The great geographical discoveries of the 15th century made the world increasingly linked into a whole: before that the history of the world was actually the history of the regions of the world, and only after that did humanity truly enter the stage of global history. When Europeans began to move towards the distant sea of stars, China's Ming Dynasty promulgated a policy of sea ban, but the sea ban did not completely block China's connection with the sea. The southeast coastal provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong and other provinces have formed a tradition of relying on the sea to eat the sea since ancient times.
Even after the promulgation of the sea ban policy, the merchants on the southeast coast still resisted the pressure to go to sea to trade. When the imperial court retreated from the sea, Chinese merchants were widely involved in the international trading system of the Age of Discovery: merchants on the southeast coast brought back nearly half of the silver from Spanish America to China through trade with the Spaniards, and japanese silver was imported into China in large quantities through trade with Japan, the world's second-largest silver-producing region at the time. In the late Ming Dynasty, silver replaced copper coins as the main circulating currency in the Chinese market, and Mexican eagle coins and Spanish silver coins on the southeast coast also became common currencies.
At that time, there was no clear line between maritime merchants and pirates: if the sea ban policy was severe, it would force normal trade merchants to become pirates; if the sea ban policy was relaxed, then pirates could also transform into merchants. For these people who eat by the sea, everything is for survival, and the issue of identity has never been their concern. In fact, in the official context of the Ming Dynasty at that time, these maritime merchants were called "thieves". From the late Ming Dynasty to the apocalypse, the maritime merchants along China's southeast coast have always been in a state of "bandits".
At that time, there were two people surnamed Lin among the various pirate (maritime) forces along the southeast coast: one was called Lin Daoqian, and the other was called Lin Feng. The cat and mouse game they played at sea has repeatedly influenced the policy direction and institutional settings of the Ming Dynasty in the Taipeng region. As soon as the Ming Dynasty was established, it immediately closed its doors to the sea. At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, the remnants of Fang Guozhen and Zhang Shicheng fled to the sea to collude with the pirates and harass the Ming Dynasty's sea frontiers. The nascent Ming Dynasty tried to respond in this situation by imposing a sea ban. During the Hongwu period, the imperial court issued four consecutive bans on "no plates allowed to go to the sea".
The Ming Dynasty migrated on the southeast coast to settle the border and clear the wilderness. The Penghu Inspection Department, which had been inherited from the old Yuan Dynasty, was abolished in 1387. Those who had settled in Penghu were relocated to Zhangzhou and Quanzhou in Fujian. The Records of the Emperor and the Ming Dynasty records: "I believe in the country, and the remnants of the people on the island rebel and are difficult to obey, so I migrate to the real inside, and there is no one in the lake." Zhu Yuanzhang believed that the people on the sea were difficult to rule, so he migrated all the people of the Penghu Islands to the interior, thus making the Penghu Archipelago a desert island. After the Ming Dynasty moved the people away, the pirates were happy. Since then, the Penghu archipelago has become a base for pirates.
Lin Daoqian and Lin Feng were the leaders of the two most powerful pirate forces active in China's southeastern sea frontier at that time. In 1563, Lin Daoqian was defeated by the Fujian general Yu Dayu and forced to retreat to Taiwan. After Yu Dayu led his army to Penghu, he did not dare to venture forward because of the twists and turns of the waterways, so he left a partial division to garrison Penghu, and then steadily sent troops to Luermen and other places in Taiwan to pursue him. This is the first time in history that officers and soldiers have gone to the main island of Taiwan to hunt down pirates. In various records, Lin Daoqian and his subordinates traveled all over Taiwan to present-day Kaohsiung, Pingtung, Tainan, Chiayi, and Taichung.
Lin Daoqian and others even reached as far as present-day Yilan County. In the end, they found that there were not many Han Chinese living in this place, so they set sail in Cambodia, Thailand, and Nanyang. Lin Feng, the One Piece King who dominated the southeastern sea frontier at the same time as Lin Daoqian, had a hand with Lin Daoqian around the first year of the Wanli Calendar (1573 AD). Lin Feng, the victorious party, annexed Lin Daoqian's henchmen and ships, after which Lin Feng used Penghu as a base to further develop his power in the Fujian-Vietnamese Sea. In 1574, Lin Feng was defeated by the Fujian general Hu Shouren and fled to Taiwan(present-day Chiayi Budai).
Hu Shouren recruited fishermen and Taiwan's ethnic minorities to join lin feng for a year. Under this pressure, Lin Feng had to leave Taiwan to continue China Southern Airlines. Lin Feng's goal of this southern voyage was the Philippines, which was already controlled by Spanish colonists. Lin Feng's march south included sixty-two warships, 3,000 men, and thousands of women and children. Lin Feng and others settled in Ban Lan Shi on the present-day Philippine island of Luzon after fighting the Spaniards, and there are still Chinese descendants who follow Lin Feng to this day. In the narrative with different positions, Lin Daoqian and Lin Feng are sometimes ferocious pirates and sometimes brave pioneers.
If you stand in the official position of the Ming Dynasty, you will naturally regard Lin Daoqian and Lin Feng as pirates, and sometimes even classify them as "Wokou" who are raging on the southeast coast. On the other hand, however, the activities of Lin Daoqian, Lin Feng, and others objectively constituted an early pioneering of the Chinese in Taiwan, Penghu, Nanyang, and other places—in fact, their activities laid the earliest foundation for the further large-scale development of Taiwan by Zheng Zhilong, Zheng Chenggong, and his and her sons. Of course, Lin Daoqian and Lin Feng themselves could never have imagined such a far-reaching at that time. As the saying goes, "Thousands of miles of officials are only for eating and wearing", and Lin Daoqian and Lin Fengqian are also thieves to fill their stomachs.
Lin Daoqian and Lin Feng did not find other jobs when they reached the age of employment, so going to the sea to beg for a living became their occupation. If the Ming Dynasty could develop overseas trade, they might have been law-abiding merchants. However, the Ming Dynasty's policy of sea prohibition forced them to transform into pirates. In fact, what happened to Lin Daoqian and Lin Feng is just a microcosm of the history of countless Chinese struggling for a living in Taiwan and the Nanyang region. It is difficult to objectively evaluate them simply by the standards of good people or bad people. The activities of Lin Daoqian, Lin Feng, and others in turn forced the Ming officials to pay attention to the strategic value of the Taipeng region.
The early ancestors who followed Lin Daoqian, Lin Feng and others from the mainland to Taiwan opened at least two large-scale towns in Jilong (present-day Keelung) and Tamsui (now part of New Taipei). This naturally seems to us today to be a historic achievement of the ancestors in pioneering and building Taiwan, but at that time, the Ming Dynasty officially saw it as a threat to itself. These early ancestors who went to Taiwan all went to sea under the pressure of the official government's sea ban, so these people were all restless and self-guarding people in the eyes of the authorities. These people's activity in the southeast sea frontier actually posed a certain threat to the coastal defense security of the Ming Dynasty.
Born in 1589 in Haicheng County, Fujian Province (present-day Qingjiao Village, Haicang, Xiamen), Yan Siqi was strong and proficient in martial arts. Yan Siqi, who has been a "big brother fan" since he was a child, once beat the servants of the official's family to death because of uneven fighting. Yan Siqi, who was beheaded according to the Ming Law, fled all the way to Hirado, Japan, when he was only fourteen years old. Japan was in the early days of the Tokugawa shogunate's rule, and Hirado's merchant travel as a treaty port was booming, and Fujian's hometowns were everywhere. Yan Siqi opened a tailor shop here. Yan Siqi, who was bold by nature, soon gained a foothold in a foreign country, and after some hard work, became a big merchant across the sea.
After Yan Siqi's rise to fame, twenty-eight Chinese merchants and righteous knots Jinlan regarded him as their boss, including Zheng Zhilong, the father of Zheng Chenggong, a national hero who later recovered Taiwan. Dissatisfied with the japanese forces' oppression of Chinese businessmen, these Chinese merchants planned to capture the port of Hirado. Unexpectedly, before the incident, everyone was drinking for a brother's birthday celebration, and one of them was drunk and inadvertently leaked the plan, which attracted the officers and soldiers of the shogunate to surround and suppress. Yan Siqi, who had been informed, fled to the sea with his brothers in a hurry. Yan Siqi, who escaped death, had no other way but to go to Taiwan. In 1624, Yan Siqi led his fleet to dock at Bengang (present-day Beigang, Taiwan).
The fertile island of Taiwan has a large wilderness waiting to be reclaimed. Yan Siqi was determined to do something here: he led everyone to cut down wood and build a squatter village, while at the same time appeasing the indigenous people of the island, agreeing on boundaries, and not invading each other. After the overall situation was initially decided, Yan Siqi sent his subordinates to lead a fleet of ships to Zhangli and Quan's hometown and successively recruited more than 3,000 people to move to Taiwan. Yan Siqi divided the reclamation into ten villages and distributed them to silver two and cultivating cattle and agricultural tools. Yan Siqi thus set off the earliest organized large-scale reclamation activities in Taiwan's history. Reclamation requires capital investment, so how does Yan Siqi solve the problem of funds?
Yan Siqi selected a group of Zhang, Quan and Quan people with navigation experience to use the original 13 large ships to take advantage of maritime transportation to carry out maritime trade with the mainland; at the same time, they organized sea fishing and island hunting to develop the mountain and sea economy, so as to solve the material needs of migrant production and life. In 1625, when Taiwan had a bumper grain harvest, the excited Yan Siqi dragged the brothers into the Zhuluo Mountains to hunt. After returning, Yan Siqi fell ill and died a few days later at the age of 37. Yan Siqi's life was like a shooting star, but his feat opened a new era in Taiwan.
Since then, a large-scale migration has come: every year a large number of people cross the strait into the island of Taiwan, where they cultivate and multiply. Yan Siqi's tomb at the junction of Shuishang Township and Zhongpu Township in Chiayi County, Taiwan Province, is still well preserved. As the pioneer of large-scale development of Taiwan, Yan Siqi was praised by the Taiwanese people as the "King of Kaitai". In order to commemorate this Kaitai king, the "Monument to Mr. Yan Siqi's Pioneering Taiwan Landing" was built in Beigang, Yunlin County, and the "Siqi Pavilion" and "Huaiben Building" were built in front of the Mazu Palace in Xingang Township, Chiayi County.
Even as Lin Daoqian, Lin Feng, Yan Siqi, and others were carrying out early development and construction in Taiwan, the Ming Dynasty officials also attached more and more importance to Taiwan's strategic position. Since at least the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming court has regarded Taiwan as an important gateway to the Zhangquan area along the mainland coast, and at the forefront of southeast coastal defense. The imperial court has sent troops deep into Taiwan three times to pursue and suppress the pirate group. Inspector Huang Chengxuan of Fujian also repeatedly stressed the importance of Taiwan's position in his "Title Ryukyu Consultation on the Neglect of Feelings" and "Tiao Chen Hai Defense Matters Neglect". At the end of the Ming Dynasty, some officials proposed a plan to administer and set up counties in Taiwan.
Between August of the 45th year of the Ming Dynasty (1617 AD) and September of the 46th year of the Ming Dynasty (1618 AD), Zhao Bingjian (also known as Zhao Ruosi), a Ming Dynasty sailor officer from Zhangpu (now part of Zhangzhou, Fujian), built a city in Taiwan "Chikan" (now part of Tainan). At that time, southern Taiwan had become a base for many Fujian-Guangdong maritime armed groups. Zhao Bingjian's act of building the city as a Ming dynasty officer shows that the Chinese military had set up a castle on the island of Taiwan as early as 1618. This also effectively means that the Chinese government's jurisdiction has officially extended to the island of Taiwan.