Wokou
| Wokou | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Hanja | 倭寇 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Japanese name | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | wōkòu |
| Bopomofo | |
| Wu | |
| Romanization | u kheu |
| Hakka | |
| Romanization | vo24 kieu55 |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Jyutping | wo1 kau3 |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | e-khòo |
| Transcriptions | |
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| Revised Romanization | waegu |
Wokou (Chinese: ; pinyin: Wōkòu; Japanese: Wakō; Korean: 왜구 Waegu), which literally translates to "Japanese pirates" or "dwarf pirates", were pirates who raided the coastlines of China, Japan and Korea. Wokou came from a mixture of ethnicities.
The term wokou is a combination of Wō (倭), referring to either dwarfs or pejoratively to the Japanese, and kòu () "bandit".
There are two distinct eras of wokou piracy. The early wokou mostly set up camp on Japanese outlying islands, as opposed to the 16th century wokou who were mostly non-Japanese. The early wokou raided the Japanese themselves as well as China and Korea.
The first recorded use of the term wokou (倭寇) is on the Gwanggaeto Stele, a stone monument erected in modern Ji'an, Jilin, China to celebrate the exploits of Gwanggaeto the Great of Goguryeo (r. 391–413). The stele states that "wokou" ("Japanese robbers") crossed the sea and were defeated by him in the year 404.
Records report that the main camps of the early wokou were the island of Tsushima, Iki Island, and the Gotō Islands. Jeong Mong-ju was dispatched to Japan to deal with the problem, and during his visit Kyushu governor Imagawa Sadayo suppressed the early wokou, later returning their captured property and people to Korea. In 1405 Ashikaga Yoshimitsu sent twenty captured pirates to China, where they were boiled in a cauldron in Ningbo.
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Wikipedia