During the Jiajing period, the Ming Dynasty, which was troubled internally and externally, was repeatedly in trouble.
There was constant war in the northern border areas, and the Wokou on the southeast coast were becoming more and more rampant. The territory of the Ming Dynasty was devastated and the people suffered unspeakable. The reason why the coastal Wokou were able to invade the southeast was precisely because the warriors, displaced people, civilians, and merchants there often communicated with the Wokou for their own selfish interests, and while they tried to seize the wealth of the Ming Dynasty, they also gradually led the Ming Dynasty to the abyss of national subjugation.
At that time, there was one of the largest armed smuggling teams headed by Wang Zhi along the southeast coast.
After the Ming Dynasty enforced the sea ban, Wang Zhi began to unite with the Wokou to become the largest dynasty tumor on the southeast coast.
In the thirty-second year of Jiajing, The Wokou invaded Wenzhou from the coastal land.
At that time, the imperial court was the governor of the southeast coastal defense, and in order to be able to resist the Wokou on the southeast coast, he recruited wolf soldiers from Guangxi and young people from nearby lands to fight against the Wokou. The Ming Dynasty's former guardhouses on the southeast coast have long since ceased to exist in name only, and the soldiers with real combat effectiveness have almost disappeared, and if they want to eliminate these Wokou and traders, they can only borrow the local people to organize armed forces to train troops.
The Wukou who invaded Wenzhou were repelled by the Ming army's General Tang Kekuan and invaded the coastal lands again. It is worth noting that this time they were prepared, and the number of Wokou was huge, attacking the southeast coast from different directions, and the southeast coastal front was stretched to thousands of miles.
After successively seizing the coastal lands in Ningbo, Linshanwei, Haining, Taicang, Wusong, and Shanghai, the Wukou turned their guns and attacked Zhapu and successfully captured Zhapu. Subsequently, in the frenzied plundering of the land of Zhapu, the plague of the Wokou began to intensify in the southeast coastal land, and with the helplessness of the Ming Dynasty army, the Wokou were safely withdrawn after the large-scale plunder.
However, at this time, more than three hundred Wokou were left in the land of Nansha, who stayed here due to the lack of ships during the evacuation. The Ming army led tang Kekuan and Ren Huan to surround these lingering Wokou, but the Ming army of only three hundred Wukou could not take these three hundred people, and when the Wukou rescue came, they were defeated by the Wokou, and the three hundred people who stayed in the Wokou retreated.
After the retreat, the Wokou still began to plunder the coastal lands in a frenzied manner, and Baoshan, Huating, Shanghai, and Jiading were plundered, and many people were killed and injured.
Subsequently, these Wokou began to flow from Taicang to Wenzhou, Taizhou, and Xuzhou, and the Ming Dynasty was shocked and the whole country was terrified.
In order to be able to completely quell the plague, the Jiajing Emperor sent the military department Shangshu Zhang jing to the southeast coast of the viceroy.
Arriving in the land of Zhejiang, Zhang Jing led his troops to garrison the land of Jiaxing and re-arranged combat deployments in the southeast coastal land. The general Yu Dayu garrison trained troops at Wolf Mountain to strengthen the armament forces in Suzhou, Songjiang, and Jiaxing, and at the same time began to train troops day and night to strengthen the army's combat capability.
Taking advantage of the preparations of the Ming army, the Wokou, who were entrenched in the southeast coastal areas, forcibly occupied the lands of Tuolin and Chuansha, and garrisoned troops here for defense, and the number of troops was as high as more than 20,000. With the threat of victory, the Wokou once again carried out a frenzied plunder in the lands of Zhapu and Haining.
The Jiajing Emperor, seeing that the war was in danger, ordered Zhao Wenhua, a servant of the Ministry of Works, to sacrifice himself to the sea.
The Jiajing Emperor, who had always admired Taoism, still firmly believed:
Wokou's repeated violations of the southeast coastal land were caused by sea monsters, and he hoped that the action of sacrificing the sea would be able to protect the Daming River and Mountains, and such psychological comfort was actually misleading the country and the people. And Zhao Wenhua, who went alone to the southeast coastal land, had a more important task, that is, to supervise the army for the Jiajing Emperor.
Zhao Wenhua's arrival made the military situation in the southeast extremely tense, and Zhang Jing's operation of the southeast coastal defense line was also repeatedly hampered.
In May of the 34th year of Jiajing, the Wokou began a large-scale invasion of Suzhou and Jiaxing, and the three-way army invaded the coastal lands.
Shen Nanshan, Lin Bichuan, and Chen Dong led an army to capture Shanghai
Xu Hai's forward troops led the army to capture Jinshan
Xu Hai's main forces besieged the land of Tuolin and Songjiang
The reason why the Wukou divided their troops and advanced was to control the key basin of the Wusong River, so as to lure the Ming forces in Taicang and Zhenjiang.
In an instant, the land of Shanghai was captured in an instant, and Zhang Jing, the military governor of the southeast coast, hurriedly dispatched wolf soldiers to rescue Shanghai, successfully repelling the attack of the Wokou. Xu Hai's forward and main forces seized the opportunity to capture Jinshan and Jiashan respectively, and the peak of the army was directly approaching Jiaxing, where Zhang Jing was stationed.
At this critical moment, the wolf soldiers guarded the Shuangxi Bridge outside Jiaxing City, successfully repelling the attack of the Wukou, and Zhang Jing firmly held the city, ready to wait for the arrival of other large armies and take the initiative to attack.
Zhao Wenhua, the overseer of the southeast coastal land, seized this opportunity and impeached Zhang Jingyang Kou for self-respect and passive slackness.
After the defeat of the attack on Jiaxing, the Wukou army once again sent troops from Jiashan to attack Jiaxing, and the situation was once again extremely critical. It just so happened that Hu Zongxian came to this place to boost morale, and at the critical moment, he ordered the soldiers to divide into three roads and attack them separately.
One of the large armies pretended to attack and lure the enemy, and the other two large armies took advantage of the attack of the Wokou to march from the two encirclements and encircled the Invading Wokou. This time, the Ming army and the Wukou engaged each other, and the Wukou retreated in defeat and fled towards Pingwang.
When The Wokou fled to Wang Jiangjing near Pingwang, they suddenly found that the water depth here could not cross the river at all, and they prepared to reorganize their soldiers and horses to attack Tuolin again. However, the Ming Dynasty's armies had been surrounded one after another, and Tang Kekuan, Lu Bo, Yu Dayu and others had already led the soldiers and horses to slaughter them, and at this time, the Wukou who had retreated to Wang Jiangjing had become the turtle in the urn.
The two armies quickly fought together at Wang Jiangjing, and the main army of the Wukou quickly overwhelmed the front of the Ming army, and the Ming army drowned countless people, and even Hu Zongxian was squeezed into the water. While the two sides were fighting, Yu Dayu and Tang Kekuan also led the army to rush over at the same time, severely damaging the Wukou army in the battle, killing more than a thousand enemies.
With only 200 men remaining, Wokou's army broke through and fled back to Tuolin.
The Great Victory of Wang Jiangjing was a pioneering victory of the Ming Dynasty in the southeast coastal area. During the Jiajing period, the Wukou suffered for more than several decades, almost accompanied by the Jiajing Emperor's dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty was really helpless against the way the Wukou plundered. The soldiers finally fought a beautiful victory.
This victory can be said to be not easy at all, and the life of the Ming Dynasty has been endlessly encroached upon by border troubles and sea troubles. The Jiajing Emperor's rule without authority also pulled the Ming Dynasty step by step into the abyss of collapse. The prosperous dynasty that was once painstakingly maintained by Emperor Taizu and Emperor Chengzu has been gradually eroded by foreign enemies.