Qi Jiguang

Biography

Family Background and Early Life

Qi Jiguang came from a hereditary military household. His sixth-generation ancestor Qi Xiang was originally from Dongmou in Shandong, present-day Muping District of Yantai, and moved to Changyi Township in Dingyuan, Haozhou, during the turmoil at the end of the Yuan. Qi Xiang followed Zhu Yuanzhang in campaigns across the empire and was killed in battle during the conquest of Yunnan. After Zhu Yuanzhang became emperor, he remembered Qi Xiang's founding service and appointed Qi Xiang's son Qi Bin as General of Manifest Might, with the hereditary post of Assistant Commander of the Dengzhou Guard. From then on, the Qi family settled in Dengzhou and served as military officers for generations.

The details of the Qi lineage come from Ming biographies and from Qi Jiguang's own inscriptions. Wang Daokun's life of his father Qi Jingtong says that the general Jingtong, styled Shixian, was known for his integrity and was by origin a man of Dingyuan; that at the beginning of the dynasty a centurion named Xiang had followed the founder west on campaign and died in battle; that his son Bin received office for merit in founding the state; and that Bin begat Gui, Gui begat Jian, and Jian begat Xuan, who held by inheritance the assistant commandership of the Dengzhou guard. Gui Youguang, in his life of Duke Qi, calls him the present Duke Qi Yuanjing of Dingyuan, and in the poem stele at the White Dragon Pool in Miyun, near Beijing, Qi Jiguang signs himself as native to Dingyuan. Because of this, later writers dispute whether his native place was Dengzhou in Shandong or Dingyuan in Anhui, scholars writing specially on the question and concluding that his ancestors were of Dingyuan while hereditary service in the Dengzhou guard made Dengzhou his home, so that both accounts have support. His father Qi Jingtong was firm and studious, had military ability, and held in turn the command against the Japanese pirates in Shandong, the command of Daning, and the deputy command of the firearms camp; he was fifty-six before he had this only son and disciplined him strictly, teaching him letters and arms and constantly instilling the duty of protecting the state and the people. Though a military family, the Qis were poor, and when Qi Jiguang was ten his father returned home to care for his grandmother, which made their means still scantier. At thirteen he studied under the noted scholar Liang Jie of Penglai. The Ming History sums up his youth by saying that he was dashing and full of unusual spirit even as a boy, that his family was poor but he loved to read and understood the great principles of the classics and histories, and that in the Jiajing period he took up the hereditary post. In 1544 Qi Jingtong fell ill, knew he had not long to live, and told his son to go quickly to the capital to complete the formalities of succession; before Qi Jiguang returned his father had died, and at seventeen he inherited the assistant commandership of the Dengzhou guard.

Qi Jiguang's father Qi Jingtong was resolute, studious, and militarily capable. He successively served as a military commissioner responsible for coastal defense in Shandong, commander of the Daning Regional Military Commission, and deputy commander of the Shenji Battalion. Qi Jingtong was fifty-six when his only son was born and disciplined him very strictly. He carefully taught him reading and writing and martial skills, while frequently instructing him in the principles of protecting the state, caring for the people, and conducting oneself properly. Although the Qi family belonged to a military lineage, its household circumstances were poor. When Qi Jiguang was ten, his father returned home to care for Qi's grandmother, making their livelihood even harder. Raised in this atmosphere, Qi Jiguang developed an early interest in strategy and unusual schemes and understood historical and classical writings while still young. At thirteen, he studied under the noted Penglai scholar Liang Jie.

In 1544, the twenty-third year of Jiajing, Qi Jingtong became gravely ill and, realizing that he would not live long, instructed Qi Jiguang to hurry to the capital to complete the procedures for inheriting his office. Before Qi returned home, his father had died. At only seventeen, Qi inherited the post of Assistant Commander of the Dengzhou Guard and began a military career that lasted forty-five years.

Early Display of Ability

In 1546, the twenty-fifth year of Jiajing, nineteen-year-old Qi Jiguang was placed in charge of military-agricultural affairs in the Dengzhou Guard. His reorganization brought clear results. At the time, coastal Shandong repeatedly suffered burning, killing, and plundering by wokou raiders. Determined to destroy them, Qi wrote a poem titled Taoqian Shenchu in the blank space of a military manual. Its final two lines read: "It is not my wish to be enfeoffed as a marquis; I only hope the seas may become calm." The poem expressed his ambition to protect the state and bring peace to the people.

Beginning in 1548, the twenty-seventh year of Jiajing, Qi each year led sons of military households from the Dengzhou Guard to Jizhou for frontier garrison duty. This continued for five years, and he completed each assignment effectively. He later recalled the experience: "In my early manhood I exerted myself, deploying men of good families from six prefectures against the northern tribes, and gradually became familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of the northern frontier." The experience clearly influenced his later career. In the tenth month of 1549, the twenty-eighth year of Jiajing, Qi passed the Shandong provincial military examination. The following ninth month, when he went to the capital for the metropolitan examination, the Gengxu Incident broke out and Mongol forces advanced from Gubeikou to the walls of Beijing. Qi submitted strategic proposals for defense against the enemy and was appointed an officer responsible for the command banners guarding the nine gates of the capital. Although he failed the metropolitan examination, his military talent had become evident. Wang De and other Supervising Secretaries in the Ministry of War described him as "young yet keen in natural intelligence, ambitious and superior in riding and archery," and repeatedly memorialized recommending him.

In the sixth month of 1553, the thirty-second year of Jiajing, Qi was promoted to acting Assistant Regional Military Commissioner, overseeing twenty-five guards and battalions under Dengzhou, Wendeng, and Jimo and defending the Shandong coast from wokou attacks. The guard system had long deteriorated: desertion was widespread, most remaining soldiers were old or weak, and discipline was lax. Qi determined to reform it. His maternal uncle, relying on senior family status, refused to obey orders. Qi punished him publicly according to military regulations, then that night removed his cap and apologized according to the proprieties between nephew and uncle. His uncle was convinced and submitted. Seeing that Qi enforced the law strictly and did not show favoritism, the troops became markedly more disciplined and Shandong's coastal defenses were strengthened.

Even in his first years in office his conduct showed the direction his military work would take. In 1546, at nineteen, he was put in charge of the military farms of the Dengzhou guard and his reforms there produced good results. Shandong's coast was then repeatedly ravaged by Japanese pirates, and he wrote a poem in the blank space of a military book whose closing couplet declared that a marquisate was not what he sought and that he wished only for a calm sea. From 1548 he led the sons of Dengzhou's military families to the northern frontier at Jizhou for garrison duty every year for five years, each time completing his task; recalling it later he said that in his early twenties he had bestirred himself to lead the good families of six commanderies against the northerners and had thereby come to know something of the advantages and difficulties of the northern frontier. In the tenth month of 1549 he passed the Shandong provincial military examination. The next year, going to the capital for the metropolitan examination, he found himself in the midst of the Gengxu incident, when Mongol forces came through the Gubeikou pass to the walls of Beijing and the court hastily planned the defense of the capital; Qi Jiguang submitted his proposals for the occasion, which the board found acceptable, and was made banner and tally officer commanding the nine gates of the capital. He failed the examination, but his military ability had shown itself, and the supervising secretary of the bureau of war, Wang De, and others, seeing that he was young and quick of mind and full of ambition and skilled with the bow and horse, memorialized to recommend him. In the sixth month of 1553 he was promoted to acting assistant commander and given charge of the twenty-five garrisons of the three camps of Dengzhou, Wendeng and Jimo against the pirates on the Shandong coast. The garrisons were long unrepaired and their soldiers had deserted in great numbers, those left being mostly old and weak and without discipline; Qi Jiguang resolved to set the ranks in order. His own maternal uncle, relying on his seniority, refused to obey an order, and Qi Jiguang had him punished publicly under the camp regulations and that evening, as a nephew, took off his cap and begged his pardon, so that the uncle was convinced; the officers and men, seeing that he enforced the law without regard to persons, were shaken, the former laxity was much corrected, and the Shandong coast defenses were steadied.

Campaigns in the Southeast

After the middle of the Jiajing era, wokou raids on the southeastern coast became increasingly severe. Government troops in Zhejiang and Fujian were unable to suppress them effectively, and the raiders appeared unpredictably; on some occasions, tens of thousands of Ming troops were routed. In the seventh month of 1555, the thirty-fourth year of Jiajing, Qi was transferred to Zhejiang as an assistant commissioner in the Regional Military Commission and put in charge of military-agricultural affairs. He repeatedly proposed anti-wokou strategies to Governor-General Hu Zongxian and won Hu's appreciation. At Hu's repeated request, Qi was promoted in the seventh month of the following year to regional commander, responsible for defense in the frequently raided areas around Ningbo, Shaoxing, and Taizhou.

Less than a month after taking office, more than eight hundred wokou attacked Longshan Guard, the gateway to central Zhejiang. Although the Ming forces numbered several thousand, they could not hold and began to collapse. Qi personally shot and killed three wokou leaders, forcing the raiders to retreat. In the tenth month of 1556, the thirty-fifth year of Jiajing, the wokou attacked again. Qi cooperated for the first time with Yu Dayou and Tan Lun, prefect of Taizhou, and together they defeated the raiders repeatedly. Because they advanced too rashly, however, the Ming army nearly suffered total destruction.

These battles convinced Qi that the old forces suffered from poor training and lax discipline and that a new army was essential if the fierce wokou were to be resisted. In the winter of 1557, the thirty-sixth year of Jiajing, he drafted the official communication Ren Lin Guan Qing Chuangli Bingying Gongyi, his first formal proposal for creating training camps and selecting and drilling troops. In the second month of the next year, he submitted Proposal on Training Troops, analyzing why Ming forces could not match the wokou and asking to "obtain three thousand men of Zhejiang and personally train them. Within three years they will be capable of resisting the enemy, and several times the annual expense of guest troops can be saved." Hu Zongxian was initially displeased but trusted Qi's ability and reluctantly agreed. Ruan E praised the proposal highly and assigned three thousand Shaoxing troops to Qi for training.

In 1558, the thirty-seventh year of Jiajing, after the wokou leader Wang Zhi was lured into capture and killed by Hu Zongxian, his remaining forces occupied Cengang. Ming armies launched assaults from several directions but remained stalemated for half a year. The court accepted slanderous accusations and issued an order stripping regional commander Yu Dayou and Qi Jiguang of their offices, giving them one month to eliminate the enemy. Supervising Secretary Luo Jiabin and others then accused Qi of suspected collusion with overseas enemies, and the court prepared to arrest and interrogate him. Fortunately, Cengang was finally captured, and Qi's bravery in the assault was widely witnessed. He was restored to office and reassigned to defend Taizhou, Jinhua, and Yanzhou prefectures.

Formation of the Qi Army

Qi never abandoned his training program. The three thousand Shaoxing troops previously assigned to him had been trained and deployed in several campaigns, but many were streetwise townsmen with poor discipline. Some killed innocents and falsely claimed merit, and flight in battle remained common. In autumn 1559, the thirty-eighth year of Jiajing, Qi submitted a third proposal for military training. At the time, residents of Yiwu and miners from Yongkang had engaged in a large armed clash over mining rights, and both sides showed great courage. Qi asked to recruit troops in Yiwu. Tan Lun strongly supported the plan, and Hu Zongxian adopted it. Zhao Dahe, magistrate of Yiwu, also memorialized recommending the recruitment of local miners as soldiers.

In the ninth month of 1559, Qi went to Yiwu to recruit. Applicants gathered in large numbers. The miners' leader Wang Rulong "responded to the proclamation and led his followers out of the mountains" and later became a fierce commander credited with repeated achievements. Qi believed that "above all, slick city people must not be used ... the first people who can be used are honest country people." He selected men strictly by combining four criteria—strong physique, skill in martial arts, intelligence and agility, and exceptional physical strength—and had three exclusions: city dwellers were not to be used, men who had previously been defeated by the enemy were not to be used, and men accustomed to submitting to government authorities were not to be used. He soon recruited four thousand carefully selected men and took them to Shaoxing for training.

After organizing the force, Qi made twelve men a squad under a squad leader; four squads formed a sentry unit under a sentry leader; four sentry units formed a command under an officer; and four commands formed a larger unit led by a battalion commander. Qi personally commanded the central force. In 1560, the thirty-ninth year of Jiajing, he devised a new tactical formation, the Mandarin Duck Formation, in response to the hills, marshes, and broken terrain of the Zhejiang-Fujian coast and the wokou preference for ambush and close combat. Twelve men formed the basic combat unit. The squad leader stood in front, followed by two men carrying a long shield and a rattan shield for protection, then two men armed with wolf-brush spears, four spearmen arranged two on each side, two close-combat soldiers, and finally a cook or support soldier. Long and short weapons supported one another, and the formation could shift according to terrain and combat requirements into the Two Powers Formation or the Three Powers Formation. Its flexibility effectively countered the wokou's strengths.

Qi required his troops to follow the spirit associated with the Yue Army: "Freeze to death rather than tear down a house; starve to death rather than plunder." He printed essential orders in booklets and distributed them to the soldiers, rewarding or punishing them according to their mastery. He required officers to understand that "to put oneself before the soldiers does not mean only going first in battle; in every hardship one must go first. To share the same hardships does not mean only sharing them in danger; in ordinary times one must also share the same conditions." This force later became famous as the Qi Army.

Qi Jiguang's training aimed not at hastily raised militia but at what he called a restrained and disciplined army. He held that training should begin with the methods of the file, then orders, then weapons — that is, he treated organization, command training and the training of military skills as one organic process. Such an army was managed in three ways: by a system of collective responsibility in which officers and men of the same rank stood surety for one another; by hierarchical control with absolute obedience to superiors; and by unified action aiming at a single mind in ten thousand men. Since the abuses he faced were that the old troops were little drilled, that the soldiers' hearts were unattached and that military orders were unknown, he proposed to build a disciplined force, strong in technique, precise in tactics, obedient and fit to fight, through the training of troops and officers and the improvement of equipment.

Because the conditions in Zhejiang and at Jizhen differed, his approach took two forms. In Zhejiang he insisted on combining kindness with severity and feeling with law: toward the troops he attended at once to kindness and human feeling and to authority and ordinance, but with authority foremost and kindness as its support, and with law foremost and feeling as its support. He valued the study of military knowledge and had texts compiled and issued, ruling that the piece on forming the files be studied first, that the men be given the piece on eye and ear, and that officers master both; in every banner one man who could read was chosen to recite and explain, so that the whole company learned it by mouth and heart — a concern for military instruction and for orderly progression rare among commanders of any age. At Jizhen he reduced the method of training to five parts: the methods of the file, of courage, of eye and ear, of hand and foot, and of camp and battle formation. The methods of the file meant the selection of soldiers and the organization of units, chiefly according to a strategy of active defense, separating cavalry, infantry, cart troops and transport troops, giving each its own organization and separate training, and only when each arm was trained bringing them together in joint exercises. The training of courage meant moral instruction, taken from two sides: the officers, as those in charge, must understand the soldiers' minds and care for their lives, and the soldiers' words and conduct must conform to the regulations. The training of eye and ear meant special instruction so that soldiers could tell the instruments of command apart, and grow familiar with the signals. The training of hand and foot meant military skills and physical conditioning, centered on skill and held to strict standards of assessment. The training of camp and battle formation covered drill, marching and camping, field encampment and the direction of battle, including the parade drill, the marching camp, the field camp and the articles of battle. From choosing soldiers and forming units to marching, camping and commanding in battle, the whole made one complete system.

The training of officers as a military concept was first proposed and systematically expounded by Qi Jiguang, who wrote in the New Book of Effective Discipline that the essential of training troops lies in training officers. In his view a good commander must possess seven virtues: rectitude of heart, firmness of purpose, clarity about life and death, discernment of advantage and harm, being a good man, keeping his integrity, and breadth of measure. He must overcome seven defects: the harm of pleasure, of greed, of obstinacy, of outdoing others, of flattery, of slackness and of reputation. And he must have twelve qualities: esteeming humility, guarding his official precepts, diligence in his duties, discernment in choosing models, study of the art of war, practice of arms, correctness of position and duty, care for the soldiers, instruction of the soldiers, clarity in reward and punishment, strictness in discipline, and clarity about what is to be protected. From rectitude of heart to clarity about protection these make twenty-six articles, with positive guidance and negative warning together, more detailed than earlier writings on generalship and plainly ordered. In the manner of training officers he valued both theory and practice: first reading the lives of famous commanders to understand their character, designs and achievements and to ponder them by comparison with one's own; then reading the histories and classics to broaden knowledge and form a right view of life; and finally to be placed among practical affairs, exercising military skills, learning one's own condition and the enemy's and the shape of mountains and rivers, and being assessed in real situations and appointed according to his virtue, ability, understanding and skill.

The Great Victory at Taizhou and Reinforcement of Fujian

In 1561, the fortieth year of Jiajing, wokou forces launched a large invasion of the Taizhou coast. Qi led his troops in response and within one month won nine engagements in succession. The raiders were almost entirely destroyed while the Qi Army suffered very few casualties. The campaign became known as the Great Victory at Taizhou. Qi was promoted to Regional Military Commissioner for his service and gained widespread fame. Officials in Jiangxi then asked the court to send him to suppress a rebellion there. He led his troops to Jiangxi in the eleventh month and returned victorious in less than a month.

The battle of Taizhou in the fourth month of 1561 was the first great victory won by the Qi army after its formation. That month the pirates attacked the Zhejiang coast in force with several hundred ships and ten or twenty thousand men. Early in the fifth month a large body of them advanced by way of Ninghai, intending to pin down the government's main force and strike at Taizhou while it was away; Qi Jiguang saw through the design, first placed the necessary troops at Taizhou, and led the main army himself toward Ninghai against the pirates there. Believing their plan had worked, the pirates sent troops straight at the city of Taizhou, and Qi Jiguang on receiving the report wheeled south, reached the city wall a step ahead of the enemy, and fell on them with the mandarin duck formation, routing them and driving them more than forty li, taking several hundred heads and prisoners, with the rest drowning in the river, and rescuing more than five thousand people whom the pirates had carried off. Soon afterwards a follow-up body of pirates moved into the Datian area northeast of Taizhou intending to raid Chuzhou, and Qi Jiguang, learning of it, laid an ambush at Shangfengling on the road they must take, and with fifteen hundred men annihilated twenty-five hundred, showing his art of winning by surprise. He went on to win seven land and five water victories in the Taizhou area. The campaign lasted more than a month, with one thousand four hundred and twenty-six pirates killed and more than four thousand drowned or burned; according to the veritable records of Emperor Shizong, Hu Zongxian reported that since the fourth month the pirates had repeatedly raided the Ningbo, Taizhou and Wenzhou regions, that the government troops had fought six actions at sea and twelve on land, killing and capturing one thousand four hundred and twenty-six and drowning and burning countless others, and that the coast was now cleared, the brigade commander Qi Jiguang having directed the fighting with the greatest merit. At the same time the commander-in-chief Lu Tang and the brigade commander Niu Tianxi defeated the pirates at Ningbo and Wenzhou, killing more than a thousand, and the pirates of Zhejiang were essentially wiped out.

After this victory Qi Jiguang and his army established their reputation in the southeast. In the ninth month he was promoted to provincial military commander for having been named by Hu Zongxian as foremost in directing the fighting, and the people of Taizhou came to rely on him as on a long wall, while eastern Zhejiang depended on him for its defense; the people of the two Zhe circuits built shrines in his honor. Soon afterwards he recruited again at Yiwu, bringing the Qi army to more than six thousand men; this force, its backbone the country people of Yiwu, became the main instrument of the campaigns in Fujian and Guangdong. In the tenth month, when bandits from Fujian and Guangdong moved into Jiangxi and Hu Zongxian could not put them down, Qi Jiguang was sent to help, broke them at the Shangfang lair, drove the remnant to Jianning, and returned to Zhejiang in the eleventh month. In its geographic effect, the clearing of Zhejiang allowed the court to move the Qi army into Fujian and so shaped the pattern of the next ten years, in which Zhejiang troops relieved Fujian and the two provinces acted together; and the army could be repeatedly drawn off on distant service precisely because its organization was uniform, its orders single and its supply self-sustaining, which was the institutional result of Qi Jiguang's method of training.

In 1562, the forty-first year of Jiajing, the wokou crisis in Fujian became urgent. Qi led his army to reinforce the province, winning three successive victories at Hengyu, Niutian, and Lindun and almost entirely destroying the main wokou forces in Fujian. He was promoted to acting Assistant Commander-in-Chief. In the twelfth month, large numbers of wokou reinforcements arrived and captured Pinghai Guard and the prefectural city of Xinghua. This was the first time a prefectural capital had fallen during the wokou crisis, causing alarm over a wide area. Early the next year, 1563, Qi was promoted to Deputy Regional Commander and placed in charge of the northern Fujian coast, while Tan Lun became governor of Fujian. Working together, they recovered Pinghai and Xinghua in the fifth month and destroyed the last major wokou base on the Fujian coast. Qi was promoted for his service to Associate Commander-in-Chief and at the end of the year to regional commander of Fujian.

In 1564, the forty-third year of Jiajing, Qi pursued the bandit Wu Ping, who had allied with the wokou, as far as Guangdong. By 1567, the first year of Longqing, the wokou threat along the Fujian coast had largely been eliminated.

Defense of the Northern Frontier

After the southeastern wokou threat had been suppressed, the Ming court shifted attention to northern frontier defense. In 1567, the first year of Longqing, Qi was summoned to Beijing and appointed deputy commander of the imperial Shenji Battalion, the same office once held by his father. Feeling that the post gave him little scope to use his abilities, he requested responsibility for the defenses of Jizhou, Changping, Liaodong, and Baoding. Tan Lun had by then become governor-general of Jizhou and Liaodong and strongly recommended Qi. In the fifth month of 1568, the second year of Longqing, Qi was ordered to take overall charge of troop training in the defense commands of Jizhou, Changping, and Baoding. The next year he concurrently became regional commander of Jizhou.

With the pirate troubles of the southeast settled, the problem of the northern frontier came to the fore. In 1567 the court summoned Qi Jiguang, then commander-in-chief in Fujian, to the capital to assist in military administration; Mongol troops having entered Yongping and the governor-general of Ji and Liao, Liu Tao, having reported his merits falsely, the supervising secretary Chen Zan and others impeached Liu Tao and recommended Qi Jiguang, and the order followed. Soon after arriving he submitted a memorial in four articles on defeating the Mongols, setting out his views on frontier defense systematically and asking the emperor to give him a hundred thousand troops with discretion in their use to settle the frontier. In the eleventh month of the same year he was made deputy commander of the firearms camp, the very post his father Qi Jingtong had held more than thirty years before. Not long afterwards, on the proposal of Tan Lun, who had by then become governor-general of Ji and Liao, the court concentrated thirty thousand infantry and called three thousand troops from Zhejiang to be trained under Qi Jiguang alone; in the fifth month of 1568 he was appointed, as associate commander-in-chief, to direct the training of the three garrisons of Jizhou, Changping and Baoding, with all officers below commander-in-chief under his control. Because Jizhen had both a commander-in-chief and a director of training, the divided authority left the generals waiting on one another, and the ministry of war proposed recalling the commander-in-chief Guo Hu and giving the post to Qi Jiguang alone; the court then made him commander-in-chief holding Jizhou, Yongping and Shanhaiguan, and in 1569 recorded his merit against Wu Ping and advanced him to the right command.

Before Qi arrived, Jizhou had seen eight regional commanders in fifteen years. He requested the transfer of troops he had trained in Zhejiang, and the court approved the deployment of three thousand, later expanded to twenty thousand. Because he considered the quality of northern soldiers inadequate, he relied heavily on his veteran southern troops. He repaired the Great Wall and constructed towers to strengthen defenses. By 1571, the fifth year of Longqing, the Great Wall towers were largely completed. That same year, the Ming concluded an agreement with the Mongols and the border became calmer. In 1573, the first year of Wanli, Mongol forces under Tümen and Altan entered the frontier region; Qi intercepted them, and his reputation inspired such fear that thereafter they did not dare attack Jizhou again.

At Jizhou he memorialized repeatedly on the frontier's problems and the importance of training. The memorial on training submitted in the tenth month of 1568 held that of the frontier armies there were seven reasons why a great many men amounted to few, six faults of untrained troops, and four abuses that made training useless, and proposed raising new troops and concentrating authority, which Tan Lun approved and Gao Gong and Zhang Juzheng supported and the emperor sanctioned. Thereafter the Jizhou sector was divided into twelve routes with eastern and western coordinators commanding them, and a cart camp was formed for the combined training of horse, foot and carts; in the twelfth month he beat back an attack at Qingshankou, and the record says that he answered the alarm and greatly raised the army's spirit, directing his troops to bar the way and winning a martial success, which changed the view that he was fit only to fight pirates and not the Mongols. In the second month of 1569, holding Jizhou, Yongping and Shanhaiguan under the title of director of training, he personally led the twelve routes, and after careful observation memorialized for the building of three thousand hollow towers; the emperor approved the plan but granted funds for only twelve hundred, and Qi Jiguang set his troops to the arduous work of raising towers and repairing the wall. Jizhou's soldiers had long been hard to control and, as the record puts it, could not bear military discipline; fortunately the three thousand Zhejiang troops he had asked for arrived. Waiting outside the city wall in heavy rain they stood motionless from morning to evening, which astonished the frontier troops and gradually corrected their lax habits. By the eighth month of 1571 the hollow towers were finished, with one thousand and seventeen of them along the line from Shanhaiguan to Zhenbian, greatly strengthening the eastern stretch of the Long Wall.

Qi repeatedly received promotions and honors. In 1570, the fourth year of Longqing, he became Chief Military Commissioner of the Right; in 1574, the second year of Wanli, he was promoted to Chief Military Commissioner of the Left, the highest military office of the Ming; and in 1581, the ninth year of Wanli, he was granted the additional titles Junior Guardian and Grand Guardian of the Heir Apparent. He defended Jizhou for fourteen years. In addition to his own military ability, his success depended on strong support from Tan Lun and Senior Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng. Zhang trusted Qi greatly and instructed him to preserve peace on the frontier and avoid taking the offensive without need.

Along with the wall and towers he reformed the frontier army: besides forming a cart camp for the joint training of carts, horse and foot, he devised anti-cavalry barricades so as to use his own strengths against the enemy's weaknesses; he set up transport camps in the frontier garrisons as bases for grain, fodder and equipment; and he assigned duties by the origin of the troops, with the southern troops as the vanguard, the guards on rotation in support, and the local garrison for holding the wall. In the winter of 1572, on his proposal and arrangement, the frontier army carried out large-scale maneuvers in the Zunhua area with carts, cavalry and infantry together, more than a hundred and sixty thousand men and over twenty days, something rarely seen in Chinese military history; Qi Jiguang himself was much stirred, saying that in more than twenty years of commanding troops he had never seen a hundred thousand men assembled, that only now that they were camped together did he understand what a hundred thousand could do, and that he had gained some insight and believed frontier affairs were truly workable. Because his training was effective, Dong Huli's offensives all ended in ruin: in the spring of 1573 the two chiefs planned an incursion, rode to Xifengkou and, denied the gifts they demanded, plundered and hunted along the wall to lure the government troops, whereupon Qi Jiguang attacked by surprise and nearly took Dong Huli; that summer Dong Huli raided Taolin and was driven off, and when Chang Ang raided Jieling he too was beaten. Having gained nothing and lost heavily by repeated raids, Dong Huli offered to open the pass and ask for gifts, and the court agreed to annual payments. In 1574 Chang Ang, unable to force the passes, pressed his uncle Chang Tu into raiding, and Qi Jiguang defeated him and took Chang Tu alive; Dong Huli and Chang Ang then came to the pass with three hundred kinsmen to ask pardon, Dong Huli in plain clothes weeping and begging that Chang Tu be spared, and Qi Jiguang, after consulting his officers, accepted their surrender; Dong Huli returned the frontier people he had carried off and swore not to rebel again, and for as long as Qi Jiguang held the post the two chiefs did not dare attack Jizhou. With Jizhou made secure, the Mongols could not get in and turned against Liaodong; in 1579 Qi Jiguang marched to the relief of Liaodong and with the Liaodong army drove back the Tumet, and for the merit was advanced from grand guardian of the heir apparent to junior guardian. At Jizhou he exhausted the wilderness and his own thought, leaving no wall or tower whose plan he had not worked out himself and none he had not inspected and tested, so that his results were usually the best of all the garrisons, though his rank advanced only in the first month of 1574 from the right command to the left command. In the seventeen years before he took the post ten commanders-in-chief had been changed, almost all removed for fault, and the defenses were insecure; under him, partly through the sound decisions of the grand secretaries Xu Jie, Gao Gong and Zhang Juzheng and partly through his own ability, the frontier was kept in order for sixteen years. He got on well with superiors and colleagues: against the pirates he had the esteem of Hu Zongxian, Tan Lun and Ruan E, and at Jizhou the reliance of the grand secretaries and the cooperation of the governor Tan Lun, with Zhang Juzheng in particular consulting him on every matter and removing anyone who tried to obstruct him. But this closeness told against him after Zhang Juzheng's death. In 1582 Tan Lun and Zhang Juzheng died in succession and he lost his chief supporters at court; the emperor soon began to settle accounts with Zhang Juzheng, and Qi Jiguang, as the general Zhang Juzheng had trusted, was caught up in it. Chen Wenzhi, a subordinate officer he had himself promoted, spread slander against him in the capital hoping to take his place, and the supervising secretary Zhang Dingsi impeached him for achieving nothing at Jizhou and proposed sending him south. Zhang Juzheng had laid down the strategy of holding fast, saying that the business of the day was to defend and that keeping the enemy out was the highest merit, and though Qi Jiguang wished for a decisive battle in the open he never obtained it; the emperor nevertheless followed Zhang Dingsi's proposal and in the second month of 1583 transferred Qi Jiguang to be commander-in-chief of Guangdong.

Qi Jiguang's greatest work at Jizhen was to bring the eastern stretch of the Long Wall from a rough beginning to completion. To strengthen the northern defenses the Ming had divided the wall into nine defense zones with heavy forces in each, Jizhen being one; its wall had been built on a considerable scale before, but only under Qi Jiguang did it reach completeness. From the fifth month of 1568 he raised the question of repairing the wall of each route, and once he was commander-in-chief he set about it: thin stretches were made thicker and low ones higher, generally to a height of seven or eight metres and a width of six, missing stretches were built, and at vital points double walls were raised, as at the Heiyu pass. Thus of the one thousand seven hundred and sixty-five li of the Jizhen frontier from Shanhaiguan onward, one thousand four hundred and seventy-four li had wall, all but the steepest ridges where neither horse nor man could pass; and the wall was faced with brick and stone, laid on dressed stone footings, cased inside and out in blue brick to the top, pointed with lime, filled with rammed lime-sand-clay and paved with brick, so that it was strong and lasting.

The details of the work show his eye for actual fighting. Walls were provided with parapets on both sides, the inner ones lower, so that the enemy could be shot at from either side, while the outer parapet, six feet high by regulation, could completely cover a man; where ordinary crenellations were square, Qi Jiguang had them built with pointed bricks so that the openings formed triangles, enlarging the field of fire for guns, muskets and bows. Below the parapet he built the hanging eye, a half-funnel opening a few courses deep flush with the wall face, whose purpose was to watch the enemy who had come up to the foot of the wall — for once there, the enemy would concentrate bows and guns on anyone leaning over the crenel, and to see them without being hit he devised this opening. In the inner face, between every seventy or eighty crenels, he set a small gate, now called the inner gate, for reinforcements to climb up. The pointed crenel, the hanging eye and the inner gate were all his inventions and are found in no wall built by others. He also cut the outer slope more steeply so that the wall stood higher and enemy horses could not climb it; where the slope was too gentle to cut, he had ditches dug and pits dug in patterns to hinder cavalry; and even on cliffs and in remote places he sent men to survey the ground, building towers where towers could be built, trimming slopes that could be trimmed and cutting new ones where there were none, so that every place was prepared.

The building of hollow towers was the heart of the work. At the end of 1568 Qi Jiguang memorialized for their construction, asking that since the two garrisons of Ji and Chang stretched more than two thousand li with too few men to hold them, the wall be thickened a little with crenels on both sides and a small gate between every seventy or eighty crenels for support from below; and that hollow towers be built on the wall itself, one every hundred paces where the ground was easy and every fifty or thirty where it was critical, like the watchtowers of a private house, five zhang high, a hundred and twenty feet square, hollow within and of three storeys, able to hold a hundred men, with weapons, grain and defensive stores inside — in all three thousand towers for the two garrisons at fifty taels each, one hundred and fifty thousand taels in all, fifty thousand issued each year for a thousand towers, the work done in three years. Tan Lun revised the height to three zhang and the capacity to fifty men, and on his memorial the court approved the project in the first month of 1569. In the second month of 1569 the great building began, the first such frontier work of the Ming; four hundred and seventy-two towers were finished that year, three hundred and sixty-seven in Jizhen and a hundred and five in Changzhen. Thereafter Tan Lun and others, from their own inspection, decided that no towers need be built where horses could not pass, so that fifteen hundred would suffice for the two garrisons. By the summer of 1571 Jizhen had built eight hundred and eighteen towers from Shanhaiguan to Shitangling and Changzhen a hundred and ninety-nine from Huanghua to the Huailai area, one thousand and seventeen in all, so that, as the record says, every vital pass on the mountain roads of the two garrisons was now completely commanded. By 1572 the first phase was essentially complete with one thousand two hundred and six towers, and Qi Jiguang took the occasion of an inspection to raise with the inspecting minister Wang Daokun the building of two hundred more; on Wang Daokun's memorial of frontier affairs the court approved in the fourth month of 1573, and the second phase, finished in 1575, brought the two garrisons to one thousand three hundred and thirty-seven towers; a third phase, completed in 1581, left Jizhen with one thousand one hundred and ninety-four and Changzhen with two hundred and fifty-four, all interlinked and splendid to see. The pits, ditches and cut slopes outside the wall, the wall itself with its parapets, hanging eyes and hollow towers, and the camps within made one complete defensive system. Because the towers gave the garrison shelter and stabling which they had lacked while the towers were unfinished, Qi Jiguang proposed camps beneath them: where there was a tower the camp was built by it, where there was an old tower or a wall-guarding tower likewise, and where there was neither, a camp was made against some natural strong point, each camp with its own wall and space for the horses; if the enemy broke through elsewhere, the defending troops were to withdraw into the towers and hold them to the last, while the reserve within the wall was to keep a base camp by tower, mound or strong point, and in emergency all the troops on the wall were to enter the base camps and hold them. With this the eastern Long Wall was greatly strengthened, and it was said that the planning of the towers and walls at Jizhen all came from the junior guardian Qi.

Difficult Later Years

Zhang Juzheng died in 1582, the tenth year of Wanli. Because of his close association with Zhang, Qi Jiguang lost favor with the Wanli Emperor. Ministers warned the emperor that Qi was like a fierce beast outside the palace gates who obeyed only Zhang Juzheng and could not be controlled by others. Less than six months after Zhang's death, Qi was impeached, removed from his northern post, and transferred to serve as regional commander in Guangdong. His rank remained unchanged, but he lost his important position defending the capital. In 1585, the thirteenth year of Wanli, he was impeached again and dismissed by the emperor.

In the summer of 1583 Qi Jiguang took up his post in Guangdong. The province was then quiet, and he was dispirited; his friends Tan Lun and Yu Dayou and his old subordinates Wang Rulong and Chen Dacheng had died in succession, leaving him the more solitary, and being old and ailing he asked repeatedly to retire. The supervising secretary Zhang Xigao and others impeached him again, and in 1585 the emperor granted his resignation; in the tenth month of that year he returned to his old home at Penglai. Wang Daokun's epitaph records the passage: after Zhang Juzheng left the world, the talk spread to the junior guardian; he was moved to command in the south, and when the Mongols entered the Heiyu pass the men of Ji begged that he be recalled, and being refused they carved stones in praise of his merit and set up shrines to him; crossing the mountains into Guangdong he took up the frontier business as he had in the two garrisons, and after a year falling ill he obtained leave to return to Dengzhou. When he left Jizhen the local people had wished the court to recall him but could not obtain it, and had to inscribe his virtues in stone and sacrifice to him.

After returning home, few of Qi's former friends continued to associate with him. He had accumulated little wealth and in old age was reduced to poverty, at times unable even to afford medicine. In 1587, the fifteenth year of Wanli, an Investigating Censor submitted a memorial recommending that Qi be recalled to service, but the Wanli Emperor rejected the proposal and punished the censor. Three months later, on January 17, 1588, the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month of the fifteenth year of Wanli, Qi died at his home in Dengzhou. Wang Daokun composed his epitaph.

His circumstances after dismissal contrast sharply with his open-handedness in the army. In Zhejiang he had given freely from his own purse to reward the deserving, and in the north he continued to be generous with soldiers and friends, so that it was said of him that he had four times held the seal of a general and worn his jade for more than thirty years, yet left no field in the countryside and no coin in his purse, and nothing but several thousand volumes of books. Without a salary he filled his days repairing the family shrine, hiring teachers for his sons and sorting his old papers, until the household could not afford a doctor or medicine, and his wife, the lady Wang, left him. The court's attitude was colder still: in the ninth month of 1587 the censor of the Henan circuit, finding his services outstanding, his abilities exceptional and his age not yet great, memorialized to employ him again, and was not only refused outright by those in power but fined two months' salary for it. Under such political weather and in poverty, on the nineteenth day of the twelfth month of 1587 he was suddenly taken ill and died the next day, 17 January 1588. The matter of what was owed him was settled only in the third month of 1593, when the ministry of rites stated that he had fought the pirates in bloody battles with merit in Fujian and Zhejiang, and that his bold plans against the Mongols were renowned in You and Yan, and asked that the customary posthumous benefits be granted; the court agreed, and his descendants thereafter held his offices in succession, and in the last years of the Wanli reign a posthumous name was also granted. Earlier a memorial had been sent up on his behalf recounting his great services and observing that never had great merit been so poorly rewarded. From inheriting the assistant commandership of the Dengzhou guard at seventeen to dying in poverty and sickness at fifty-seven he commanded troops for forty-five years, holding the seal of a general four times and leaving nothing behind — an ending rare among Ming generals.

Qi Jiguang's verse is the mirror of his campaigning life, rich in matter and varied in manner: in length from more than twelve hundred characters to sixteen, in subject chiefly military life, in line from three characters to seven, and in manner ranging from the rousing and martial to the clear and flowing, always natural, substantial and sincerely felt. In his songs he gives voice to the soldier's devotion and the ambition to serve the state, to the resolve to protect the people and think lightly of death, and also to the pain of a man slandered and thwarted. The poem written in 1546, when at nineteen he had inherited the assistant commandership of the Dengzhou guard and was managing the military farms, tells of a night of anxiety for the state in which he could not rest and drank and talked of war with an old friend in the depths of the tent; its closing couplet, that a marquisate is not what he sought and that he wished only for a calm sea, shows plainly his indifference to rank and his wish that the people be at peace and the sea quiet. The poem written at twenty-six, when he was acting assistant commander supervising the anti-pirate defense in Shandong, describes a morning boat slowly making its way to the camp at Wendeng with the cooking smoke rising from the villages and the camp horns echoing in the spring wind, and then looks back on the Qin and Han past and outward to the states beyond the sea, showing his sense of peril and his ambition to serve, the whole scene ample and grave. In the well-known quatrain written on horseback he says, without any ornament, that he has ridden north and south to repay his sovereign, that the flowers and moon of the rivers laugh at his life, and that of the three hundred and sixty days in a year most are spent on horseback with his spear — four lines that may serve as a portrait of his whole campaigning life.

After he took command at Jizhou, with the capital near at hand, rumors circulating, objections multiplying and the court checking him at every turn, his verse turned grave and stirring or muted and indignant. The poem on reaching the summit of Mount Pan, still much quoted, was written on a winter evening while he held Jizhen. Mount Pan, the first scenic height east of the capital, rises abruptly and sheer; the first four lines describe what he saw from the top — the border horns sounding, the autumn grass withered, the clouds rearing up and the two peaks facing each other — and the next two the general drinking in the north wind without growing drunk because his mind was on the frontier, seeing only the flocks of homing crows cross the sky at dusk. The last four lines express his heart: in the couplet about the halberd, if force could put an end to the killing of invasion and keep the state's borders at peace, he would willingly spend his life guarding the frontier even with white hair; the veteran of the border here is the officer grown old in frontier service, and the closing lines invoke the sword-dancing terrace of Li Jing on Mount Pan to take that founding worthy of the Tang as his model. The collection also holds many clear and flowing pieces, among them songs in the voice of a woman thinking of a man on the frontier and bearing a folk-song quality. His poems, like his prose, are without artifice and carry their own dignity.

Major Activities

The Qi Army and the Mandarin Duck Formation

Qi Jiguang recruited miners in Yiwu, Zhejiang, to form the Qi Army and established strict standards for recruitment, organization, and training. Twelve men formed a squad, four squads a sentry unit, four sentry units a command, and four commands a larger unit; an army camp contained more than three thousand officers and soldiers. He created the Mandarin Duck Formation, using twelve-man combat units in which long shields, rattan shields, wolf-brush spears, long spears, and short weapons operated in coordination. The arrangement could adapt to terrain by changing into the Two Powers Formation or Three Powers Formation. It effectively countered wokou swords and close-combat tactics. The Qi Army was subject to severe discipline and collective responsibility: if one man fled, another could be beheaded; if a whole squad fled, the squad leader could be executed. Each soldier received an annual salary of ten taels of silver, while an enemy head brought a reward of thirty taels. The Qi Army became one of the most elite forces of the Ming and achieved an unmatched record of victories according to the source text.

The Qi army took shape with the recruiting at Yiwu and the organization, formation and discipline that followed. The three thousand Shaoxing troops assigned to him earlier, though trained and marched about, had not been chosen by him, and being largely slick townsmen they kept poor discipline, even killing innocent people to claim merit, and shrank from close quarters or deserted in battle. In the autumn of 1559 he proposed training for a third time, saying that to discuss war without soldiers was like fighting without arms; and since the people of Yiwu had then come to blows on a great scale with the miners of Yongkang over mining rights, and both sides had fought with great daring, he asked to recruit at Yiwu. Tan Lun supported it warmly and the governor-general Hu Zongxian adopted it, the magistrate of Yiwu, Zhao Dahe, also memorializing that the local miners be recruited to weaken the feuding factions, and Hu Zongxian had Zhao Dahe assist in the recruiting. In the ninth month of that year Qi Jiguang went to Yiwu and volunteers came in crowds; the miners' leader Wang Rulong came down from the hills with his followers at the summons and afterwards became a mainstay of the Qi army and a general of repeated merit. His standard for selection was that slick townsmen must above all not be used and that only simple country folk would serve, and he chose strictly on four counts — a full and strong physique, skill at arms, quickness of mind and great strength — holding that none of the four could be dispensed with though none need be absolute, and valuing above all courage; he had also three exclusions: no townsman, no man who had been beaten by the enemy, and no man obedient to the officials. With Zhao Dahe's close cooperation he soon recruited four thousand strictly chosen soldiers, took them to Shaoxing for training, and after two months of rigorous and effective drill the new force was such that, as the record says, every man was worth a hundred; it was called the Qi army, and from then on its fame spread through the empire.

In organization he made twelve men a file with a file leader, four files a company with a company leader, four companies a battalion with a battalion commander, and four battalions a regiment under a regimental commander, with Qi Jiguang himself commanding the central standard and the whole camp. In 1560, taking account of the hills, marshes and swamps of the Zhejiang and Fujian coast and the pirates' habit of laying ambushes and fighting at close quarters, he created the mandarin duck formation: twelve men as the basic unit, the file leader in front, then two men bearing respectively the long shield and the rattan shield for cover, then two with the wolf-brush, then four spearmen two on each side, then the swordsmen with short blades, and last a cook carrying the fire. The wolf-brush was made from southern bamboo, the oldest and hardest cut, its tip shaved to a point and its four sides left with sharp branches, some three metres long, the bearer using its point to stab and so cover the advance of the shield men and the spearmen behind; if the spearmen missed, the swordsmen rushed in with their short blades. The formation bound spear and shield, long and short together and brought out the worth of every weapon, and it was flexible, able to turn from column into line and to divide into two small formations, the two-talents formation, or three, the three-talents formation, both known as the changed mandarin duck, and it exactly checked the pirates' advantages.

Discipline and instruction were the other half of the Qi army. He required of his soldiers the spirit of the Yue family army, which would freeze rather than break into a house and starve rather than plunder, had the essential orders printed and issued to the men and rewarded or punished them by how well they knew them, and demanded as much of officers: to lead the soldiers in person did not mean only to be first in battle but to be first in every hardship, and to share their lot did not mean only in danger but in ordinary times as well, and how should the arts of war be left for the soldiers to learn while the commander disdained to practice them. He insisted that reward and punishment were then the handle of an army: where reward was due, even a man who had been his enemy should be rewarded and helped in trouble, and where military law was broken, even his own son or nephew must suffer it without regard to affection or grudge — so that although the categories of reward were many, all were actually carried out. He taught the soldiers that learning arms was no business of answering the government's call but a matter of their own skin, since a man skilled in arms would kill the bandits and not be killed by them; and he reminded them repeatedly that they came from the people and fought to lift affliction from the people, asking them to think how hard it was to pay their taxes as farmers at home and how easily they now drew pay, and what use they were if they would not kill the bandits and protect those who fed them. His words were plain and to the point. Besides infantry he trained a fleet, its ships of three chief kinds, the Fuchuan, the Haicang and the Chongqiao, each with its strengths and weaknesses, working together, with the small kailang and net boats for liaison and scouting, the fleet organized into five squadrons, center, left, right, van and rear, to attack separately or concentrate as the enemy required, so that Zhejiang's sea defenses were greatly strengthened.

Suppression of the Wokou Threat

Qi fought the wokou in Zhejiang and Fujian for more than a decade and took part in more than a hundred engagements of various sizes. In 1561, the fortieth year of Jiajing, he won nine successive battles in the Great Victory at Taizhou; in 1562 he broke the enemy positions at Hengyu, Niutian, and Lindun; and in 1563 he defeated the wokou at Pinghai Guard and recovered the prefectural city of Xinghua. By the beginning of the Longqing era, the wokou threat along the coasts of Fujian and Zhejiang had largely been eliminated. His victories resulted not only from rigorous training but also from careful defensive arrangements, cooperation with local officials, recruitment of local militia from affected areas, and generous military pay.

In his first years after moving to Zhejiang, Qi Jiguang learned from reverses what was wrong with the old armies. From the middle of the Jiajing period the pirate scourge along the southeast coast grew worse and worse, especially in Zhejiang and Fujian, where the government troops were ineffective, the pirates came and went at will, and there are records of tens of thousands of Ming soldiers being driven off by them. According to the veritable records of Emperor Shizong, in the seventh month of 1554 the court appointed Qi Jiguang, then acting assistant commander supervising the anti-pirate command in Shandong, to office in the Zhejiang provincial military commission; the Ming History says that he was transferred to the Zhejiang commission and made a brigade commander with charge of the Ningbo, Shaoxing and Taizhou districts. In that post he repeatedly planned anti-pirate measures for the governor-general Hu Zongxian and won his esteem, and at Hu Zongxian's repeated request he was promoted in the seventh month of the following year to brigade commander in charge of the Ningbo, Shaoxing and Taizhou region where the pirates were most active. Within a month of taking up the post more than eight hundred pirates attacked Longshan station, the gateway to central Zhejiang; the court assembled several thousand soldiers to defend it, the pirates divided into three columns and broke into the Ming units, and the numerically overwhelming Ming force could not hold and fell back in disorder until Qi Jiguang, regardless of his own safety, shot dead the three pirate leaders, whereupon the pirates withdrew. In the tenth month of 1556 the pirates raided again and Qi Jiguang fought alongside Yu Dayou and the prefect of Taizhou, Tan Lun, beating them in several engagements, though reckless pursuit and the lack of discipline nearly destroyed the Ming force. In 1557 the pirates attacked Yueqing, Rui'an and Linhai, and Qi Jiguang's relief column arrived too late because the roads were cut, for which the court did not hold him at fault.

These fights convinced him that an untrained army of poor quality and loose discipline could not withstand well-armed and ferocious pirates, and that only a newly raised and trained force would serve. That winter he drafted a communication asking permission to create a military camp, the first time he proposed to his superiors the raising, selecting and training of troops; in the second month of 1557 he submitted a second memorial on training in which he analyzed why the Ming armies could not match the pirates and asked for three thousand men of Zhejiang to train under his own hand, undertaking that within three years they would be fit to meet the enemy and would save several times their cost in the hire of outside troops. Hu Zongxian had tried training troops before without result, and though he was displeased by the proposal he believed in Qi Jiguang's ability and reluctantly agreed, while Ruan E praised it warmly and that winter transferred three thousand Shaoxing soldiers to his training. Within a month the force was committed to a relief march in the Yueqing area; the roads were cut and it arrived too late, and no blame attached to him. In the fourth month of 1558 Qi Jiguang was ordered to cross by sea from Zhoushan to defend Taizhou, where he won a number of small victories. That year, after the pirate chief Wang Zhi was lured to his death by Hu Zongxian, his followers occupied Cengang; the Ming forces attacked it in several columns and Qi Jiguang led the left column in a fierce assault, but Cengang was a lair the pirates had held for years and could not be taken at once, the siege lasting six months. The court, believing slanderous reports that the officers were slack, stripped the commander-in-chief Yu Dayou and the brigade commander Qi Jiguang of their posts and set a month's limit for reducing Cengang; the supervising secretary Luo Jiabin and others impeached Qi Jiguang for deliberately letting the pirates go and for suspected dealings with them, and the court prepared to arrest and interrogate him. Fortunately Cengang was taken, Qi Jiguang's part in the fighting was plain for all to see, and the charge of dealing with the pirates was baseless, so that he recovered his post, continued to guard the three commanderies of Tai, Jin and Yan, and went to the relief of Taizhou, where the pirates were worst. The Ming History records the matter in these words: joining Yu Dayou's troops he besieged Wang Zhi's remaining followers at Cengang; when the place was long untaken he was deprived of office and left to atone by finishing the bandits; the pirates then fled, others burned and plundered Taizhou again, and Luo Jiabin and others impeached him for achieving nothing and for dealings with the pirates; while the case was being examined he recovered his office through the merit of the Wang Zhi affair and was transferred to guard the three commanderies of Tai, Jin and Yan.

The reversal in Fujian began after Qi Jiguang returned to Zhejiang. Within a month of his departure the reinforced pirates attacked Xinghua, tricked their way through the gate and took the prefectural city — according to the Ming History, Liu Xian sent eight soldiers into the city with letters, their clothes marked with the words heavenly troops, and the pirates killed them, put on their clothes, deceived the defending general into admitting them, and that night cut the bar and let the bandits in. It was the first prefectural city lost since the pirate troubles began and it shook the region. Liu Xian, advancing on Xinghua with too few men to attack, was impeached and left to atone, and Yu Dayou likewise would not attack at once, preferring to wait for the main armies to close in. The court, seeing the Fujian situation worsen again, made Yu Dayou commander-in-chief of Fujian, sent Qi Jiguang into Fujian once more with troops, and appointed Tan Lun governor of Fujian. The pirates burned and plundered in Xinghua and around it until the whole region was emptied and all eight prefectures shaken, withdrawing of themselves only in the second month of 1563, and the provincial commander Ouyang Shen, fighting in ambush, was killed, after which the pirates held Pinghai wei.

In the third month of 1563, after recruiting at Yiwu for the third time, Qi Jiguang led his troops into Fujian and reached Fuqing in the fourth month. Tan Lun gathered Qi Jiguang, Yu Dayou and Liu Xian to plan the operation, first setting up palisades across the sea routes to cut off the pirates' retreat, and deciding that the Qi army should make the main attack in the center with Yu Dayou and Liu Xian on the left and right. On the twentieth day of the fourth month, under heavy bombardment and with the wings cooperating, Qi Jiguang led in person, the Qi army broke into Pinghai wei, took more than two thousand two hundred heads, and rescued more than three thousand men and women, and then pursued and destroyed the pirates who landed elsewhere, reporting twelve victories and more than three thousand killed within a month. In the sixth month, when his earlier merit at Hengyu was reported, he was made acting associate commander-in-chief; and when the court again recorded the victories at Xinghua and Pinghai wei, praising him as one who used troops like a god, not merely a tiger of the present age but a famous general of all time, he was advanced to associate commander-in-chief with a hereditary thousand-household rank and took Yu Dayou's place as commander-in-chief, holding the whole of Fujian together with the Jinhua and Wenzhou prefectures of Zhejiang in military and naval command. At that time more than twenty thousand newly arrived pirates invaded Fujian and besieged Xianyou; hearing of it Qi Jiguang marched to relieve the place and on a foggy day in the twelfth month destroyed the pirates piecemeal, rescuing a city that had been shut up for more than fifty days. The battle of Xianyou was a classic case of the few defeating the many, and Tan Lun said that since the war in the southeast began the army's prestige had never been so shaken nor its merit so extraordinary.

In the spring of 1564 the Qi army caught the pirates again at Wangcangping, taking several hundred heads, many of the pirates falling to their death from the cliffs; several thousand survivors occupied Caipiling in Zhangpu, where Qi Jiguang divided his force into five companies, took up short weapons himself, climbed the cliff barefoot, and closed with the pirates, killing or capturing several hundred. With this the pirate troubles in Fujian died down for a time; in the fifth month Qi Jiguang turned back to put down the mountain bandit Lan Songshan, and afterwards the Qi army remained in Fujian. Guangdong had suffered little from the pirates, but as Zhejiang and Fujian were cleared the trouble there grew, especially around Chaozhou, where twenty thousand pirates joined forces with the sea rover Wu Ping. In the spring of 1565 Qi Jiguang marched out to join Yu Dayou against Wu Ping, and the Qi army by land and water defeated him at Meiling; Wu Ping abandoned his baggage, gathered more than a hundred large ships and moved to Nan'ao, in the sea between Fujian and Guangdong. In the ninth month Qi Jiguang divided his force into center, left and right, and on a calm day led them across the sea in person to attack Nan'ao, where Yu Dayou's relief force arrived soon after; nearly the whole island force was destroyed, and only Wu Ping and some seven hundred escaped. The two pursued them together, at last destroying the remnant in the fourth month of 1566, and Wu Ping drowned himself. In the first month of that year the court had removed Yu Dayou from the Huizhou and Chaozhou command and ordered Qi Jiguang, commander-in-chief of Fujian, to take charge of those two prefectures as well. Thus after more than ten years of hard fighting the pirate scourge along the southeast coast was at last ended. The Ming History's narrative of the era sums it up: that the pirates, having been badly hurt in Zhejiang, had once raided Huai, Yang, Wu and Yue without success, and then made Fujian their lair, lasting seven or eight years, taking more than ten cities, seizing millions in people and goods, and costing the government armies, officials and people more than a hundred thousand dead; and that with victory and defeat alternating and the transport of grain disturbed the empire had been shaken, until now at last the trouble ceased.

Qi Jiguang had another name in the mouths of the people of Zhejiang and of his enemies. When he returned to Zhejiang in 1562 the pirates congratulated one another that the tiger Qi had gone and there was nothing left to fear; and within a month of his departure the reinforced pirates attacked Xinghua, tricked their way through the gate and took the prefectural city — a boast that stands in ironic contrast with the loss that followed, and shows what weight his name carried among them. His relation with Yu Dayou is another important side of his career: the two were named together as the great commanders of the age, and in the Nan'ao campaign in Guangdong they divided the work, Yu Dayou taking the fleet and Qi Jiguang the land forces to attack Wu Ping from both sides, until the last pirates between Fujian and Guangdong were destroyed; later accounts of the Ming commanders who fought the pirates commonly name the dragon Yu and the tiger Qi together.

The Taizhou victory illustrates the working of the Qi army at its height: the enemy's intention was read correctly, the main force was moved by anticipation rather than in reaction, the ambush at Shangfengling defeated a superior force with an inferior one, and the pursuit was pressed home until the survivors were destroyed rather than dispersed. Its immediate consequences were a promotion and a reputation: the people of the district spoke of him as their long wall, and the two Zhe circuits built shrines to him. Its larger consequence was that the same troop, again recruited at Yiwu to a strength of more than six thousand, could then be transferred to Fujian and afterwards to Guangdong, so that the coastal war was fought to the end by the same body of drilled men operating far from home. That this was possible rested on the uniformity of organization and command and on the ability of the force to supply itself in the field — features of a trained standing force rather than of the temporary levies that had failed before it, and the point on which Qi Jiguang's reforms proved their worth beyond the winning of any single battle.

Defense of Jizhou

Qi took overall charge of troop training for the four commands of Jizhou, Changping, Liaodong, and Baoding and concurrently served as regional commander of Jizhou for fourteen years. He repaired the Great Wall and built hollow watchtowers to strengthen defense, trained northern troops, and brought veteran units from Zhejiang to reinforce the frontier. With the support of Zhang Juzheng and Tan Lun, the Jizhou frontier became highly secure and Mongol forces did not dare attack. Qi thereby shifted from strategic battlefield command to long-term military administration.

In weapons and methods of fighting Qi Jiguang held that the comparison of arms was the first business of handling troops — that is, that by improving weapons both cold and firearms the army's fighting power should be raised and an advantage over the enemy created — and under this principle he improved and invented in firearms, war carts, ships and fortification. Against the northern cavalry he formed the cart camp: four men pushed one cart, in which were carried anti-cavalry barricades and firearms; in battle the carts were formed into a square, horse and foot sheltering behind them, firearms opening at long range first, and as the enemy cavalry came near the infantry set the barricades in front and stabbed with spears, while if the enemy broke the cavalry pursued. The Ming History sums up the method: one cart pushed by four men, formed into a square in battle with horse and foot inside; light and handy barricades to stop the enemy's charge; firearms fired first as the enemy came, then the infantry advancing with barricades in line, spears and wolf-brushes among them, and the cavalry pursuing when the enemy fled; a transport camp following behind, with southern troops as the picked vanguard, the guards on rotation in support and the local garrison holding the wall — so that with precise control and sharp weapons the Jizhen army became the finest of all the frontier commands.

The improvement of firearms shows his care for detail. The old crouching-tiger gun was light and apt to leap and had to be placed twenty or thirty paces from the cart camp: outside the camp, the other firearms within could not be fired for fear of hitting the gunners; inside, it was liable to hurt them, and its effect in killing was limited. Qi Jiguang therefore had wrought-iron guns specially made: two feet long, two inches thick, with five bands, loaded by putting in the touch-hole cord wrapped in cloth, then six or seven ounces of powder closed with a wooden plug and a little earth and lead balls at the second band, then more earth and lead balls from fifty to a hundred, then a stone at the mouth rammed home, with two clawed spikes in front and a double-clawed catch behind the fourth band according to the slope of the ground, and fired at about five inches from the camp, so that the other firearms could still be fired without avoiding it and the crouching-tiger gun could be loaded as before — and the problem of its awkwardness was solved. The old great general gun was heavy and long and hard to move, its pre-loaded powder apt to cake with time and its touch-hole to rust, with slow and laborious reloading; he replaced it with a new type, light enough to move, with three chamber pieces that could be loaded into the mother barrel in advance and changed by one man after firing. The quick gun, whose short and heavy stock caused either too much powder with too light a ball or too little with too heavy a one, he improved to a barrel two feet long with three or four moneysweight of lead ball and powder sealed in bamboo or wooden tubes, loaded by cutting the cord an inch and a half long and binding ten to a bundle, dipping both ends in powder, ramming the charge with a rammer and adding one ball, the gunner kneeling on one knee to rest the piece and firing with the rear hand. He also devised the six-fold matchlock and the three-flying firearm, built the Chongqiao ship, and joined firearms to carts, to ships and to fortifications, with the army's organization, training and manner of fighting altered accordingly.

Among cold weapons the wolf-brush and the sword stand out. The wolf-brush was made of long jointed bamboo tipped with an iron spearhead, its side branches singed into straight and hooked points, soaked in tung oil and smeared with poison; in action the pirates' long swords, sharp as they were, could not cut through the pliant branches, and the deep joints stopped spear thrusts while the dense side branches screened the bearer, so that it served both for attack and defense and was called the pirate-killing weapon. The Military Training Record says that a man could screen his whole body with it so that no thrust of sword or spear could enter, which gave men courage, and that it was placed in the front rank as the south's weapon for killing pirates. In long campaigning he found Chinese swords inferior in quality to the Japanese, and taking the merits of the latter he had the blade lengthened, the width narrowed and the curve increased, with strict attention to quality, forging the famous Qi sword, the method of which is recorded in the same work: iron must be repeatedly refined, the edge of pure steel, the blade from the back ground and planed flat and the edge polished until no shoulder remained, and the excellence lay above all in the point. In the direction of operations he laid down a series of principles: that before battle everything should be calculated for certain victory and plans made before fighting; that at Jizhen he kept many open and secret scouts to learn the enemy's movements, established signal posts to pass alarms quickly, placed ambushes and decoys outside the passes, held the wall, blocked with main forces and pursued with cavalry, so as to keep the initiative in defense; that plans and methods must be settled according to the circumstances of both sides, changing with the enemy and forming up according to the ground; that attack and defense must go together, defense within attack and attack within defense, whence his saying that the cart camp is the defense within attack and the wall and towers the attack within defense; and that against hardy pirates trained and disciplined troops were needed in the proportion of five to one, that with inferior force no attack should be risked until superiority in the whole or in part had been created, and that once battle was joined the enemy must be crushed utterly, so that a single effort might bring lasting peace.

Military Writings

Qi authored Jixiao Xinshu and Lianbing Shiji, which record in detail his practical experience in marching, training, organization, and tactics. The former was written during the anti-wokou campaigns and the latter during his defense of Jizhou. Both became representative Ming military texts and had a deep influence on later military thought. Qi was also skilled in poetry, prose, and calligraphy, and collections of his literary writings survive.

Qi Jiguang's writings are the counterpart of his practice. The New Book of Effective Discipline was written in the years of fighting pirates in Zhejiang and the Military Training Record while he held Jizhou; both describe in detail the practical experience and tactics of marching and training, both are representative military books of the Ming and both deeply influenced later military thought. He also left the Collected Works of the Zhizhi Hall, containing the verse collection Hengshuo gao and the miscellaneous Jiyu gao. Guo Chaobin's preface says that Qi Jiguang bore the spirit of a hawk and the resolve of one who would die of hunger, and that his military writings — oaths and warnings, sacrifices, victory reports, elegies, accounts of journeys and answers to gifts — all arose from actual affairs and could stand comparison with the ancients, their tone being lofty and self-consistent. In the middle scroll of the verse collection the prefaces to friends, such as those for the censor Wang Changgong, for the Jizhen collection, and for the censor Zhang's three memorials, were all written for things he had lived through and men he knew, with little empty phrasing; his records of events and journeys, such as the account of Fujian, the record of the Pavilion of Parting and the record of rebuilding the San Tun camp, all bear on the campaigns against pirates and Mongols and preserve valuable material through the testimony of a participant; and his tomb tablets and epitaphs provide solid evidence for the study of particular figures. The last scroll consists of sacrificial addresses and oaths, the sacrifices being to soldiers killed in action, subordinate commanders, superior commanders and his own teachers, as well as to the spirits; the oaths are of two kinds, for officers and for the army, and all relate to the fighting of the time.

The title of the Jiyu gao, the record of the foolish and again foolish, means that when all men prized cleverness he would alone take foolishness for his own and so give vent to what he had seen for himself. Its first scroll has eleven pieces expounding his military thought through selections from the Confucian classics; among them the Questions on Policy analyze strategy and tactics and his own abilities and failings in dialogue form, and divide commanders into the wise, the foolish and the foolish and again foolish, claiming the last place for himself and therefore styling himself the foolish and again foolish one, by way of self-warning. The second scroll is miscellaneous notes, much concerned with strange and supernatural matters, which drew the criticism that they were not free of bias, but which also touch on many realities of social life: as when he describes the change in the conduct of officials returning home, comparing the early years of the dynasty, when retiring scholars and officials came back with little substance, with his own day, when they came with a hundred cases and more, carrying them through the busy markets in broad daylight and fearing only that their districts might not see them. He also describes officials fearing their subordinates and shipping their baggage ahead before departure. Such passages reflect the middle Ming temper, in which profit was prized above principle, and mirror the corruption of administration: officials seeking private gain and vain reputation, at odds with their subordinates and unloved by the people. His collected works also record conditions on the frontier, local customs, and the attitude of the people toward the army, and are of considerable value for the study of Ming society, morals and thought in the middle and later periods.

Qi Jiguang's military thought came out of the building and use of armies, and as he said in the New Book of Effective Discipline it was no empty talk but strongly practical, and being inventive rather than bound to ancient methods it was esteemed by students of war in the Ming and Qing, who followed and used it. As frontier crisis deepened in the late Qing, many drew on his thought to guide the building of new armies, and reprinted and adapted his works as they circulated; in the Daoguang, Xianfeng and Guangxu periods many printed and manuscript copies of the two books were in circulation and were treated as the classics of military training. Reformers of the late Qing valued their practical worth and listed them among the references for training the new army, and in the Republican period he was regarded as a national hero and his exploits against the pirates were written into school textbooks. Beyond China his military writings reached the countries of East Asia: Korea adopted his military system, the Korean king studied his books himself, and in 1667 Korea again promulgated the New Book of Effective Discipline together with the Military Training Record; in Japan both books were reprinted several times between the end of the eighteenth century and the later nineteenth. Modern researchers hold that after Guo Deng no one in the Ming surpassed Qi Jiguang in both military achievement and literary distinction, and his contemporaries said that of men who were greatly endowed with both civil and military talent few could match him. His line about not seeking a marquisate but only a calm sea is widely recited, and that he both won extraordinary merit in the field and left a systematic body of military writing and a collection of verse makes him rare among Ming generals. Later ages sum him up as a strategist, a great commander and a national hero, and his ideas on training, his innovations in formation and his frontier works are still studied.

Personal Relations

• Father: Qi Jingtong, resolute and studious, with military ability; rose to deputy commander of the Shenji Battalion
• Sixth-generation ancestor: Qi Xiang, who followed Zhu Yuanzhang on campaign and died in battle in Yunnan
• Younger brother: Qi Jimei, served in the military and rose to regional commander of Guizhou
• Liang Jie: noted scholar of Penglai under whom Qi studied at the age of thirteen
• Tan Lun: prefect of Taizhou, governor of Fujian, governor-general of Jizhou and Liaodong, and Minister of War; Qi's patron and long-term collaborator
• Wang Daokun: military supervisor in Fujian who later composed Qi's epitaph
• Yu Dayou: renowned anti-wokou commander who fought alongside Qi; the two were known together as "Yu the Dragon and Qi the Tiger"
• Hu Zongxian: governor-general in Zhejiang who promoted Qi and supported his training program
• Zhang Juzheng: Senior Grand Secretary and Qi's strongest political supporter during his northern service
• Zhu Houcong, the Jiajing Emperor: appointed Qi Jiguang as regional commander
• Zhu Yijun, the Wanli Emperor: dismissed Qi after Zhang Juzheng's death
• Ruan E: governor of Zhejiang who supported Qi's training program
• Zhao Dahe: magistrate of Yiwu who assisted with recruiting miners
• Wang Rulong: leader among the miners and a fierce commander in the Qi Army

Historical Assessment

Ming Dynasty / Contemporary Period

• Tan Lun praised Qi Jiguang: "His talent and judgment are keen and penetrating, he is thoroughly versed in strategy, and his loyal and righteous heart is so clear that it could pierce Heaven and sun." (Memorials of Lord Tan Xiangmin)
• Hu Zongxian praised Qi for having "unique skill and the courage to be first to mount an assault," adding that he had "resisted and destroyed several thousand bandits in Taizhou and Wenzhou without leaving survivors; his merit was repeatedly established in eastern Zhejiang, and his name became known overseas."
• Wang Daokun wrote in the Taihan Ji that Qi "possessed both civil and military abilities, while his achievements and plans flourished together."
• Although the Wanli Emperor dismissed Qi, the History of Ming assessed him as a famous general on a level with Yu Dayou and wrote that "his conduct was inferior, but his resolution and courage surpassed Yu's."

Early to Mid-Qing

• The "Biography of Qi Jiguang" in juan 212 of the History of Ming states: "As a general, Jiguang's orders were strict, his rewards and punishments trustworthy, and no soldier dared disobey his commands." It also states: "After the Gengxu year of Jiajing, many frontier officials were dismissed because of affairs of state; Jiguang alone remained long in his command and ended his career with merit and reputation."
• Qing historian Gu Yingtai wrote in the Mingshi Jishi Benmo that Qi "swept away the wokou miasma, cleared the coastal regions, and rendered service to the southeast."
• Qing compilers included Jixiao Xinshu and Lianbing Shiji in the Siku Quanshu, commenting that they "all consist of words tested by experience and cannot be compared with empty discussions of the art of war."

Late Qing and Republican Period

• Late-Qing reformers valued the practical content of Qi's military writings and listed them as references for training the New Armies.
• During the Republican period, Qi was regarded as a national hero and his anti-wokou deeds were included in textbooks as inspiration for resistance and national salvation.

Modern Period

• Modern historians generally regard Qi Jiguang as one of the most outstanding military figures of the Ming, and his thought on training, tactical innovation, and frontier defense remains an important subject of study.
• Ray Huang wrote in 1587, A Year of No Significance: "His troops were the most efficient military organization of their age; his success lay in combining ideals with reality."
• Qi has been celebrated as a "national hero," and his line "It is not my wish to be enfeoffed as a marquis; I only hope the seas may become calm" remains widely known.