Japanese Silver Attracted Foreign Smugglers (5)

      Those Chinese smugglers were based in islands along the coasts of Zhejiang and Fujian Provinces.  They conspired with Chinese landed gentries at the time in the provinces.  The gentries were retired central bureaucrats, whose sons were either central bureaucrats who had passed the Imperial examinations or those who were preparing themselves to pass the examinations, and were accordingly more powerful than local authorities there.

     Japanese silver not only caught up Chinese smugglers and their supporters, coastal Chinese landed gentries, but also inevitably involved high-ranking authority officers because of smugglers’ illegal actions and occasional violent conducts.  The conflict between utilitarian landed gentries and militant authoritarian ones made central Court power games ever severer and more complicated.