Mid-Ming wokou activity began to pose a serious problem in the 1540s, reached its peak in 1555, and subsided by 1567, with the extent of the destruction spreading across the coastal regions of Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong.

These Japanese missions to Ming China continued up to Japan's Sengoku period, when the hold of the Ashikaga shogunate waned and power became divided by the warring regional daimyōs.

Since the Ming government prohibited people from travelling heading out to sea and forbid those who had from returning home, a large number of Chinese maritime merchants were forced to establish themselves on offshore islands or even overseas trading ports.

The official reason for the withdrawal was that these forward bases in the sea were a heavy burden on the civilians who had to supply them, and that the Ming army could focus on defence after the invaders had landed.

[18] The Ming government, being committed to the northern frontier defence against the Mongols, could only spare reinforcements to the coast in the form of bandit fighters, ex-pirates, and aboriginal "wolf troops" (狼兵, langbing) led by government-recognized tribal headmen.

[20] Beginning in the middle of the 15th century, grand coordinators (xunfu) and supreme commanders (zongdu) were sent to the provinces undergoing military emergencies to override the existing provincial hierarchies.

[24] Zhu Wan, who became the Grand Coordinator of Zhejiang in 1547, called these gentry members "pirates in gowns and caps" (衣冠之盜), and identified them as the root cause of the coastal disturbances.

Hardened by their victories against the Ming navy, the smugglers expanded their network of activities down the coast of China all the way to Guangdong and inland to the metropolis of Nanjing, with Shuangyu being their hub.

[33] Zhu Wan and his generals were greatly rewarded in silver for the victory, but he also drew the ire of his political enemies among the gentry, whose profits were directly affected by the destruction of Shuangyu.

Seeing that the odds were against him, especially since his backer Xia Yan had been executed in disgrace in October last year,[40] Zhu Wan wrote his own epitaph and committed suicide by drinking poison in January 1550.

Despite the coastal gentry's political victory over Zhu Wan, they had destroyed their trump card against the merchant-pirates — the threat of the Ming army — and the wokou raiders took full advantage of the military vacuum.

There he called himself the King of Hui (徽王) and established good relations not only with the local daimyo Matsura Takanobu,[48] but also with regional hegemons like Ōtomo Sōrin and Ōuchi Yoshitaka.

[49] Despite his great power, Wang Zhi initially sought to appease the Ming government in hope of getting the maritime prohibitions relaxed, so he turned the rival pirate leaders that he captured over to the authorities.

Furthermore, the Nanjing Minister of War Zhang Jing was appointed Supreme Commander of the armed forces in six coastal provinces: Shandong, the Southern Metropolitan Region, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, and Guangxi.

[61] However, soon after Zhao Wenhua sent out the memorial, Zhang Jing led his newly arrived aboriginal troops along with generals Lu Tang and Yu Dayou to defeat the pirates at the Battle of Wangjiangjing (王江涇), north of Jiaxing, on 10 May 1555.

[64] Hu was promoted even higher to supreme commander in April 1556, after Zhou Chong and his successor Yang Yi (楊宜) were cashiered after less than a year in service due to their underwhelming performance.

Zhao Wenhua was opposed to a strict enforcement of the maritime prohibitions like the ones carried out by Zhu Wan, and instead favoured opening trade as the means to solve the wokou problem.

[65] Even before he had become supreme commander, Hu Zongxian sent envoys to Japan in his capacity as grand coordinator ostensibly to request assistance from Japanese authorities, but in fact to establish contact with Wang Zhi to entice him to surrender.

[65] This was alarming news to Hu as it severely disrupted his plans of appeasement, and also he had only about 10,000 men under his command — Zhao Wenhua had disbanded the aboriginal troops that Zhang Jing had assembled after the victory at Wangjiangjing, believing the situation was under control.

[68] These were later found to be diversionary attacks, meant to draw the Ming defenders away as Xu Hai's main fleet of more than 10,000 men landed at Zhapu, aiming for the great cities of Hangzhou, Suzhou, and the auxiliary capital Nanjing.

After three days of battle, Xu Hai himself was wounded and his force was on the verge of defeat, but one final push ended in the slaughter of the government troops, who by this point had run out of supplies and energy.

[48] However, in September 1557, when Wang Zhi was preparing to present himself to the authorities to discuss the opening of oversea trade, Zhao Wenhua, the major pusher of an appeasement policy, was accused of embezzlement, lost imperial favour, and died a commoner to illness.

Wang Zhi believed this was a temporary arrangement and remained hopeful for a pardon until 22 January 1560, when an imperial edict handed down the death sentence and he was summarily beheaded.

Hu Zongxian made a concerted effort to dislodge Mao from Zhoushan in March 1558, converging on the island from six directions with the generals Yu Dayou and Qi Jiguang, but failed and was forced to retreat.

Qi Jiguang had by this time assembled his own army from able-bodied farmers of Yiwu and devised the mandarin duck formation (鴛鴦陣) to counter the formidable Japanese contingents among the wokou.

[106] The compiler of the Veritable Records for the Jiajing era, the Senior Grand Secretariat Xu Jie, was keen to denounce his predecessor and political enemy Yan Song in this work, but in doing so he beclouded the whole wokou affair in the histories.

[111] Despite being a minority during the 1930s, Japanese researchers of international diplomacy like Fujita Toyohachi, Akiyama Kenzo, and Kobata Atsushi were keen to point out the link between the piratical activities and foreign trade.

[112] This line of interpretation was picked up by Katayama Seijiro and Sakuma Shigeo in the 1950s and 60s who noted that although all coastal pirates were labelled "wokou", the raids were actually carried out by "treacherous merchants" (奸商) and influential families of China.

[114] In the 1970s and 80s, when mainland Chinese scholars were interested in the "sprouts of capitalism" of the mid-to-late Ming dynasty, they followed previous Japanese and Taiwanese scholarship and classified the Jiajing wokou episode as manifestations of anti-feudal and pro-capitalist struggles of the littoral societies.

[114] Since then, Chinese writers of this interpretation such as Dai Yixuan, Fan Shuzhi, Lin Renchuan, and Chen Kangsheng are categorized in the "New wokou thesis" school in China.