Jìnjiāng

The great age ended in war. In 1357 Persian militia commanders seized the city, and the Ispah revolt and the feuds that followed tore Quánzhōu apart for ten years, until the Yuán loyalist Chén Yǒudìng crushed them in 1366. The Míng then banned private trade at sea and admitted foreign ships only as tribute missions; in 1472 the maritime trade office was moved to Fúzhōu, and Quánzhōu's foreign commerce never recovered. Trade did not stop but turned to smuggling, and its master was the pirate chief Zhèng Zhīlóng, who accepted a Míng amnesty in 1628 and ran his fleets from Ānpíng, a harbor town south of the city, sending raw silk and porcelain straight to Nagasaki. His son Zhèng Chénggōng raised the Míng banner there against the Qīng in 1646, and to cut him off from the mainland the Qīng ordered the coast cleared in 1661, driving its people inland and leaving Ānpíng almost wholly destroyed.