settlements to obtain provisions and goods for trade, then returned to their ships and left. By the summer of 1553, the situation escalated to the point where a pirate raid could number hundreds of ships, defeat garrisons, and besiege district seats. In 1554, the wokou set up bases along the coast from where they could conduct their raids, threatening the great cities of Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. Attempts at wokou suppression In 1552, the Grand Coordinator of Shandong Wang Yu (王忬) was summoned to take Zhu Wan's old grand coordinator position in Zhejiang. As grand coordinator, Wang Yu recruited talents like Yu Dayou and Tang Kekuan (湯克寬), as well as releasing Lu Tang and Ke Qiao from death row to make use of their experience against the wokou. He initiated a program to strengthen the towns and villages, which led to many towns being walled for the first time. However, Wang Yu's armies suffered repeated defeats in 1553 and 1554, during which the cities of Hangzhou, Songjiang, Tongzhou, and Jiaxing were attacked by the pirates. The raids on these cities along the Grand Canal were especially worrying to the court in Beijing since they threatened the tax-grain shipments from the breadbasket of southern China. Wang Yu was sacked in 1554 for his failure. In Wang Yu's place, Li Tianchong (李天寵) took the position of Grand Coordinator of Zhejiang. Furthermore, the Nanjing Minister of War Zhang Jing was appointed Supreme Commander of the armed forces in six coastal provinces: Shandong, the Southern Metropolitan Region, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, and Guangxi. This new position, ranked higher than grand coordinators, was made specifically in response to the wokou crisis. By this time, 8 out of 11 prefectures of Zhejiang had been ravaged by the pirates, and 1555 was on its way to become the most disastrous year of the wokou crisis. The pirates, numbering up to 20,000 men, had established fortifications along the Zhejiang coast and placed their headquarters at Zhelin (柘林) on the coast south of Shanghai. Their warships controlled the Huangpu River, and the raiding parties even carried artillery with them to besiege cities. The pirates belonged to an alliance of three Satsuma-based pirate leaders, Xu Hai, Chen Dong (陳東), and Ye Ma (葉麻), with the secondary capital Nanjing being the goal of their raids. They had hoped to capture the great metropolis Hangzhou before continuing onto Nanjing, but Xu Hai's band,