of the 15th century, grand coordinators (xunfu) and supreme commanders (zongdu) were sent to the provinces undergoing military emergencies to override the existing provincial hierarchies. In the wokou-stricken provinces, however, a grand coordinator had not been appointed until 1547 due to the interference of the coastal gentry who were involved with the illegal foreign trade. The coastal gentry, well-represented in the Ming court due to the abundance of successful imperial examination candidates from among their numbers, compounded their wealth by sponsoring the smugglers with seagoing vessels and profiteered by reselling the smuggled goods at a higher value, sometimes delaying or even refusing to pay the smugglers. They were able to keep the smugglers' dissatisfaction in check by cajolery, marriage alliances, and threatening to summon the Ming military on the smugglers. On the other hand, they protected themselves by hiring mercenaries as guards and bribing the local officials to look the other way. Zhu Wan, who became the Grand Coordinator of Zhejiang in 1547, called these gentry members "pirates in gowns and caps" (衣冠之盜), and identified them as the root cause of the coastal disturbances. In the 1540s, this gentry-led equilibrium began to fall apart as the dissatisfied smugglers went rogue from their gentry sponsors. The Veritable Records of the Ming points to a raid in 1547 as the start of the wokou troubles, where smugglers and foreigners burned down the Xie family estate in Yuyao after the prominent Xie clan (謝氏) refused to pay their debts to the smugglers and threatened to inform the government. Shuangyu, the illegal entrepôt After their ouster from the coastal ports of China, Japanese and Portuguese traders collaborated with illegal smugglers on island ports along the Zhejiang and Fujian coast. Among these ports, Shuangyu on Liuheng Island (六橫島) off the coast of Ningbo emerged as the primary emporium of clandestine trade. At first, Shuangyu only had temporary mat-sheds for the smugglers to house themselves and their goods during the trading season. In 1539, Fujianese traders started to guide foreign traders from Patani and Malacca to barter in Shuangyu and started to occupy the island. They were soon joined by the Fujianese merchants Jinzi Lao (金子老, "Gold Elder") and Li Guangtou (李光頭, "Baldy Li"), who led the Portuguese and assorted adventurers to Shuangyu. Attracted by the growing trade on the Zhejiang coast, the Xu brothers' syndicate moved their base of operations from the Malay Peninsula to