Xu Hai

Xu Hai was an influential merchant and pirate based in Kyushu in the mid-16th century. Originally he was from Shexian in Huizhou. He started his career as a monk at Hangzhou’s well-known Lingyin Temple. He stayed in the temple for many years while his young brother, Xu Hong, was engaged in a cloth business in Wuxi, and his uncle, Xu Weixue or Xu Bixi, was conducting smuggling maritime trade overseas as Wang Zhi’s business partner. Xu Hai left the temple and joined his uncle in 1551, and he was warmly welcomed and respected in Kyushu in his former capacity as a Chinese Buddhist. Partly for this reason, he became a hostage when his uncle urgently needed a sum of money from his Japanese business partner in Osumi to trade on the coast of South China. His uncle was unfortunately killed sometime in late 1551 or early 1552 by the Ming military commander stationed on Nan’ao Islet, Hei Mengyang, while bartering with local Teochew residents.

This forced him to become a real merchant-pirate as he had no other means to pay the debt left by his uncle. Collaborating with Japanese merchant-pirates from Izumi, Satsuma, Hizen, Higo, Tsusyu, Tsushima,Chikugo, Bungo and Kii in South Japan, Xu Hai led a huge naval fleet to plunder the Zhejiang coast from 1554 to 1556.

With the assistance of a Japanese chieftain named Shingoro, Ye Ming and Chen Dong, the last of whom had been a private secretary of the brother of Satsuma’s ryoshu for some years, Xu Hai’s forces expanded rapidly in the mid-1550s.

During the heyday of his piracy in the waters of East Asia, he controlled more than 1,000 junks with no fewer than 60,000 smuggling seafarers.