These differences would be played out in several conflicts. In response to
thewokoupirates, General Qi Jiguang was required to raise new military
units from the pool of local militias. Qi stressed training and went to great
lengths to improve and regularize the overall armament of his troops. His
training manual, theNew Manual on Military Efficiency, is one of the key
sources for our knowledge of the martial arts in the sixteenth century. Qi
needed tofind a way tofight Japanese swordsmen in hand-to-hand combat
and to create units that were fast enough to intercept the pirates. Training
swordsmen was a usual sort of martial arts problem: formulating an effec-
tive response to a particular system offighting. Battling pirates was a
military problem: preventing enemy units from achieving their objectives.
The martial arts problem was easily solved through proper martial arts
training. Rather than attempt to meet Japanese swordsmen at sword range
or individually, Qi’s men used spears and other polearms to negate
Japanese fencing. The same shift in martial arts practice was actually
going on in Japan at that time, as commoners armed with spears, and
increasingly handguns, would overcome samurai with swords and
mounted cavalry. Qi insisted on good physical conditioning for his men
and a solid regimen of martial arts training (though without stress on
missile weapons). He sought to condition the men to aggressively close
with the enemy and beat them in hand-to-hand combat. In a later edition of
his manual he actually removed the chapters on unarmedfighting while, of
course, retaining the sections on weapons use.
Qi’s naval units made extensive use of guns and gunpowder weapons,
usually on light boats, to overwhelm the pirates withfirepower. Although
he catalogued a wide range of martial arts in his manual, noting which
were the best, it is likely that his own background in military training
formed the basis of most of his method. His goal was to use the simplest
and most effective techniques. General Qi’s force of three thousand men
(later growing to 6 , 000 and then 10 , 000 ) was effective, as were those of Yu
Dayou, but they were not decisive by themselves in defeating the pirates.
Thewokouwere defeated by a combination of changing military policies,
infighting among the pirates themselves, and more open commercial pol-
icies on the coast. The Ming court managed to formulate an effective
response to the pirates after many false starts and its own political infight-
ing. Despite this larger context, Qi Jiguang’s success drove many martial
arts practitioners to claim credit for thefighting abilities of his troops and
to try and sort out which techniques came from which styles.
By the 1570 s a paid army had replaced the hereditary military system. This
new army would perform impressively in the last two decades of the sixteenth
168 The Ming Dynasty