WHILE POST–GOLDEN AGE PIRATICAL operations seldom matched their Golden Age counterparts in fame, there was one post–Golden Age pirate who broke that mold and went on to become one of the most successful pirates, if not the most successful pirate, of all time. This pirate had at the height of her operation four hundred ships and somewhere between forty thousand and sixty thousand pirates under her command, which was larger than many legitimate navies of the time. She amassed so much wealth that she was forced to keep records of how much she had accumulated in order to keep track of it all—unheard of for a pirate. She negotiated with the Qing dynasty and won. Who was this fearsome pirate? Her name was Cheng I Sao.
If the most successful pirate of all time was a woman, why don’t more people know her name? Surely this fact would be enough to dispel the myth once and for all that women can’t be pirates. Even though a reader who has made it this far will no longer be surprised that a woman pirate was left out of history, it is remarkable that this woman could rise to such dizzying heights and attain so much clout and still remain unknown, particularly when the story of her life seems tailor-made for an action film adaptation. Perhaps an exploration of her life may yield some answers.
Before diving into her life story, it is important to understand when and where she comes from in Chinese history. Cheng I Sao is very much a product of China, and some knowledge of the country during the late 1800s will enrich a reader’s understanding of her. This brief recap is in no way meant to be authoritative, but hopefully it will help put her epic deeds in context.
China is a massive country with nearly every habitat imaginable—mountains, large urban centers, rural farming areas, and coastal regions. The people who live near the sea have always experienced daily life in a markedly different way than people of inland China. For example, it was not unusual for women to work on the water in coastal China during Cheng I Sao’s lifetime. Women often piloted sampans, small raft-like craft, up and down the coast, delivering goods from ship to shore and selling necessities to the boat people who lived at sea. Some seafaring families in the South China region spent nearly their entire lives at sea, living and working together on their ship. In the wealthier classes, men and women were able to more strictly observe traditional Confucian values, which kept women indoors while men were free to roam. Outside of the upper class, for everyone to eat, everyone had to work, women included. The relaxed social norms in some coastal societies aided Cheng I Sao’s eventual rise to power.
She lived during the Qing dynasty, which also deeply influenced her pirating career. China’s Qing Empire (1644–1911) would be its last, but not least in terms of catastrophic events; China would experience famine, several wars, and a full-blown revolution before it was all over. During Cheng I Sao’s lifetime, there were only hints of the troubles ahead. China was thriving. Emperor Qianlong’s reign was, on the whole, the most prosperous period of the whole dynasty. His strong military defeated uprisings and stretched China’s borders, bringing the population to a peak of about three hundred million people. But despite these outward signs of imperial health, things were decaying.
One theory to explain the decline is that China simply got too big too fast and wasn’t able to handle the population explosion. The infrastructure and government could not expand quickly enough to effectively rule and protect these new citizens. Another is that there was too much foreign pressure on China as Europeans spread across the continent, establishing India and other countries as colonies. China was unused to having to fight for its spot as the biggest power in Asia. Other sources claim that China’s royal court began to follow Emperor Qianlong’s example of spending vast amounts of the empire’s wealth on personal expenses. People in the provinces struggled to feed their families while the rulers in big cities indulged in luxurious pleasures. However it came about, most scholars agree that the Qing Empire was in trouble by the late 1700s.
Despite the worsening situation for the average Chinese person during this time, Europeans, particularly the British, still desired to trade with China. Legal imports entered China through Canton (modern-day Guangzhou), a southern province on the coast of the South China Sea. This was the only port where foreigners were allowed to trade in China during the nineteenth century, and it was a bustling hub of activity. Along the Pearl River, the Thirteen Factories area was the trading post where the foreigners lived and conducted business with Chinese merchants. British, American, and Dutch traders snapped up silk, porcelain, and tea to take back home and sell at a huge markup. Trade with China was so profitable that Western traders could make 400 to 500 percent profit on one voyage.
Westerners were absolutely mad for tea and would do anything to get it. This gave the Chinese the upper hand, which they used to their advantage. Most Chinese merchants would not trade for European goods and instead accepted only bar silver as payment. Wanting to even things up a bit and offer something to trade themselves that would bring money back to England, the British introduced an irresistible commodity: opium.
The history of the opium trade in China is long and fascinating enough to merit its own book—or several books—and indeed it already has. Suffice it to say that the Chinese empire’s attempts to stem the illegal flow of opium into China caused strife and friction between China and England, ultimately culminating in not one but two wars, fought from 1839 to 1842 and from 1856 to 1860. When all was said and done, the Qing dynasty was considerably weakened and China was much less isolated, at least tradewise, from the rest of the world.
Opium was banned in China starting in the mid-eighteenth century. It was smuggled into the country through “country traders,” who were doing the dirty work of the British East India Trading Company (EITC). The EITC controlled the growers in India, who were forced to sell their product back to the EITC. They then turned around and sold the opium to these freelance traders, who technically did not work for the EITC, who then took it from British-held India to the China coast. It was quickly sold for gold and silver, which was in turn given back to the East India Trading Company. A significant portion of the EITC’s operating budget came from this arrangement. By 1838 forty thousand chests of opium were imported annually—though off the books—most of them through the Canton area.
A unique feature of this area during this time was the flower boat. The seafaring sister to the mainland courtesan house, these floating pleasure parlors housed women who entertained male guests with song, dance, drink, and sometimes sexual services. They serviced the male populations up and down the coast, further adding to the festive atmosphere of the Canton area.
What sort of power could a woman of this place and time expect to have? As already mentioned, women did take part in seafaring work alongside their husbands; however, they were far from equal partners. A woman had one main purpose, according to Confucian values—to bear a son. Women were meant to be wives and mothers, and anything else was secondary. Daughters were valuable only for fetching a bride-price and becoming potential son-bearers for other families. They were treated as guests in their own homes because, upon marriage, they would become a member of another household. Why invest the energy in making a daughter feel special and valued when she would leave once she was married? Sons were laborers, continuers of the family line, and sources of pride. Once a son was born into a family, he remained part of the family all his life. Women of this time in Canton were conditioned not to expect too much. What they could expect were arranged marriages, possibly bound feet, and illiteracy.
Although women were expected to work alongside their husbands on land or by sea, their husbands were almost certainly chosen for them by their parents—without either bride or groom’s consent. In nineteenth-century China, as well as many other places, marriage was essentially a financial transaction, designed for the all-important purpose of extending the family line by producing sons. It was far too important to be left to the romantic whims of the people involved. Marriages were determined when children were young—sometimes when the bride and groom were still babies. There were four different types of marriages practiced in China at this time, but by far the most common type was a patrilocal, or major, marriage. After marriage, a young bride left her home and entered her mother-in-law’s house, in some cases permanently severing ties to her own home and family. She became the lowest-ranking member of the household, moving up in position only when she bore a son who married. Her new daughter-in-law took the lowest-ranking place from her upon joining the family. More rarely, a boy would enter his bride-to-be’s home. This second option, called uxorilocal marriage, happened if the bride’s family was short on male laborers. However, most of the time, it was the woman who left her home and was absorbed into her new husband’s home, seldom able to visit or even contact her own parents and family again.
If a woman was not married, she still had a chance to enter into a man’s household as a concubine. The concubine system is often misunderstood by Western culture. It was used primarily as a way to produce sons. If a wife did not produce a son for the family, a concubine could be added to the family to give the husband another chance to sire a son. Despite frequent portrayals in movies, television, and literature of young, pretty concubines usurping the role of the first wife, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China the wife’s position in the household was sacred. The concubines were there for one purpose only—to produce an heir for the head of the household. The Chinese did not practice polygamy as the West understands the term, with multiple wives of equal or ranked status.
Whether wife or concubine, a woman of this time was likely to have bound feet. The practice is as inscrutable as it is painful. First practiced in the eleventh century, foot binding involves forcibly breaking a young girl’s toes and folding them under her feet. The arch of the foot is then broken and folded upward, so that the toes now point toward the heel. The foot is wrapped tightly in bandages, which are changed daily or weekly depending on one’s status, until the foot has healed into this origami-like construction that results in the “three-inch golden lotus,” a hobbled foot that requires a woman to walk in an unsteady, mincing gait. It was a symbol of wealth—bound feet often prevented women from working, so to have bound feet meant that you were rich enough not to have to work for a living. First practiced by the elite, foot binding eventually made its way down into the lower classes, where it prevented daughters from participating in the most arduous field work. It became a symbol of refinement and ladylike elegance. It was also considered erotic by men of the period, who enjoyed the wobbling gait of bound women. Chinese love manuals had copious notes on how to use the bound foot as a pleasure tool, complete with explicit artwork. Male arousal came at a huge cost for these women: this incredibly painful process often caused a host of medical problems. Women with bound feet suffered from muscular atrophy, infection, paralysis, and even death. According to one estimate, as many as 10 percent of girls with bound feet died due to infection resulting from the practice. While it is unknown how many Cantonese women bound their feet, it was most commonly done by the Han ethnic group, which makes up the majority of Canton’s population. It is not known for sure whether any of the Chinese women pirates had bound feet.
Women—whether they were wives, concubines, or unmarried daughters, bound feet or not—were seldom educated during Cheng I Sao’s lifetime. In nineteenth-century China, children were instructed into their adult roles in the household at a very early age, sometimes as young as seven years old. Girls would be taught the domestic arts such as cooking, housekeeping, and sewing, while boys were taught the family trade, whatever it might be. Schooling was reserved for boys so that they could do well on the civil service exams. Test preparation was exhausting and expensive—if a family could not afford it for their bright son, sometimes a wealthy relative would foot the bill so that the honor would benefit the entire family. A Cantonese seafaring woman from this time would probably be of limited literacy, if she could read or write at all.
From these humble circumstances, a fierce pirate would rise to prominence. Although many stories circulate about Cheng I Sao, relatively little information can be verified about her. It is not known, for example, whether she knew how to read or whether she had bound feet. Historian and foremost Cheng I Sao scholar Dian Murray has identified two primary source documents from the period: Yuan Yun-lun’s book Ching hai-fen-chi, published in Canton in 1830 (and badly translated by Charles F. Neumann in 1831 into History of the Pirates Who Infested the China Sea from 1807 to 1810), and A Brief Narrative of My Captivity and Treatment Amongst the Ladrones, written by Richard Glasspoole, an officer of the East India Company. There are many other sources claiming to have information on Cheng I Sao’s life, but for the most part, they are interpretations and embellishments of these two books. Over the years, many stories have come to be taken as true, despite the fact that there does not seem to be much, if any, historical basis for the stories. Western translation of Chinese sources, the lack of a uniform romanization system for Chinese names until 1850, and a tendency for authors to fill in gaps in their accounts have resulted in many possibly apocryphal stories being added to Cheng I Sao’s legend, despite the fact that her story is so exciting that it needs no embellishment.
Her real name has been lost to time. Cheng I Sao is translated to “wife of Cheng I.” She is called many names, including Ching Shih and Zheng Yisao (in the modern Pinyin translation), but the two accounts from her time do not mention either of these names. She was born sometime around 1775, most likely in Canton. The sources provide no information on her parents or how she spent her girlhood. Her story begins in 1801 when she was working in a Cantonese flower boat and met and married the pirate Cheng I.
There is no evidence in the primary sources that she was a prostitute; however, it is an often-repeated part of her story in secondary sources. There were certainly many floating brothels in Canton during this time. There is a pleasant fiction, repeated in F. O. Steele’s Women Pirates as well as numerous other sources, that tells of the future lovers’ first meeting. The pirate Cheng I, having decided it was time to take a wife, ordered some prostitutes to be kidnapped and brought to him for perusal. Cheng I Sao (as she would come to be called) was the most beautiful of the captive women, and the fierce pirate immediately asked her to marry him. When she was untied in order to give her answer, she sprang at him like a banshee and attempted to claw his eyes out. This display of violence only served to further endear her to him, and he promised her jewels and fine silks if she would please be his wife. As a counteroffer, she requested half of his fleet and wealth. He accepted, and then she accepted, and the pair wed in 1801. This story appears to stem from an unverified source and is almost certainly untrue, however delightful it may be.
Soon after their marriage, the newlyweds became embroiled in the Tay Son rebellion happening in present-day Vietnam. The Tay Son leaders paid the Chinese pirates to fight for them and transformed them from a hodgepodge group into a professional band of fighters, who for the first time were united and fighting together. Although the brothers responsible for the Tay Son rebellion were ultimately unsuccessful and were overthrown in 1802, the lessons that the Chengs learned in Vietnam would not be lost on the couple. Immediately following the rebellion, the Chinese pirates were abruptly out of a job and returned home to fight each other for a while. But in 1805, Cheng I devised a scheme that would bring the pirates together into a strong confederation. The pair used their influence and leadership skills to herd the formerly warring pirate bands in the area into a strong, unified fleet. This fleet had seven captains, all of whom reported to Cheng I. The subfleets were classified by the different colored flags they flew: red flag fleet, black flag fleet, green flag fleet, and so on.
The Chengs had quite a successful operation for two years, continually adding ships to the fleet and booty to the coffers. Cheng I died in 1807, leaving his wife and his fleet behind. Sources disagree on how he met his end—some say he drowned during a storm, but others say he died fighting. In any case, his death left a big hole in the pirate fleet’s structure. To avoid the collapse of the organization, somebody would need to step up and lead—someone whom the other pirates respected and trusted.
Cheng I Sao herself claimed the commander position and assumed control of the coalition. Her ascendancy to the throne was not as radical a decision as it might appear at first glance. Chinese culture of the period did allow men and women to sail together. The seafaring life was perilous, and people often died while working. It was standard procedure at the time for the surviving spouse to assume the responsibilities left behind by the dead spouse. This was essentially the same thing, only with a much larger fleet and the higher financial stakes to go along with it. So Cheng I Sao’s rise to commander might have raised a few eyebrows, but it was most likely accepted as legitimate by the majority of the sailors. Her first official duty was to appoint a new captain of the most powerful fleet in the group: the red flag fleet. She appointed a promising sailor who also had the honor of being her adopted son, Chang Pao.
Chang Pao was captured by Cheng I as a young man and put into service in one of his fleets. Pirates were not above the occasional press-gang; it was not only the Royal Navy that made use of this recruitment technique. Somehow young Chang Pao caught the commander’s eye, and he was adopted by Cheng I as a son in order to establish the all-important family bond that was necessary for business interactions in China. Some sources speculate that Cheng I developed a homosexual relationship with Chang Pao while he was grooming his protégé. Whatever the nature of Cheng I’s relationship with Chang Pao, his wife would continue her late husband’s custom of showering the young man with praise and privileges. Eventually, she married him. Whether she entered into that union for love or power (or some other reason entirely) only she knows.
Together, the couple formalized the relationships between the remaining fleets of pirates, making them a more cohesive force. Under Cheng I Sao’s leadership, the fleet grew from fifty thousand to seventy thousand men, which she maintained for the remainder of the decade. This confederation outmanned and outgunned anyone who tried to stand up against it, including imperial forces. The coast was virtually unguarded, which left an opportunity for Cheng I Sao to set up a “protection” scheme that collected money from fishing boats and other shippers in exchange for protection from other pirates. This system kept vessels safe, provided restitution if the fleet failed to prevent an attack, and generated enough money to sustain the huge fleet and its men.
The importance of this massive achievement cannot be overstated. Cheng I Sao essentially built a navy and developed a program to keep it running. The logistics of such a feat are staggering. A woman with no training in military tactics or management mounted a formidable force that had China quaking in its boots. She also led pirates on pillaging expeditions to wealthy villages, according to some sources—extending her protection scheme to the shore. Cheng I Sao also decided to try her hand in some military battles, demonstrating her fleet’s ability to best the high military officers. No other pirate in history—male or female—is known to have had as many ships or as many pirates under their command. While most pirates were an annoyance to the governments they pillaged, Cheng I Sao was an absolute terror to China, influencing diplomatic relations with foreign governments as well as domestic trade.
Nobody seemed able to stop her. The Chinese navy was utterly useless in holding her back and had to overcome its deep-seated reluctance to work with Britain in order to negotiate to borrow a ship, the Mercury, to be used to defend Canton from Cheng I Sao. The British ship was unable to damage her fleet as the Chinese had hoped it would, so the Chinese had to negotiate again with a foreign power—this time the more-familiar Portuguese—for six men-of-war. Still, Cheng I Sao could not be cowed. Her forces outlasted a blockade off the coast of Lantau Island. She was able to deflect the vessels that were sent to destroy her and sail away on the wind. The big showdown to end piracy that China had hoped for never came; when some Cantonese officials sailed out to watch the show, they saw their own ships being destroyed instead of Cheng I Sao’s.
One of the accomplishments for which Cheng I Sao is best known is the code of conduct that she enforced in her fleet. Since the buccaneer era, many pirate ships had articles to be signed by everyone aboard, detailing rules and the division of loot. Cheng I Sao’s code, however, contained some unique features. For starters, it was particularly strict and punished many offenses with death, including going to shore twice without permission, disobeying the orders of a superior officer, and holding back treasure out of the common stock.
Rape of female captives was also punishable by death. Men were permitted to marry captives if they chose to do so, but a pirate who purchased a wife from among the captives must under the code remain faithful to her, under penalty of death. If a man and a female captive had consensual sex, whether they were married or not, the man would be beheaded and the woman tossed overboard with weights tied to her legs. Even among married persons, Cheng I Sao viewed sex as a distraction that kept men from focusing on their jobs. It would bring jealousy and chaos onboard, which she could not afford in her fleet. According to Richard Glasspoole, this code was strictly enforced. Cheng I Sao had a giant operation to control, and so she needed things to be orderly. This code was a means to hold her vast fleet together and keep it the primed fighting force that it was, capable of taking down anyone in their way.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the code is its authorship. While a plethora of sources attribute it to Cheng I Sao, the earliest Chinese sources and, according to Dian Murray, the sources most likely to be factual say that Chang Pao wrote the code. Perhaps Cheng I Sao wrote it but chose to promulgate it under her husband’s name to offer it more legitimacy, although the leader of one of the world’s most powerful fleets probably did not lose too much sleep over appearing legitimate. Given that she was Chang Pao’s foster mother before she became his lover, and even after they were married she remained his direct superior, it’s plausible that even if he did write the code, she would have asserted a lot of influence over the ideas that he included. No matter who penned the code, Cheng I Sao was the one responsible for enforcing it, and it remains a major symbol of her reign as Pirate Queen.
Cheng I Sao’s pirating spree could not go on indefinitely. However, her end was not particularly dramatic or bloody—a rarity for any pirate, male or female. It was internal dissension that led to the surrender of the force. Kuo P’o-tai was the leader of the black flag fleet, the second-largest fleet after the red flag fleet. These two big fleets often worked together, both in the protection racket and in battle. Supposedly, Kuo P’o-tai was gunning for the red flag fleet position and for more power, and the formerly friendly partnership broke down. He went to the Chinese government, which had put out an offer of amnesty in an attempt to finally stop the pirates. His surrender prompted Cheng I Sao to think about surrender as well, which she eventually did.
After an unsuccessful conference between Chang Pao and a government official in February 1810, Cheng I Sao took the lead on negotiations. She was smart enough to realize that they could not continue pirating until age and infirmity took them to the afterlife and that they might as well go out on top with the government’s blessing.
Cheng I Sao, so the story goes, stepped off her ship and traveled to the governor general’s headquarters completely unarmed. With her were a number of other women and some children, also unarmed. What a sight they must have made, approaching the fortress of the general. One can imagine nervous soldiers, armed to the teeth, straining their eyes watching for the fearsome pirate leader to appear on the horizon. But she chose to enter negotiations unarmed, and let her powerful track record speak for her—a smart move that immediately gave her the upper hand in negotiations.
She pushed aggressively for a settlement in which the pirates were able to keep all the money they’d won, avoid jail, and obtain jobs in the military if they wished. For Chang Pao, she obtained a ranked position in the navy and permission to keep a private fleet of his own. Also part of the settlement was a large sum of money, paid by the government, which was to be used to help the pirates transition into civilian life onshore. In just two days, she emerged victorious from the negotiations and the surrender began. The government hardly had a choice other than to offer her what she asked for, since they had proved so ineffective in stopping her pirating activities. She held all the power and she knew it, so she used it wisely to the great benefit of her fleet.
Never in the history of piracy was there a large-scale surrender like this. Governor Woodes Rogers issued his large pardons decree during the Golden Age, but those were granted on a case-by-case basis, not en masse through a single pirate ambassador. Queen Teuta also negotiated a surrender for her band of pirates, but she lost a lot more in the discussion than Cheng I Sao did. It is a testament to how desperate the Chinese government was to get her out of the water that they agreed to Cheng I Sao’s terms, which amounted to almost a total victory for the pirates, complete with government-sponsored pensions for the retiring pirates. The fact that Cheng I Sao was able to negotiate this might be her most impressive achievement of all. Some pirates were killed in battle, some killed by the law that caught them, but Cheng I Sao’s pirates would die warm in their beds, covered in cozy quilts bought on the government dime.
After her triumphant victory, what became of Cheng I Sao? She lived with Chang Pao in Fujian Province until his death in 1822, but after that, sources begin to diverge again. Many claim that she returned to her biggest talent—accumulating wealth—although the stories differ on just how she made her money. Some say that she returned to her first profession and ran a large brothel. Others claim that she started a successful gambling house. No matter what she actually did, by all accounts she led a mostly law-abiding life after the death of her second husband and died in 1844 at the age of sixty-nine.
Why isn’t more known about Cheng I Sao? It seems that, with her record, she should be a household name along with Blackbeard and Captain Morgan. Yet she is seldom more than a side note in piratical texts. It could be because many of her accomplishments are hidden under the banner of Chang Pao. It seems that Chinese-language sources simply do not find her as fascinating as Westerners do, due to China’s general tendency to view continental concerns more pressing than maritime ones. Pirates are not the cultural and pop heroes in the East in the way they are in the West. Whatever the reason, she remains frustratingly obscure, though Dian Murray’s work has shed a great deal of light on her story and brought her more attention. Hopefully additional information on Cheng I Sao will turn up as more scholars become involved in the research.
Over half of the nineteenth century remained when Cheng I Sao died, during which piracy would undergo still more changes and stylistic adaptations. During her lifetime, she briefly revived (and arguably surpassed) the grandeur of the bygone Golden Age, but her death plunged the pirating world back into the post–Golden Age doldrums. The pirates who succeeded Cheng I Sao did not come anywhere close to emulating her style or her success. They did, however, continue to update the ever-changing definition of what it meant to be a pirate, with their own legends of daring deeds and wild exploits.