the Portuguese on Macao remained “autonomous,” subject only to their authorities in Goa and Lisbon, and free to live wherever they wanted on Macao and administer themselves. However, the local Chinese authorities who dealt with the Portuguese at Macao were cognizant of their role in registering and taxing ships and incoming cargo. In other words, while the first Macao-based Portuguese may have escaped routine Sino-foreign sojourning regulations, they remained bound to the local authorities’ privy of the purse and had to make both routine and extra payments to them.

Administrators outside the Guangzhou government network did not realize what was happening at Macao until the 1560s. For example, the well-respected official Pang Shangpeng (1524–1581), serving as a censor for Zhejiang province and preoccupied with coastal defense, warned in a 1564 memorial to the throne that regardless of how profitable the collection of customs duties at Macao might be, that these foreigners were residing in China was and would remain worrisome.Footnote ⁹⁴ The writings of literati observers also express concern over how many local people were selling their children to the Portuguese. Ye Quan (1522–1578) visited Macao in 1565 and noted in his “You Lingnan ji” [Records of trips in the south] that one could find five to six children “kept in foreign households,” as many as “ten slave girls in a house,” and “tens of thousands of children serving as concubines and servants.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Thus, it seems that by the early 1560s in Guangdong and environs, the laws of the Ming Code with regard to trafficking children and adults had become “an empty piece of paper.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Profit-making, whether through the silk-for-silver trade or the sale of human beings, counted for more than did enforcing Ming law.

In addition to geography and political organization, another important factor in the model of slaving zones is “customs” (or “level of civilization”), whereby one group depreciates the habits of another and thereby validates its own superiority.Footnote ⁹⁷ Many sixteenth-century Chinese writings about the Portuguese portray them as guilty of cannibalism, which we can understand as representational retaliation for the Folangji intrusion into China. One specific Chinese accusation has been associated with Simão de Andrade’s trafficking of children in 1520, some of whom, it was said, he “roasted and ate,” and more generally with the first Portuguese traders at Guangzhou acquiring children as slaves and servants.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet the allegation of cannibalism surfaced much later than that, long after the earliest Sino-Luso encounters. As the modern scholar Zhang Qiong observes, cannibalism is not mentioned in accounts of the Folangji in the earlier period, including those in the MSL, or in the observations of Gu Yingxiang (1483–1565), the Chinese official charged with preparing the Portuguese tribute mission to Beijing.Footnote ⁹⁹

Zhang Qiong traces the earliest references to Folangji cannibalism to writings published in Guangdong province during the 1540s. The origin of these texts, she demonstrates, relates to myths about Melaka, where Danren guo [the country of cannibals] was supposed to be.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In his book Yueshan congtan [Conversations on the Moon Mountain], Li Wenfeng (jinshi 1532), an official who served three years (1540–1542) at Guangzhou, related widely-circulating accounts that the Melaka-based Folangji followed the practices of Danren guo and ate children.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This idea was given further attention in a number of publications, including the 1546 edition of the local gazetteer of Xin’an county (in the present-day Hong Kong-Shenzhen area). It perpetuated what we might call “myth-histories,” based on a Malay text that described the original 1511 “Ferenggi” [Ferenghi] attack on Melaka and their eating children there.Footnote ¹⁰²

The best-known of these myth-histories is Yan Congjian’s (15?–75; 1555 jinshi) Shuyu zhouzi lu [Record of the dispatches concerning various regions], completed in 1574. Yan wrote about the Folangji: “These people are fond of devouring small children … their method is first to boil large vats of water, and then the children are hung up in iron cages over the vats and steamed so that they sweat. When their sweat is exhausted, they are taken down and their skin is scraped off using iron brushes. The children are still alive. They are killed and split open so that intestines can be removed. Then they are steamed and eaten.”Footnote ¹⁰³ This account was printed in 1583 and quickly became very popular,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ but by then the Portuguese had been settled on Macao for decades.

Thus one may suppose that Yan’s purpose, in the face of the Ming court’s history of indifference toward the Folangji presence on Macao and their illicit practices there, was to discredit the evils of the trade and free market that facilitated human trafficking.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In this way, the Chinese-generated myth of Portuguese cannibalism is a kind of reverse hegemony of the civilization concept in a slaving zone. Yan Congjian and these other writers were striking back at the Folangji by telling a wide audience about their brutalizing, “uncivilized” behavior.

Connecting Disconnected Histories: Writing about Human Trafficking and Ming China

By the early 1560s, some eight to nine hundred Portuguese were living at Macao with their Chinese servants and Black slaves (heinü). The isthmus was also attracting myriads of overseas transitory visitors from Goa, Melaka, Japan, and later Manila, all of whom made the location seem like a sixteenth-century version of a “multi-culti” enclave, which now also witnessed the ingress of the Jesuit mission.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In 1563 the Jesuit order established itself at Macao and built two churches there—Chinese locals described these Catholic missionaries as “monks from India” and considered them “spiritual masters who kept the wild jungle of Macao under control.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The population on Macao grew steadily, to an estimated ten thousand residents before the century’s end, composed largely of casados or vezinhos, Portuguese married men who were heads of households that included male slaves (strong-armed Black men), female slaves (usually of Asian origin, mainly Chinese), as well as their Chinese wives and children, and Chinese concubines and their offspring.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Given that these Portuguese were in close contact with their Chinese hosts in procuring day-to-day necessities (fresh water and food), and that they were restricted from visiting Guangzhou, it is unlikely that Chinese women and children could have been trafficked to their households without the connivance of locals. The Guangdong authorities most probably turned a blind eye to this crime, as the Macao Portuguese community increasingly gained favor with its overseer. In the ten years following the Wang Bo-Leonel de Sousa agreement, the Portuguese supported Chinese military officials combatting skirmishes against pirates and domestic rebels. This best-known of these conflicts was a failed mutiny by Chinese troops in nearby Dongguan county in 1565, in which Portuguese fighters, cannons, and swift-moving centipede boats influenced the outcome.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Under the command of the prominent military official Yu Dayou (1503–1579), who was responsible for coastal pacification, some three hundred Portuguese-led fighters, with guns concealed on Chinese junks, surprised the mutineers and helped defeat them.Footnote ¹¹⁰

At this point, the Portuguese realized that their privileged position—trusted to oversee the lucrative silk-for-silver trade, with its extra-added human cargo bonus—was economically in their favor, but not necessarily politically secure since they, like the Japanese, remained officially barred from China. To amend this situation, the Kingdom of Portugal once again proposed to offer a tribute embassy to China. As recorded in the MSL 16 May 1565:

The memorial was approved.Footnote ¹¹¹

It would seem from this correspondence that the Ming court maintained its anti-Folangji policy and that Beijing officialdom was unaware that the Portuguese resided at Macao, and not least, did not know, even after some ten years, that local authorities had given them permission to trade at Guangzhou and import Japanese silver. These gaps in government knowledge about happenings in southern China are striking. They reveal just how disconnected the communication lines between center and periphery were, but also how far the Ming economy had shifted away from the ideal of autarkic self-sufficiency. That approach had been replaced by a laissez-faire regime that sustained commercialized agriculture and craft manufacture but disregarded the regional trade networks that ultimately connected China to the world economy. This left the burgeoning Ming economy vulnerable to international human trafficking.

There are three arenas where Ming government economic policies proved inconsistent in theory and practice between 1370 and 1565: the capital (Nanjing/Beijing), the provinces, and the littoral. In each sphere, the lines of disconnection and connection intersected, resulting in a set of paradoxical circumstances. In the first arena, emperor Hongwu issued the haijin maritime prohibition from Nanjing but also generated new, legitimate tribute trade regimens between China, Southeast Asia, and Japan, with mixed results. As the Ryukyu kingdom became the conduit of trade and communication between the Ming court and Japan as well as numerous Southeast Asian polities, human trafficking along the northern Chinese littoral dissipated while commercial overseas exchange opportunities along the southern littoral expanded. These circumstances set the stage for illicit trade, and eventually for the piracy and human trafficking of the sixteenth century.

In the second arena, the provinces, there was already at the beginning of the Zhengde reign what one may term “horizontal competition” between Guangdong and Fujian, with officials from the former appealing to the Ming court for more opportunities to collect revenue by taxing private trade. The southern Fujianese Hokkien community had long ignored the haijin and profited from extensive smuggling networks that delivered precious exotic goods into Fujian’s many coves and offshore islands,Footnote ¹¹² and the frictions between the two provinces regarding income-generating opportunities worsened over the decades. Although Guangdong, unlike Fujian, did not suffer destruction from the wokou raids of the 1530s and 1540s, it had been subject to official censure for harboring human trafficking enterprises that linked foreign visitors with the practice, even before the Portuguese arrival in Guangzhou waters. Eventually, the “horizontal competition” led the Guangzhou authorities to defy tribute trade protocols altogether and engage with the Ming government’s two most infamous persona non-grata groups, the Japanese and Portuguese whose connection with human trafficking was integral to the “core business” of silk-for-silver trade. Thus, while Guangdong and Fujian provinces were both under the suzerainty of the Ming regime, they pursued different strategies to overcome the economic challenges engendered by tribute trade rules.

It was in the third realm, the littoral, where “pirates in caps and gowns” competed with military institutions and representatives responsible for maintaining order, that the disconnect between the center’s authority and the periphery’s power may have been most profound. This is evident in the case of Zhu Wan. But in this arena, too, there was connection: both the gentry and the military elite profited from piracy “because of their proximity to the state.”Footnote ¹¹³ Both groups, at any given time, had the option to maximize their own interests within the structure of the institutions meant to minimize trade and smuggling. Such fluidity was indicative of a decline in the state’s power to limit maritime exchange or, as in the case of emperor Hongwu and the Ryukyu kingdom, to exploit it for personal advantage. It was replaced by a dominance of the market, which pushed a sixteenth-century expansion of overseas commerce, especially after 1567, when the haijin ended (except for direct trade with Japan).

With the steady influx of silver from Japan, and after 1570 from the New World, the Ming economy grew, especially the porcelain and silk industries. But the state remained bound to the Hongwu era tax quotas and failed to gain revenue from the intensification of agriculture and commerce, and so stayed chronically underfunded.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The market economy did bring urban splendor and conspicuous consumption for many, but it also engendered economic volatility: stagnated grain and land prices meant that agricultural incomes remained flat and growing poverty led to rising inequality, and discontent among the rural masses.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Such economic and social pressures fostered human trafficking: in mid-Ming China selling women and children became an option for individuals in need of cash. We lack detailed records of how many persons were trafficked under these circumstances, but studies of servitude in imperial China make it possible to assess how vulnerable Chinese women (and children) were to specific abuses within the three broad categories of legal discrimination, economic exploitation, and physical abuse.Footnote ¹¹⁶ These three categories form the basis of a “vulnerability index” and may be used to assess how particular factors determine the degree of liability to which persons may be exposed to slavery, or slave-like conditions, for example, within the category “economic exploitation,” “not being paid for their labor,” or within the category “legal discrimination,” “subject to forced labor.” In the vulnerability index, each of the three categories is subdivided into a series of specific infringements, totaling seventeen specific offences; the vulnerability index assigns scores of either 1 or 2 points to each transgression depending on the degree of severity. So, within the category of “physical abuse” almost all sub-categories score 2, in contrast to a score of 1 for not being paid for labor (category “economic rights”). Based on the seventeen subcategories of the three main categories, it is possible for historians to assign scores for each infringement in diverse societies where slavery thrived, such as ancient Greece and Rome, but also for more modern situations with ostensibly non-slave conditions. One recent study showed that if we compare the plight of modern trafficked sex workers, who totaled a very high score of 25 (comparable to Atlantic slavery scoring 26), then the calculated vulnerability tally for Chinese women in the Ming era, 19, approached that of those groups.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Our analysis of human trafficking also lacks a map of the networks that connected inland markets, especially in southwest China and along the Central Asian-Chinese frontier, with littoral export points besides Macao. Much is missing in the documentation of trafficking during the Ming, but it seems obvious that government policies and practices were unable to cope with the changing circumstances that economic expansion triggered. To be sure, human trafficking within China and by its littoral was a problem before the sixteenth century, as documented from the second century BCE along the maritime and land routes of the Silk Road. But the Portuguese presence along the Chinese coast intensified the extent to which both provincial officials and local people disobeyed the laws and norms of their country. In essence, Ming China can be categorized as what Fynn-Paul calls an “imperfect no-slavery zone,” where “rulers discouraged the active raiding or kidnapping of their own subjects, but still allowed many paths for their subjects to become slaves, such as poverty, sale by parents, and judicial slavery.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Like some other Asian societies, personal ties of hierarchy and dependency dictated the extent to which a “no-slaving zone” became “imperfect.”

After 1570 Portuguese merchants extended their supply lines of human beings from Africa and Asia and began moving forced laborers from various Asian communities, via Manila, into the Americas.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But even with the demise of the Ming in 1644 and the establishment of the Qing dynasty, which tried to rid Macao of its trafficking business, well-developed networks in inland China continued to meet the demand for adults and children, as they still do today. The tragedy of this history is that Ming China from its inception adopted stringent laws to deter and punish the trafficking of humans both within and away from the country, and yet despite these regulations, and the moral exhortations of a few individuals like Yan Congjian, the lure of profit triumphed.