Dan Snow's History Hit - Pirates: Piracy in the South China Seas

Episode Date: July 6, 2025

Zheng Yi Sao was a pirate leader so formidable that she made Blackbeard and Captain Morgan look like amateurs. From humble beginnings as a sex worker in Canton, she rose to command a vast pirate fleet that wrought havoc in the South China Sea. She took on the Qing Dynasty, the Portuguese and the East India Company and still managed to walk away free.In the second episode of our 'Pirates' mini-series, Dan is joined by Andrew Choong, Curator of Historic Photographs & Ship Plans at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, to uncover the story of one of history's most successful buccaneers.You can discover more about the exhibition and book tickets here.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Join Dan and the team for the first-ever LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/You can now find Dan Snow's History Hit on YouTube! Watch episodes every Friday here.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

She was the queen of pirates. More formidable than Blackbeard or Captain Morgan. She commanded a confederation of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men. Her pirate kingdom operated a highly drilled navy. There were separate squadrons demarcated by a strict colour code system. Her men were trained, severely disciplined. Punishment for disobedience would have made Nelson's navy blush for their severity. One could lose a nose or an ear for insubordination. As a result, China's Qing navy, even its European allies, struggled to contain her fleets,

whom she outsmarted and outmanoeuvred on numerous occasions. Her name was Zheng Yisao, and she terrorised the South China Sea at the turn of the 19th century, first alongside her pirate boss husband, then as undisputed leader herself. The South China Sea has got a maze of islands and coves and narrow passages, choke points. It was, and still is, ideal for pirate operations. This was a golden age for ocean trade, particularly between Europe and East Asia.

There were ships laden with tea and porcelain and silk and opium and weapons, Asia. There were ships laden with tea and porcelain and silk and opium and weapons, entering and leaving ports like Canton, modern day Guangzhou, every day. There was plenty of opportunity for the pirates to gobble up prizes. So this is the second episode of our Pirates series right here on Dan Snow's History and I'm joined by Andrew Chung. He's curator of historic photos and ships plans at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich. Together, we're going to delve into the history of piracy in the South China Seas, how it differed from piracy in the Caribbean.

We're going to look at the rise of Zheng Yi Cao and the dramatic battles between her pirate empire and the East India Company, the Portuguese Empire and the Qing India Company, the Portuguese empire, and the Qing, who all teamed up and still couldn't beat her. If the Qing rulers had put her in charge of their navy, maybe history would have been very different. Andrew, thanks for talking to us. It's a pleasure, Dan. Thank you.

So the Qing dynasty in China, enormously powerful. So what happens in the 18th, 19th century that allows piracy to flourish along the coasts of this huge empire? The Qing dynasty suffers from a number of problems there, Dan. It is this mighty organisation, as you say, but that apparent outward strength conceals quite a few weaknesses. Part of the way they organised their maritime defences was the issue. So the local defence of the coast was very much the responsibility of the mandarins and the other authorities, and there was not as much coordination as there could be. So Chinese naval responses to piratical activity were often very dispersed. You would sometimes find the forces sent against the pirates were actually

weaker than the people that they were pursuing. And when you get the problems of corruption, rivalry and petty jealousy, it's not unusual to find Chinese imperial forces not only failing to cooperate effectively with one another, but sometimes abandoning their colleagues to their fate if it's not going well. So they wouldn't act like a more organised Western, a European navy would. It's very much down to number one first, the mission second. And as the Europeans appear on the scene and further erode the strength and the power of that Chinese empire, does that also open up cracks for pirates to exploit on the coast? Definitely. The arrival of Europeans benefits the pirates in two ways. As you say, they weaken the Qing dynasty by picking at it both militarily, but also economically.

And in the case of the British, the influx of opium begins to cause massive social problems within the Qing dynasty. The other issue is that the Europeans bring with them an increase in the volume of trade. Now, bearing in mind before European trade exploded in Southeast Asia and Chinese waters, it was difficult enough for the Qing dynasty to police its own waters. Now you've got even more trade coming through the area, which it presents the pirates with more targets, essentially. So it's a heaven sent, it's a boom time for pirates. It is, yes. And they are ideally placed for it because the pirates themselves are well established in this region. They've been

there almost since recorded history began. And by the time Europeans arrive in numbers, you get the equivalent of, I'll call them pirate kingdoms. If you think about a late medieval European kingdom and how much manpower that those entities could command, the Chinese pirates and the Southeast Asian pirates are very generally in the same sort of position. They have thousands of men at their call, hundreds, sometimes even thousands of ships. They are very formidable forces. That's amazing. So we're talking about very different phenomenon to the lone wolf pirates of the Caribbean in the 18th century, for example. Yes, completely different. These are much more

organised on a much bigger scale. And it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that they're almost countries in their own right. Their chieftains sign treaties with their neighbours to occasionally settle disputes between themselves. Some of them even have their own trading network, so when they rob the ships of one nation, they'll happily sell on the goods to another nation. Are they based in places like Taiwan off the coast, or are they right on the coast of China, right under the nose of the emperor and their officials? They are everywhere. There are pirate organisations along the Chinese coast, some of them distressingly close to cities like Canton or Guangzhou, as it's known today.

The Pearl River Delta is a huge nest of piracy. And throughout Southeast Asia, you get large pockets of pirate communities. They're in Borneo. You also find them in the Annamese states, what's today known as Vietnam. Incredible. So Europeans come along and trade just multiplies by many times over. These pirates, are they lying in wait off the coast? Are they attacking ports as cargo is being unloaded? What's the chief practice? It's a bit of both. They will normally

attack ships when they're passing along the coast because, as with so many other parts of the world, for aid of navigation and also general safety, it makes sense for a lot of the merchant traffic to follow coastal routes. And the Chinese pirates know this as well as anybody else does. And so they're often lying in wait in a convenient cove for the shipping to pass. When it comes to smaller, less well-protected towns, they were not above attacking or threatening to attack those in order to extort protection money. So that was another favoured tactic of theirs.

My goodness, that does sound like as the power of the Qing state dwindles, it's just ripe for these little semi-autonomous little, almost as you say, kingdoms to spring up and chaos. Yes, indeed. Yes, the Qing dynasty was always quite weak in the maritime sense, because although Chinese trade flourishes, you do find that their naval forces are never quite up to the task. And as their problems multiply, they're less and less able to deal with things. And this is what begins to prompt the European powers to want to try to solve the problem themselves. But they bump up against these huge pirate organizations that are not like anything they've ever encountered before.

And even worse, although the European navies begin to have a presence in Asian waters, if you come up against a pirate of the caliber of, say, Cheng Yi Shao, you have an organization that is vast and powerful, but you as a European naval officer, you're operating at the logistical limit of your capabilities. The homeland and your dockyards and your support mechanisms are literally on the other side of the planet. And you're captain under God with maybe two or three other warships. So going up against fleets of 50 or 60, I'll say you have to pick your battles carefully. Yeah, I'll bet.

And you made me think when you talk about the Qing and their grip on naval affairs. Of course, they're not maritime people, are they? They're from the steppe. Originally, the Qing, their genesis naval affairs, of course, they're not maritime people, are they? They're from the steppe, originally the Qing. Their genesis was from the nomadic peoples of the north. So I guess it's just they're not instinctively attuned to naval matters. No, they really are not. And sad to say, the people in whose hands they leave the naval defence, I don't want to write them all off as being incompetent or ineffective, but largely speaking, they never quite managed to get a

coherent navy together in this early period, the late 17th into the 18th and then the early 19th centuries. What sort of tech, when Europeans arrive and they've got the kinds of ships that people will be familiar with images of Nelson's navy, are Chinese pirates operating the same kind of hardware or is there big differences? Visually, they're quite different. So the ubiquitous junk, which comes in various sizes and flavours, is the staple for the Chinese pirates. It's a vessel ideally suited to Asian waters. It's been developed on the strength of millennia of experience of operating in those waters. The very largest pirate junks would be massive, great two-deck 40-gun warships. They wouldn't disgrace a European navy if they stood in a European battle line.

And then you get everything down to armed sampans, which lurk in the river deltas and just come out to quickly board a ship once they've stopped it, and everything in between. So you get various sizes of pirate vessel. They tend to be very sturdily built and the ones that have cannon are very heavily armed indeed. The only advantage that the Europeans have, relatively speaking, is that their guns tend to be more modern and the European navies are just beginning to benefit from shell firing guns, whereas those of the Chinese pirates, they don't have exploding shells, they have solid shot. The sort of thing Nelson's navy would have

been much more familiar with. But you suggest these pirate kings, they had access to iron foundries, they're making an artillery, they're presumably gunpowder shipyards. The logistics of this are very impressive. Yes, they are. And largely speaking, the larger pirate organisations are completely self-sufficient. So anything they can't make themselves, they tend to steal. And so when you hear stories of some of the larger clans actually swooping in on, say, a Chinese coastal town and ransacking it and taking all the guns from its fort, it's not necessarily the case that they need those guns for themselves, but they're simply depriving the town of its ability to protect itself in future and therefore leaving it open to their protection racket.

Don't make us come back and do this again. And during the late 18th century, there's opportunity for them to stretch their wings and learn their trade. Is it along what we now call the Vietnamese coast, so just further south? Yes. So even in its period of upheaval towards the end of its life, the Qing dynasty was still quite expansionist in nature. And they had always regarded the Annamese states, as you say, modern day Vietnam, as at worst a vassal state at best part of the Chinese empire. Now, of course, the Vietnamese took a slightly different

view of this. And the pirates did benefit from a series of dynastic wars fought between the Chinese-sponsored Nguyen dynasty and the local dynasty, which was a bit more popular. The reason this was great for the pirates is because they were already quite well established. Both sides tried to woo them and tried to recruit them. Now, one of the benefits of being recruited in the middle of a war is you gain combat experience, you gain training, you learn new tactics. You also get the chance to procure firearms. In many cases, the firearms are given to you as part of your contract of service. So even after these conflicts die down, it leaves the Chinese pirates and the local Asian pirates in a very strong position because they've got all

this experience, they've got all this stuff, and they have the beginnings of the bureaucratic infrastructure to go completely independent. I'm always struck in Chinese history and geography by these great rivers and these waterways inland that run inland. So presumably you're not just talking about deep sea piracy and offshore piracy, but does that piracy extend into up the Pearl River, for example, but even in some of these amazing canals that you hear about that join key parts of the Qing empire together? Yes, they do. The pirates are everywhere. And you would think in geographical terms, they'd be easier to hunt down and corner on a river, but they're not because very often the smaller pirate organizations who function on

these rivers, they're very adept at disappearing into one of the endless waterways or to simply blending in with the local population. Others find it's very easy to enter cozy relationships with the local authorities. And after a bit of bribery and the promise of a percentage of the takings, it's amazing how ineffective the responses to their activities become. In terms of named individuals and well-attested episodes of piracy, tell me about some of the classics. Who are the biggest figures in this world? I'll start with the biggest one, and this may surprise Western listeners because she's a lady. Cheng Yi Tsao was arguably the most successful pirate ruler throughout this period of

history, and indeed possibly the most successful pirate ever. So she is born in the late 18th century. And she doesn't get off to the best start. She's born near Canton. And in her early life, she ends up working as a sex worker in a floating brothel. And she somehow ends up marrying a pirate chieftain. And he seems to recognize quite early on that she's got a great deal of organizational ability. She's quite courageous and she can be ruthless when she wants to be. So everyone soon realizes that she is the brains behind the operation and she makes herself the de facto chief administrator of this enormous pirate kingdom, that she's one of the ones who ends up running thousands of ships and tens of thousands of men. When her first husband is killed a few years later,

she keeps the dynasty going by marrying his adopted son. So maintaining a sort of level of authority there. And they just carry on a very successful career. It peaks in about 1809, 1810, where she begins to annoy a number of Europeans by attacking their ships. But even then, with European powers cooperating with the forces of the Qing dynasty, they can't really make any impression on her. Whenever they think they have her cornered, her ships manage to fight their way out. There's a moment in 1809 where they think they've got her, a fleet of about 80 Qing and Portuguese vessels have them trapped in a bay, and they think they've got a fleet of about 80 Qing and Portuguese vessels, have them trapped in a bay. And they manage to keep the government forces at bay until the wind changes

and they can make their escape. And to add insult to injury, they capture one of the major government ships on the way out, which is rather embarrassing for all concerned. It's a measure of her power and influence that towards the end of her career, where partly she may have felt she didn't want to do this anymore, but also the pressures on the pirate confederation she built up were increasing. And not all of her former friends were as friendly as they used to be. She is able to negotiate the terms of her retirement with the Qing dynasty. She actually tells them, you know, this is what I want by way of a payoff. And if you agree to my terms, then I will disband my fleets and your pirate problem will go away. Her second husband actually gets a commission in Qing service. It's part of the terms of this

agreement. So she ends up living very comfortably until her death in the early to mid 19th century, up living very comfortably until her death in the early to mid-19th century, running a rather successful gambling den. Oh my goodness. So she has several careers. She did, yes. Very, very talented lady. One who history has largely overlooked and could do with being brought out into the spotlight a bit more, I feel. But she is very much the exception. She is on the top of the pile. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

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By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. So, do we know anything about how she ran these fleets? Yes, quite a lot of information has survived. So, there's multiple levels here. The first is how she ran the whole organisation virtually as a monarch. So she had her own legal system. She had her own system of rules about conduct aboard ship. And these are basically run almost like a national military. So when you're a crewman aboard a ship, you have your set watches as you would on a naval vessel. You have your very specific duties. You're expected to look after your weapons and to maintain a certain level of training.

You're not allowed to go ashore without permission. I mean, we have this lovely image of pirates as being these carefree, I'll do whatever I like in a loose authority system. There wasn't a bit of that. These were highly disciplined people. And the penalties imposed for indiscipline or disobedience would have made Nelson's navy blush for their severity. So for going ashore without permission, you could have your nose and ears chopped off, which was very much a Qing dynasty punishment. So she'd learned a lot from the government. It wasn't something unusual, but it was a very well-enforced system. And she got results from it because her laws were fair. I mean, obviously, a pirate captain would get more of a percentage than an ordinary

sailor, but it was a well-understood and reasonable system of, I'll call it, wealth reallocation. In terms of how her fleets operated, tactically, they were incredible. They put the Qing dynasty to shame. So they used a very well thought out color coding system for divisions of the fleet. So you'd have your red squadron, your blue squadron, and so on. And they would train in everything from fleet tactics to ganging up on another vessel in twos and threes. Individual captains would very often practice their own

skills for the inevitable one-to-one engagement. They were very much a credible naval force. In a sense, it would even give a European power pause. It was only thanks to the slight antiquity of their weapons relative to what Europeans had that gave the Europeans a bit of an edge. Because otherwise, in terms of discipline, in terms of organization, and in terms of training, there'd be very little to differentiate between the two. If the Qing had put her in charge of the Qing Navy and made her Lord Admiral, I mean,

history could have been very different indeed. It may well have been, yes. Or at the very least, the European powers would have had to have worked a jolly sight harder to get as far as they did into Qing territory. So you're implying that by this stage, the Qing are working with European navies to try and deal with this problem of piracy. She ends up fighting a range of enemies. She does, yes. So as European ships appear more frequently in Asian territory, inevitably they come under pirate attack. And it was no different with Cheng Yi Cao's fleets either. So by the time you get to the end of the first decade of the 19th century, so 1809, 1810, the Portuguese and the Dutch are beginning to

lend their naval muscle to the Qing dynasty. And they corner Cheng Yi Cao's fleet in an area called Tung Chung Bay. And they hope at this point that they're going to sort her out once and for all. The Qing dynasty and their Portuguese allies have massed a total of about 70 ships. And although Cheng Yisao has got roughly the same number, maybe slightly less, you'd think this one was in the bag, but it's not. The pirates form up with superb discipline and they repel the first few attacks that the besieging fleet makes. They can't really try to escape at this point because the wind is against them. It's coming into the bay.

But after a few days worth of fighting, which is quite incredible in itself, a few days of sustained naval operations, the wind shifts, which allows the pirate fleet to break out. the wind shifts, which allows the pirate fleet to break out. And during the latter stages of the fighting, almost to make a point, they managed to capture one of the largest Qing vessels and make off with it. It's quite incredible as a Parthian shot goes. There's an impression that the pirates who were in the Caribbean in that golden age of piracy, quote, they realised they were sort of outlaws, there was something transgressive about what they were doing. Is there a sense these Chinese pirates felt the same way? Is there a political edge to what they're doing? Or are they just seizing what power they could like warlords when China goes through those periods of dissipation? Would she have seen

herself as an exciting political rebel? I don't think that would be the case. She would certainly be very different in a society which was very male dominated. But in terms of the organisation that she was part of, and indeed the organisation that she very much made her own and moulded in her image, she was very much continuing a tradition that had been around for a very long time. Asian pirates were aware that they were operating outside the law as far as other countries were concerned, but they didn't really see themselves as criminals on the run. They were very much an alternative power struggle, another tribe, if you will, and hence the diplomacy with other smaller kingdoms in Southeast Asia and the way they behave like monarchs in their own right. If anything, they're slightly confused by the European attitudes when the Europeans come in and go, no, you're pirates, you're nothing but outlaws. They seem to be ever so slightly affronted by that. Well, no, we're not, actually, you know, when you see who we are and what we do. And that cultural gap is never fully bridged.

Even when you get pirates who are lower down the scale, because, of course, Cheng Yishao is exceptional. But another good example and someone who we have represented in our gallery is Chak Nghai, who commanded a much more modest fleet relative to Cheng Yishao. He never had more than 100 vessels at any one time. It's not bad going. Not bad going for a pirate lord, but still putting him in that relative camp. But he never ran his organisation as a state as such. But he's representative of the lower tier pirate who still has this impressive fleet. And I suppose you could call him a fleet admiral as such, because his ships are organised and disciplined in much the same way. He's got a strict series of rules governing training,

governing code of conduct. Pirates are strictly told they're not to lay any hands on the goods until his assessors have been through it and totted everything up and had a chance to distribute it. So he, even though he's much more representative, is still part of that culture. And he won't turn around to the Qing authorities and say, you call me an outlaw, but really I don't think of myself as such. Or if I even give it any thought, I'm not that bothered really. Because he operates in an environment as to all his fellows, where if they were desperate, the Qing dynasty authorities or indeed another local kingdom would hire him as a general or an admiral to solve their problems. So that lends these Asian and Chinese pirates a bit of legitimacy

that their European equivalents never have. Is he the pirate who is associated with that amazing object down in the gallery? Yes, he is. So that wonderful tapestry, which as far as I am aware, is unique as a piece as far as British collections go. I mean, none of them were ever the same, but not many of these altar pieces survive. So it looks like it should be a flag, but in fact, it's a gigantic hanging that's meant to sit behind an altar on one of the large junks that would have been in the fleet. So it's really an item of worship. And just to describe this marvelous thing, so of course you've got this enormous tapestry and it's dominated by

a huge, somewhat imposing figure. He's got the big staring eyes and the bushy eyebrows that the Chinese often work into their depictions of male deities. So you have the imposing figure of the god Chiwe Dadi, who in Cantonese tradition is one of the four junior emperors of heaven. And he's widely regarded in the Cantonese community as a friend and protector of mariners. But it's not just about him, because you've got four big Chinese characters in red above his head, and they say Tianhu, Holy Mother or Holy Empress. And she is a goddess who is particularly favorable to mariners. She's supposed to be able to control the weather. She calms storms. She looks after her adherents. So it's an interesting perspective into the pirates as they're still culturally part of their home nation, their home culture, but they

carry that with them. You don't normally think of pirates as being particularly religious folks, but of course sailors the world over are a superstitious lot. There is a lot of symbolism in this banner relating to luck and fortune. So Chiwe Dadi holds up a big yin and yang emblem, but the yin and yang side of it unusually is in the shape of two fish. He's got fish chasing one another across his clothing. There's a fish motif on his boots. And there's also a line of bats at the end of the hanging. And what these represent, they're a play on the Chinese words, which both mean bats and fish, but they also, with a slightly different inflection, can refer to prosperity and good fortune and wealth. So it's fairly obvious what

the pirates are asking for. So this enormous thing would have been hanging on one of Shaten Chai's war vessels, and ahead of it would have been an altar with the usual large bowl for joss sticks and offerings. And so by way of making a plea or a prayer or a general obeisance, you would come up, you'd light your joss stick and bow and place it. And so this would have been a very sacred part of the ship. It would have been treated very reverently. I suppose the equivalent would be if you have a chapel on a European vessel, the same, if not more, reverence placed around this space.

You listen to Dan Snow's history hit, The Best Is Yet To Come. Stick with us. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. So speaking of European vessels, we've got the Royal Navy, among others, entering this coastline, this space in the

19th century. Do they help deliver the sort of death blow to these East Asian pirates? Because as you've hinted at before, the Royal Navy by the 19th century is starting to enjoy the benefits of coming from that industrialised economy. The weapons, the ships are getting qualitatively better in this period. Yes, and thankfully, we do have a handful of accounts by naval personnel who are actually part of these efforts. And another item we have on display in the gallery is a wonderful watercolour by a naval surgeon by the name of Edward Cree, who was on the paddle gunboat HMS Fury. Cree is a very interesting character, out and out Victorian. He served in the Navy from 1837 to 1869, always in the medical role, but he was a very astute observer. And not only did he leave these wonderfully detailed diaries, but he was also a very talented watercolourist.

Now, the watercolours can be a bit problematic because Cree was very much a man of his time and he carried certain attitudes with him about the sense of where Europeans were and their place in the world versus the Chinese. So a lot of his paintings are slightly caricatured, but they're very much of their time. And it must be said he doesn't exactly spare Europeans either when it comes to being a caricature artist. But in terms of the visual quality, they're an invaluable resource because this man was an eyewitness. He didn't waste any time putting his impressions down in word and on art paper. And even better, HMS Fury, with him on it, was involved in what should have been the last battle to finish off Shton Chai. He is described in Cree's journals as a most desperate robber, which is selling him a bit short, given that we've talked about how

large a fleet he commanded and how well organized it was. So during this battle, the Royal Navy teams up with the Qing dynasty. And as you say, they bring this technological edge with them. Fury is a paddle steamer. She's not reliant on the wind. She's got a steam engine. She has a steam engine. And it sometimes proves a bit temperamental, but generally speaking, it does what it has to do. Which is revolutionary,

because while other ships are waiting for the wind to blow, you can just beetle across that stretch of water and close with the enemy. Yes. And another tactic the Chinese pirates often favour is with their knowledge of river currents and the good hiding places in river mouths. They know how hard it is for a sailing ship to beat up a river when the current is against you, which is why a common pirate tactic is to form up in line

across the river and just pour gunfire into oncoming ships as they're trying desperately to get at you. All of a sudden sudden up comes HMS Fury with her paddle wheels and she's not in the least bit bothered by this. So it's a very different experience for the pirates having to fight this new technologically advanced enemy. The other problem they have is they've got nothing to match the shell firing gun. So when you're a wooden vessel, no matter how well built you are, if a shell penetrates your side and then explodes on your gun deck, it's going to make a much bigger mess than an ordinary iron cannonball punching through.

And the pirates don't really have an answer for this. But the Europeans, it must be said, need every edge they can get because the numbers are so much against them. And again, Cree's account of the battle against Chau Tung Chai bears this out. So when the Royal Navy sends its force against the pirates, they don't go alone. They team up with the Qing Dynasty and there are eight government warships and three Royal Navy warships. When they finally track Chau Tung Chai down on the Vietnamese coast, they find themselves facing 60 vessels, which is a

tiny disparity in numbers. And the only thing that saves them is that a lot of these vessels appear to be prizes rather than warships. Estimates of the number of warships that Chau Ngh Chai had on the 21st of October 1849, the day of the battle. They vary between 30 and 60. So we'll never quite know how many of those were unarmed captures and how many were heavily armed pirate vessels. But Cree's account of the action describes a very, very hot exchange of fire as the warships approach.

Very fortunately for the British, quite early on the vessel they take to be Shat-N-Chai's flagship takes a bad hit and explodes, possibly because the powder magazine was hit. We're not entirely sure. And thereafter, the balance of the fighting shifts in the favor of the British and their Chinese allies. And slowly the Chinese fleet is reduced. Do they succeed in eliminating him? Unfortunately not. Many of the pirates escape, and Sha Tung Chai himself is reported as successfully getting away with about 400 or 500 of his men. So it's not quite the wipeout the Allies were hoping for. But on the other hand, they have broken one of the major pirate fleets, And they've at least temporarily made that stretch of water a

bit safer. And with the Qing working alongside the British like this, clearly that's great to the British allies, but they're slightly unreliable. Did they try and absorb some of that British technology practices into their own national navy? They did after a time. The Qing dynasty suffered from some rather unfortunate mental baggage. For centuries, the Chinese had been culturally and technologically convinced that they were on the top of the pile. And they never stopped referring to the Westerners as barbarians or foreign devils, because it doesn't matter how impressive their weaponry is, there's still several cuts below the Chinese who have reached a higher plane of civilization. The problem with this

thinking is it makes it very hard for you to eat humble pie and adopt the technology of the barbarians. So while there are a number of Chinese generals, admirals, and politicians who instantly perceive the need to metaphorically up gun, they come up against a lot of opposition within the Qing court, and it makes it very hard. That said, they do realize they can make common cause with the British. And in some sense, the British and other Europeans could solve a problem for them that they've been trying to unsuccessfully to solve on their own. The other factor to consider is, and this is another statement really of how anxious everyone was to solve the pirate problem. When Cree sets down his narrative of this battle, it's late 1849.

Less than a decade earlier, Britain and China have fought the first opium war. And there's still a lot of bitterness and bad feeling. And although Cree describes General Huang, the Chinese naval commander they're working with, as a very amiable, genial fellow who gets on very well with the British, there were quite a few in the Qing dynasty's ranks who had very bitter memories of the war. A lot of them would have fought in it. And you can almost feel the last thing they want is to have to undergo this added humiliation of having to work with these people who've just beaten them in a military campaign so that they can force you to buy their drugs. It's very, very awkward for the Chinese, but then practicality rules. The pirates are such

a threat that they can't really afford not to. Does this era of piracy, is there a legacy today? Is there a sense of vulnerability about the coastline? How does this history manifest itself in the 20th and 21st centuries? Piracy in Asia has never gone away. It has never been successfully suppressed at any point. There were moments when its flame sputtered incredibly low and came close to extinction, but then it only takes a slight relaxation in any nation's naval patrols and it will flare up again. The colonial powers, even when they become very established in Asia and even had all these footholds in China. And as the British did, Hong Kong becomes an

important naval base, so does Singapore. But even then, pirates run rampant through the region, and the job of putting out these piratical bushfires never stops. One of my favourite examples from the 20th century is the Shuntian incident. I mean, how many people out there would think aircraft carriers versus pirates was a thing? But in 1934, the carrier HMS Eagle had to divert to deal with a pirate attack on a British merchant ship, the Shuntian. And they're lucky, they put up aerial patrols and they're able to find the pirates. The pirates give themselves away by firing back, otherwise the British would have never found them. But then the aircraft have to fly over, make sure that they've got the right pirate base. And then they drop leaflets on them saying, we know you've got hostages. We want you to give the hostages back unharmed, or we will come back in however many

hours and bomb and strafe you out of existence. And there's some tense moments where it looks like the pirates are not going to relent because they know full well they've got the hostages and they're counting on the British not wanting to just attack. Because if they do, they might risk innocent lives. But in the end, they let the hostages go. So it's a near run thing. But yes, so there you have a fleet aircraft carrier, one of the largest aircraft carriers in the Royal Navy, having to go after pirates in junks, in sailing junks. So truth being stranger than fiction and all that. Thank you to Andrew for that tour de force.

What a treat that was. As some of you may know, one of my dreams is actually take a boat, sail out into the South China Sea and make some podcasts, make some TV shows about many things, some of the wrecks there, but also the great Chinese expeditions of the 15th century when it was China that was the maritime power that dominated Asia and the east coast of Africa. So this podcast has been a great opportunity to get back into some maritime history in that part of the world. I really recommend going on a trip to see the pirates exhibition at the national maritime museum in greenwich it's in london if you can as we mentioned in the episode this really stunning object that enormous original altar hanging from a chinese pirate ship is in the exhibition and it is really is one of the most incredible things i've ever seen so please go and take a

look at that the exhibition will be on till january you can find out more on the link in the show notes. Join me next Monday as the series takes us across the oceans to another arena of pirate warfare. We'll be heading to what's known as the Barbary Coast. That's Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and for a time as well, the Sultanate of Morocco. So we're talking north-central, northwest Africa. We're going to be telling the story of the dramatic battle that took place in 1816

when a powerful British Dutch fleet under Admiral Lord Exmouth bombarded the port of Algiers to force the day, the ruler of Algiers, to release over a thousand European slaves and end the practice of Christian slavery. For nine relentless hours, cannon-shattered shore fortifications sank Algerian ships and ignited flames in the harbour that were visible for miles. Don't miss it, folks. Make sure to hit

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