The History of China - #307 - Zheng Yi Sao, Pt. 1: Murders & Acquisitions, Mostly

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

天高皇帝远 "Heaven Is Vast & the Emperor is Far Away" On the far side of the realm from th celestial halls of shining Beijing, an outcast girl born on the fringes of society will scrabble to survive amidt the coastal chaos of the end of the 18th Century. With little more than her looks and wits, she'll have to outwit & outplay freebooter, bandit, and official alike if she is ever going to rise above her station on the boats of Guangdong harbor. Time Period Covered: ca. 1775-1807 CE Major Historical Figures: Zheng Yi Sao/Ching Shih (née Shi Yang), Pirate Queen of the Red Flag Fleet [1775-1844] Captain Zheng Yi, Fleet Commander of the Red Flag Fleet [1765-1807] Zhang Baozai (Cheung Po Tsai), "The Kid" [1783-1822] Major Sources Cited: Andrade, Tonio. The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. Antony, Robert J. Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China. Mann Jones, Susan and Philip A. Kuhn. "The Ch’ing Government and Its Problems, 1800–1812” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 10, Part 1: Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911. Murray, Dian. Pirates of the South China Coast. Rawski, Evelyn. Education and Popular Literacy in Ch'ing China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. apply. Learn more at mx.ca.ca slash yamex. Hello and welcome to the history of China.

Episode 307, Jung-e-Sau Part 1, Murders and Acquisitions, mostly. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book, you either do right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pre-tax profit of $12 billion. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms. Greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked an upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much. Gordon Gecko, Wall Street. Since you feel an all biblical and righteous and all, you think on this. Now, if Omar didn't kill that delivery lady, somebody else did.

But you've given them a free walk right now, ain't you? A man got to have a code. Omar Little, the Wire. As we've been looking into in a rather broad sense in the last, several episodes, but especially last episode, the dawn of the 19th century was a pretty rough patch for the Qing dynasty. Though the Jaxing Emperor had been, and continued to labor mightily, to rein in the extravagances and peccadillos of his predecessor, both on the frontiers of the northwest expanses and on the waterways and coasts of the southeastern seas,

he would ultimately be just one man swimming against the very tides of history itself. Today, then, rather than further belabor that broad overview of this period, let's zoom in for a close-up of one of the most pivotal and consequential of this era's figures. Not some prince of the royal house nor merchant lord, not a gentleman at all, actually, in any sense of the word. Instead, today we're looking at Zheng Yi Sao, also known as Qing Shi, the pirate queen of the South Seas, who rose from the drags a society to take on not just one or two, but three, global empires, and win. Royal titles, we would all agree, carry weight, and royal weight, Zhang Yi-Sao surly deserves. But the woman who would one day be the maven of the red flags was certainly born to no palatial luxury. Far from the elaborate trappings of the capital, she was born instead

amidst the shady slums and dens of iniquity of Guangzhou, the capital of modern Guangdong, and better known as Canton. Neither the geographic nor social differences between these two great hubs of humanity are coincidental. In many ways, Guangdong, the beating heart of oceanic trade in the greater Asia-Pacific region, had been built almost from the ground up to stand as Beijing's opposite pole star.

Chinese language, as are all languages, is full of idiomatic expressions. You know, those peculiar turns of phrase that require explanation or shorthands of well-known stories. But perhaps one of the best known is Tian Gao Huang Di Yuan, meaning heaven is vast and the emperor is far away. And it means this. The law, such as it is, cannot hope to be everywhere at once in an empire as large as China.

There will always be corners and shadows hidden away from the prying eye of central authority, no matter how long that arm may reach, where the drags of society, might eke out in existence past the bounds of polite society and its strictures. For this purpose, the province of Guangdong had long served as one of the empire's best options and outlets. More than 2,100 kilometers or 1,300 miles south of the sacrosanct bounds of North Capital, surrounded itself by layer upon impenetrable layer of dense tropical forests and mountain spires, hundreds to thousands of mostly uncharted, unnavigable islets, waterways, and shoals, many only vaguely charted, uninhabited, and or not patrolled at all.

All this helped to turn the coasts of southern China by the 19th century into what one might call a pirate's paradise, a lulless frontier zone all its own, where the Qing's grip on control, foundered. By the dawn of the 1800s, the plague of piracy had blossomed across Chinese coasts as little less than what one might compare to an algal bloom. It's toxic to everyone, it gets everywhere, and all too often it's a bellwether of a far more serious and systemic climatological problem.

As we'll talk more about today, these weren't simple freebooters. Rather, they'd become, or perhaps grown into the cracks of, the fringes of Qing society so deep that they'd become effectively floating corporations, literal sovereign offshore holdings. And as with any scalable multinational enterprise, such ventures came with contracts, codes of conduct, internal hierarchies, career ambitions, and even, as we'll come to see,

the occasional golden parachute out clause. The other issue we'll need to take into account here, which affects the very language we use, is, as ever, politics. Once again, the Chinese language, as with most languages that have much interaction with the sea at all, has quite a few words to describe pirates and the different varieties thereof. The more modern term that I personally am most familiar with and have been largely defaulting to up to this point is Haitao, which has about the same sense of clinical neutral descriptor as piracy does in English.

A notch up that scale, though, is the term Haise, a term that, if not necessarily, Heroic certainly has more of a sense of romantic, epic charm. A Robin Hood, a Han Solo, or perhaps a dread pirate Roberts. Think of them as a buccaneer, or even revolutionary, in the romantic heroic sense. And finally, the Haiko, related, you might have noted, to the Wokho we've discussed before. This term is specifically political in nature, and considered especially negative. A Haiko is an invader from the sea, a bandit, a rebel element to be driven out and destroyed, a terrorist, perhaps.

You probably don't need my help to guess which terms the authorities of the era tended to use versus the lowborn coast dwellers who might be seeing things far more sympathetically. It would be into this very churn that our central figure today would be born and raised. If we were to simply stack up stat charts, there'd be, little contest. Zheng Yi-Sao was simply the most terrifyingly effective and successful pirate lord in history, by fathoms. Not Chinese history, history.

Ships, manpower, guns, victories, popular goodwill, riches, retirement prospects, you name it, Zheng Yi-Sao tops the charts, and it isn't close. And yet, for all that, you put. probably don't even know her name. Ah, there it is. The reason why you don't know her name. Her. Though historians have been able to uncover several other names, likely she was born as Si Yang, for instance. The world best knows her by two monikers, as I already said, Zheng Yi Sao and Qing Shi, both of which are more like titles, meaning the same thing in just different dialects, Mandarin and Cantonese respectively. Zhang Yi's wife.

Well, that begat's the question, who the hell's Zheng Yi? We'll get to that. That very sense of ambiguity and uncertainty regarding her origins or early life is one that will remain a part of Madame Zheng's tale, partly by her own design to maintain some sense of privacy apart from her personal life, but also simply as a product of the time and place she lived in. Though China had long prided itself for its extensive and long-standing culture of literacy, that certainly wasn't without its own heavy caveats.

I'm probably not going to blow anybody's mind by saying that literacy did not use to be as high as it was today. Estimates of the time suggest an overall literacy rate in China of perhaps just 10% of the nation's 300 million citizens as of 1800. In one such study, Evelyn Roski put it, quote, information from the mid to late 19th century suggests that 30 to 45% of the men and from two, to 10% of the women in China knew how to read and write. This group included the fully literate members of the elite, and, on the opposite poll, those knowing only a few hundred characters. Thus loosely defined, there was an average of almost one literate person per family, end quote. And just to be clear, that definition is really loose indeed. Sometimes amounting to an

understanding of perhaps just a couple hundred characters out of the language's many thousands. thousands. Depending, of course, on the size of one's own hometown, the most literate man in your village or neighborhood might himself need help to decipher a more complex passage or document. Again from Roski, quote, their curriculum provided mastery of probably a few hundred characters. Their limited reading skills and even lower levels of writing ability must have enabled some to keep simple accounts and cope with the transactions involved in their daily lives, sales at their standard markets, the rental of lands to till and the like, end quote. The woman who would become Zheng Yi Sao was born, again probably to the name

She Yang, and was without a doubt at the lowest end of this social spectrum. There are almost no details of her childhood, save that she was born probably sometime around the year 1775 near the river town of Xinhui Guangdong. Her background is likewise. Her background is likewise. uncertain, possibly ethnically tanka, a group known in China as the Shui Shangren, literally the people who live on the water, the so-called boat dweller people of the southern coast's long outcast from more polite society as, and here's an epithet used by Chinese and British alike of the era, sea gypsies. So yeah, not exactly keeping much in the way of official documentation like birth records or family lineages, and much less so for

a member of the lowest of the low sub-populations. Ugh, a girl. Where did she come from? What's her background? Heck, what's her name? Very few could be bothered to care about such trivialities amidst the hustle and flow of commerce, carousing, and of course, crime,

up and down the Cantonese riverways and docks. Canton, both the city and the province that surrounds it, was by the turn of the century what could easily be turned a Pirates Playground, in an almost Disney-esque sense. They would set up shop on any number of the area's hundreds of islets and secluded inlets, like Donghai, Shenzhou, and Weizhou, of course. Quote, but also around the bustling commercial hubs of Macau, Canton, and Taojo. The islands of Taipa and Koloan near Macau,

and Chongtao, near Hong Kong, supported thriving populations of pirates, smugglers and fishermen for many centuries, and quote. As of 1753, for instance, the then-in-power pirate lord, Zheng Lian Chang, had constructed an ornate temple to the patron deity of seafarers, which was called the Empress of Heaven Temple, with, of course, a stronghold hidden back in the hills behind it, from which he and his gang could securely command the entire region. Quote, half a century later, this same area would serve as a base for Zhang Yi, Zeng Bao, and other pirates, end quote. As a brief aside here, my favorite name for one of the pirate coves out of the hundreds to choose from has definitely got to be Fengji Shan, aka Release the Roosters Island.

Locally, this impenetrable maze of waterways, estuaries, and barely mapped islands, many unknown and alleged islands, many unknown and alleged, to the state, was called Guangdong's own inner sea. All was there, available to those on the outs of society, to vanish into, and at least attempt to survive. Be that a life ambushing unfortunate traitors, or slipping an imperial patrol craft. The heavily forested hills and mountains acted themselves as a natural buffer, keeping out all but the lightest and most experienced of official ground patrols via its difficulty, and who could ever forget, endemic trough. tropical diseases. It also sat right on the border of that ever-present thorn in the side of the imperial southlands, Vietnam, which was, as we've already discussed, often only too happy to serve as

a repair and refitting station, as well as jurisdictional safety zone for pirates just outside the grasp of Qing authority. Beijing's, or rather its bureaucratic brains, in this case the Qianlong emperors and his predecessors, long-standing fixation on the northwestern frontiers, had let the reign of state control slip ever looser in the south. Local magistrates could barely keep up with the mounting problems of their localities, that often went unaddressed by the far-away central government. Others were already well underwater. The vastness of the southern coasts themselves, the Guangx and Guangxi and Guangdong,

after all, both mean expansive, rendered the sea little more than a political no-man's land, in which, according to messages written by the province's then-governor, who was clearly at his wits end, quote, our ship's founder in uncharted waters, while the bandits move as if born to them, end quote. In summary, can it be any real wonder that the early life of the wife of Zheng remains even to this day as uncharted and mysterious as the very waterways it took place? a top. In spite of official remonstrations against pirates as the despicable co-invaders and bandits they were, locals tended to have a more nuanced view of such life paths. They grew up around such people,

knew them, did business with them, even married them. And they certainly weren't all that bad, at least some of them. Often as not, and depending on the year, sometimes far more often than not, it wasn't the people who decided to become outlaws on the waves, it was the world itself that forced their hands. People of almost any stripe from among the lower rungs of society could easily find themselves sliding into less and less strictly legal business ventures, or stealing from some rich trader's boat when there was no other option. Like as not, once things picked back up, they'd go back to their normal law-abiding ways. It was simply a necessary part of life, and as such

not only understood, but accommodated and sometimes even encouraged. Premantan, quote, strict legal definitions transformed legitimate seafarers into pirates, blurring the line between commerce and crime,

and quote. Given the low station of her birth, the little we do know of her background, and probably most tellingly, her later affinity for women in similar circumstances, most historians have concluded included that Qingshu was probably trafficked as a child, and likely grew up in one of the many

floating brothels that dotted the harbor. It seems that, at a certain point, she was brought up into the business as a sex worker herself. It's safe to say, however, that it was not a life that she would have chosen, nor one that she intended to stay in indefinitely. But for a member of an outcast group like the Sea Gypsies, and a woman beside, there were precious few options for improving her material circumstances. Her only tools to work with were what heaven had bestowed on her at birth, her body, and her brain. She'd need both to make it out of her bobbing brothel on the Canton Harbor. On the other side of this situation, we wind up with none other than the Sion himself of Zun Lian Tsang,

the pirate lord who'd constructed the temple as a front of his own pirate stronghold a half-century prior. Like his father, the heir to the captain's quarters, Zheng Yi, took up the family business of piracy with a capital R, prowling the southern waves and using the bases so helpfully provided by the Taysan rebels of Vietnam at every convenience. That would be all well and good right up until 1802, when they were crushed by the Wen, literally. I mean, they actually flattened the rebels leader, Boitayuan, with an elephant. And then her, yeah, again, her, heart and liver, were then eaten by the no land soldiers. But that's another story. Anyways, as for Zhang Yi and his roving band of pirates, that meant the easy days of calling Vietnam's ports their home were effectively over. But this was no great shock for the then-35- or 36-year-old fleet commander.

Life, like the sea, after all, never stays still. Some several years prior, about 1798, Zheng had kidnapped or else somehow otherwise come into possession of a 15-year-old boy from the Tonka boat people who was called Zhang Bao, who some of you might know better by how he eventually came to style himself, his professional nom de plunder, if you will, rendered sometimes as Cheng Po Tai or Zhang Bao Zai, Zhang Bao the kid. Young E. adopted the kid as his own, well, yeah, kid. A practice that, to be clear, sounds very strange and super illegal, but it was significantly more common at the time for a single childless 33-year-old to just adopt a teenager that they took as plunder on the side of the sea highway. Plus, you know, pirate, so it's not like he expected his shelf life to be all that long.

It's also rumored, and again, fairly common for its time, that the pair may have been lovers, possibly the origin of Jung's interest in the youth. Presumably, he finished off each day's work with a good night, Zhang Bao, good work, sleep well, I'll probably kill you in the morning. So it went. It was nearly the same time as the Red Flag's contract with the Taysons abruptly ran out via elephant splattering that Commodore Jung-E decided that it was time to take up with a good, old-fashioned wife, and only a real lady would do. someone calculating, devious, deceptive, cutthroat, and versed in the underhanded tools of every crooked trade.

You know, someone real respectable to bring home to the parent's shrine. The 25-year-old Xi Yang, who had become an area favorite of particularly wealthy and politically connected clientele, and who was almost equally renowned, at least in the right circles, as a kind of lady who could ply all sorts of fascinating and sensitive secrets from her clients in the course of some savvy pillow talk, all to be sold later to the highest bidder. Well, for the kind of roguish scoundrel such as Zheng Yi, she was quite simply a must-have prize. Of course, the specifics of their arrangement are left entirely to our imaginations.

Was this a match born of love, or at least passion? Possibly. Their union certainly would prove fruitful enough in short time. But it's also clear enough that, both Zheng Yi and Xiyang were getting something professionally beneficial from their union. For the pirate lord, he not only got the hand of the hottest commodity on the boardwalks of Canton, he also got her business acumen, her client list of wealthy and connected individuals, and a partner in the family business every bit his intellectual equal, if not his better. And Shiyang, apart from leaving behind the bordello for good and all,

she was also able to successfully negotiate a 50% share of the Zheng family business as the wife of Zheng Yi. That is, Zheng Yi Sao. She now was co-CEO of an entire fleet of cutthroats. What could she do with that? What couldn't she do with it? The happy couple made Zhang Bao Zai their official heir. Another common practice of the time among childless men with a lot to lose, and aspects of which you can still see today in certain modern Japanese and Korean business practices. And though they would go on to have a set of twin sons together, Zhang's status as air would remain secure. As we've already discussed at length, life on the coasts of the Qing Empire could be choppy, even in the best of times. And the turn of the 19th century, as its regional moniker, the South China piracy crisis helpfully reminds us, was far from the best of times. marked by extreme inequality, the unpredictable feast or famine currents of an oceanic commercial economy, and a retrenched, defensive, and receding state grasp on order and security, not only in Guangdong, but coastal Fujian and Jhajiang had all become tinderboxes of social

dissatisfaction and desperation. The local markets had devolved into near-anarchy monetarily. For long-distance trade, unmented silver bullion was used to convey large transactions, while day-to-day business was as likely to be conducted in self-struck bronze coins made in bulk at the local markets. This was at least partially to blame on the emergent currency and bullion crisis that was gripping down ever harder on the Chinese economy overall. As internal economics reliant on regular infusions of New World and Japanese silver saw ever-shanking returns on that policy, but on the ever-spirling demand, they were left effectively helpless to remedy the situation without some sort of major institutional overhaul. With already too little currency in circulation, and that becoming more rampantly problematic by the day, the natural outcome, less currency being officially produced,

meaning fewer people using it, only worsened the crisis. People turned to other homegrown means of commerce, looping the state itself out of the transaction entirely, and thus compounding its own depleted treasury problems. It was an economic positive feedback loop, and no one could seem to find the off button. The climate of the period was of no help either. Of course, the weather of the coasts is ever-changeable, but in the two decades of the piracy crisis, it seemed to go almost out of its way to make an already tough period even worse. Year after year, destructive weather patterns ravage the coastlines, and critically, the fields, patty. and fisheries that supported them.

Typhoons, floods, droughts, all led to famines that would only compound upon themselves as one brutal year ticked into the next devastating one. What this meant for those already on the ragged outer edges of society, like the coastal social underbelly and the Tonka boat people, was what it always had meant, that they would be the first to feel the pain, and they'd simply have to bear it. they knew from long experience that no help from the state would be forthcoming. As such, all up and down the coast, not a new but a revitalized parallel economy sprang up in the shadows of the official economy of Guangdong. And by the 1790s into the early 1800s, it was actively employing millions, many of whom would otherwise have had no means whatsoever of providing for themselves.

The primary outlet for people such as this would be smuggling. It's reliable, steady work, it's lucrative, and, relatively speaking, at least, pretty safe. Major smuggling ports like Jiangbin, just across the border, had practically purpose-built itself as a free port open to business for any and all. And at other ostensibly stricter and more locked-down harbors within the Realm Celestial itself, Nothing, a few of the correct palms greased generously enough, couldn't motivate to move entire shipments around customs and port inspections, and straight by those laborious forms of trivialities like taxes or laws.

Everyone got paid, no one got hurt, everyone went home a winner, usually. It was a completely and totally victimless crime, if you squinted. as such controlled substances flowed both through and around official censures and bans with little actual resistance silks salt firearms iron and steel yes of course those classics but also valuable cargoes of other and in some cases newer goods liquor tobacco and a substance called yapien opium by the foreign merchants who sold it in bulk to any local trader who could evade Qing patrol craft and make it to the sale point. These dark gray market ports of call would become famous, infamous, as havens for the transnational shadow economy that would serve as the foundation

of Zhang Yi Sa's empire to be. The Qing's own policies only served to add further fuel to the fire. We've talked all about the sea bands of the Ming and the full evacuation of the coasts of the mid-1600s. But even once those had been relaxed by the likes of the Kangxi Emperor, governmental overreach and ham-fisted policies, not to mention the glut of corrupt local officials that they employed, drove ever larger numbers of once legitimate fisherfolk and merchants into the very criminal lifestyles they were ostensibly trying to stamp out.

Scars were still riven across the populace. Communities long disrupted and torn apart, and long-held resentments left without, any kind of comeuppance. Yet, the sea was always there. An outlet, a lifeline, an escape.

The last three sovereign's triple focus on the overland frontiers left the maintenance of Qing Sea trade long neglected, and in the hands of those who sought maximum personal profit, whether they wore a government robe or a smuggler's sea bags. And from

there, it would be no great leap from smuggling a bit on the side to doing a little light freebooting as well. And for many, as Anthony put it, piracy was simply a, quote, rational survival strategy, end quote, in an overwhelmingly cruel and indifferent world. It's noted that through virtually the whole of his own epochal reign, the Qianlong emperor himself remained, quote unquote, blissfully unaware of a maritime threat that grew ever stronger amidst his own harbors.

going so far as to even declare piracy itself eradicated in 1793. The period between 1801 and 1807, following Zheng and Shi's marriage, might be what one would call the honeymoon period for the happy couple. Now with a 50% stake in the Sea Org, our lady Shi Yang, who I'll hear on out refer to as either Zheng Yi-Sao or Qingxia to try to minimize confusion, would consistently prove her own razor-sharp business, this acumen. While her groom had inherited his uncle's powerful fleet, the Jung's, now under

Madam's oversight, began to think bigger yet, seemingly impossibly so. Zung Yi was able to use his inherited position, his own natural swagger and savvy, and now his wife's finesse and brilliance to become both a unifier and patriarch to a rapidly growing pirate network that was swiftly coming to span the breadth of the South Seas. This professionalization of piracy as an enterprise we've already talked about, as differentiated from its petty and political cousins. No longer merely small-time hustlers and thugs of the waves, but a fully organized, methodical, full-time profession, a corporatization of the high seas.

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Initially, Jung's fleet was financed, outfitted, and even paid as naval mercenaries by the Taysan rebels out of Jiangbin. Known in Chinese, better as Jiangping, the port served as a freebooter's dream come true. With more of its economy centered around servicing the so-called plunder-based economy off its docks than actual fishing, it was, along with neighboring Ba Long Way Island, little less than the Tortuga Freeport of its day.

Unsurprisingly, it attracted all manner of the human flotsam and jetsam spurned by the drags of Qing society, from boat people to former and current prostitutes, and all other stripes of outcasts set adrift. Tucked amid the maze of islands and waterways of the Guangdong Vietnamese border waters, it offered shelter from Qing patrols, as well as a launchpad for raids. With Jiangbin as their headquarters, Commodore and Madame Zheng could plot their next moves in the relative safety of their fellow cutthroats and thieves, safely ringed by a very very very charitable wall of ship-mounted cannons and battle-hardened crewmen. One could never hope to find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy in which to set up shop.

In other words, it was perfect. But honeymoons, inevitably, end. And so too did the dream of Jiangbin as a permanent piratical headquarters. Little more than a year into their nuptial bliss, the Taysan rebels came to their crunching, squished end in 1802. And the victorious wens were no fans of rebels, rapscallions, or the accumulated sea lice that now filled their ports of trade like Jiangbin. They'd taken Taysan money, and they'd done Taysan dirty work, which made them just more rebels to Gallagher with their elephants, as far as the Ludd dynasty

was concerned. And so they did exactly that. The Nguens launched a brutal campaign of outright extermination against the fringes. forcing a wave of panicked migration back into the Qing territorial waters and coasts of Guangdong to escape immediate imprisonment and slaughter. In the wake of this mass-forced migration, it became more than evident to the zungs, and many others beside, that things were getting strange, stranger than usual, and strange was dangerous.

But, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when the going gets weird, the weird turned pro. Getting evicted from Vietnam, far from shuddering their operations, instead called for bold innovation to move fast and break things. This Vietnamese massacre forced everyone, career criminal and part-time fence alike, to really start thinking about the future, and specifically what they would need to do

to be able to resist the attempts of the powerful nation-states they grew between, to eradicate them. This would mean more manpower. This would mean more organization. This would mean working together, now more than ever. To that end, and almost certainly not just with his wife's backing, but at her direction and insistence, Deng Yi would use his name and already considerable means and power to serve as something of a grand unifier of piratedom, forging alliances in agreements with other

likewise powerful fleet commanders, and all, of course, with Tsingha as his ever-faithful wife, confidant, consolidator, and organizer, smoothing over his own rougher edges and bringing silk and whispered secrets to his steel and sail. All this would merge to act as, quote, a catalyst for a grand alliance of Chinese pirates, and quote, under the effective dual command of Zheng Yi and his Madam Wife. Now, most guys I know who work in mergers and acquisitions don't really like it. But it certainly worked out all right for the junks. By 1804, whatever they needed to be signed was.

And the South Seas came to know a new corporate multinational, the Red Flag Fleet. Just look at that subtle off-crimson coloring, the tasteful thickness of it. My God, it even has a watermark. And while it might sound like a... and being rather on the nose with all this corporate buzzword jargon, it's really not all that far off base either.

Because the Red Flags, certainly as far as pirate alliances go, but even in the wider world of legitimate businesses, was a very tightly run organization, with a complete set of rules, regulations, quarterly profit futures, and shares to be meted out. And if worse came to worse, punishments. Let's take a look a little closer into this Red Flag Corporate Handbook. At the heart of the operation was what amounted to an effective pirate constitution.

While not any single document, this collection of agreements and guidelines they all agreed to would collectively be called the Gong Yue, or the public agreement or compact, a code of the brethren, if you like. Finalized, signed, sealed, and delivered as of 1805, the red flag Gongye set out each of the confederated pirate lords as master of their own squadron, formerly fleets, designated by color, black, white, blue, green, yellow, and purple. While this might have something of an ironic nod to the official military banner system of the Qing, it seems much more likely that this was a Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Pink situation,

where it was more out of arbitrary convenience than any deeper meaning. The squadron commanders agreed to cede overall command, and a percentage of their takes, and at least some of their autonomy to Zeng Yi's red flags, but the juice was more than worth the squeeze. Organizational security and official protection, shared intel, and a percentage of the overall haul of the fleets put together, all made their operations much more reliably profitable, and in much less peril of falling on truly famine levels of poor returns.

Moreover, now banded together, they could take on shipments and even whole flotillas with relative ease that only just recently would have been impossible targets. All of a sudden, the Pearl River Delta was, in effect, their oyster to shuck at leisure. Zung's own Crown Fleet, the Red Flags, was obviously the Crem de la Crem of this whole outfit. Starting at around 200 junks strong, it would balloon to some 400 fully rigged and outfitted craft by the middle of the decade, crewed by somewhere between 40,000 to as many as 70,000 at the height of their overall power. Contracts ran a minimum of eight months, taking into account the off-season of the summer monsoons

when sea travel became so dangerous as to be impractical for trader or freebooter alike. The cooler, calmer, winter northeastern monsoon of October to April was prime time for seafarers of all colors, bearing predictable strong winds, clear skies, and active trade routes right for the plunder. An eight-month term aligned roughly with this window, covering the full high season, plus a little extra buffer time to launch and then recover from major campaigns. It also served to prevent seasonal pirates from signing up just for easy hits and then bailing once things got rough. In addition, it offered steady pay, loot shares, and benefits like that. like medical care that, well, I mean, it beats starving on the shore.

As such, locking the crews in for eight-month tours of duty built a kind of professional core that allowed for the planning of multi-squadron strikes, ship maintenance, and supply chains, without the constant need for recruitment churn. It was long enough to be reasonably certain of a commitment to the bedrock shadow economy, but not necessarily indefinitely, thus giving crews an out if they wanted to go legit between seasons. But you really, really wanted to wait until the off-season, because there was no out clause to the red flags once aboard.

The penalty for desertion, either decapitation, or else being delivered up to the Qing authorities in a cage for their own disposal method. Lute distribution followed a clear formula. 20% went directly to its captors. with the remainder to a communal fund for supplies, repairs, and support for underperforming squads. The fleet covered medical care and pensions for the injured, and even put out bonuses for high earners. Punishments were likewise clearly spelled out and then consistently applied,

lashings for minor offenses, death for mutiny, theft, or desertion, but all applied equally across the ranks. The code also set standards for captives, which set the red flags apart. Women and children who were elderly, pregnant, or otherwise vulnerable, were released immediately and returned to shore unharmed. Attractive female captives were auctioned, with proceeds divided per the rules, but only if they did not choose to marry a member of the crew. Marriage required mutual consent. rape was punishable by death, and forced publicly to deter violations.

This approach reduced local resentment, minimized retaliatory attacks from villages, and helped to maintain order by keeping crews disciplined. Beyond internal discipline, the fleet ran protection rackets through Yang Shui, or Ocean Taxes, collected from merchants and coastal communities. In exchange, vessels received. received Piao Dien, safety certificates stamped by a squad chief, guaranteeing passage without interference from any allied pirates.

And as a fun little addendum here, on reading through this, my son actually asked me the key question that I'd left out here, what about men? To which I have no happy reply. Men who were captured by such pirates were pretty much at their mercy. men were considered to be legitimate targets to be either captured and then ransomed or sometimes taken aboard as members of the crew after all once you're aboard a pirate ship it's not as though you have anywhere to go but especially if they put up a significant amount of resistance

in the process of being boarded and captured by the pirates the likely sentence for men afterwards was death That's the game, and the game is the game. By 1806, this system extended to key trades like salt and silk, effectively controlling sea lanes from Hong Kong all the way to Hanoi. Merchants often preferred these fees to much more unreliable Qing officials' taxations. These rules turned the Confederation into a significantly more stable operation, attracting smaller gangs and swelling the fleet to 1,800 vessels by 1809,

outnumbering the Qing Navy 3 to 1 and rivaling the total size of the Spanish Armada. Bases on island like Da Wan Shan supported underground networks that included fishermen, corrupt soldiers, and local elites. Black markets handled fencing and resupply, employing thousands in the coastal shadow economy. By 1808, the Red Flag Fleet had sunk. some 63 Qing ships and briefly seized no less than Macau itself, forcing the Jia Qing Emperor to reclassify them from Haisei bandits to Haiko rebels. Riding into 1807, it was all going so well for the happily married Jung's and their shiny new red flag confederation. In fact, things had never been better.

Which, you're no doubt already aware, is just about the perfect time to yank the rug out from under at all. And that would take the form of the death of Zheng Yi himself at age 42. And it is with that that we'll conclude our origin tale today. As with so many other facets of this time and place, Zheng Yi's demise is a contested story in the telling. We've got the official version from the Qing, and then we've got the Red Flag's own preferred narrative, so let's run down them both, And then, well, pretty much like everyone else for the last two centuries, it'll be up to you to decide which one tells it best. The most common version, drawn from oral histories and later Qing interrogations of surrendered pirates,

paints it as a tragic accident. Late in 1807, Jung-E was aboard his flagship during a fierce squall. There is no agreement as to exactly what, but something happened. A rogue wave, perhaps, or a snapped mass. hurled him into the churning waters, with no body ever recovered. This is eminently plausible. Junks were sturdily built, but they tended to be top-heavy, especially with a full complement of heavy cannon on the upper deck.

Common was it as well for captains to lash themselves to the helm in storms and sometimes near suicidal, or in this case perhaps not near, attempts to retain control of the ship and not be cast adrift in the gale. Anthony notes it as, quote, drowning in a sudden tempest, end quote. I'm still undecided whether such an end for a man who'd made a career plying the sea lanes as more ironic or simply poetic. The other version, though, puts a rather more heroic spin on events.

Stimming primarily from British East India Company logs, as well as local Tonka folklore, This version claims that he was blasted by a cannon from a Qing war junk during a skirmish. Proponents argue it aligns with his more aggressive style. He loved, after all, bold daylight hits on armed patrols. And the fleet's habit of pressing attacks even in foul weather. Murray cites a captured pirate's deposition describing, quote, a ball from the emperor's dog striking the captain mid-command, end quote. It's all unverified.

and some claim it smells of embellishment for dramatic effect, but it's left to each of us to decide, drowned in a storm, or blasted by an imperial cannon. Tellingly, though, one possible version of this story appears nowhere at all, and that is any tale that would claim it was some sort of an inside hit job. Neither his fellow pirate captains, or his heir, nor his wife, now widow,

were ever seriously suspected or accused of between, betraying their lord commander. It simply wouldn't be in keeping with the code. Beyond the grief of loss itself, the loss of Commander Zheng threw the future of the red flags into immediate question. Though respected in her own right, it was still virtually unheard of to have a woman assume actual command of a naval brigade,

even a pirate one. Moreover, there was the question of the heir, Zhang Bao, and his rightful claim to the helm. This could have gotten incredibly violent extremely quickly, but it didn't. Thanks, surely entirely, to the widow Jung's deft thinking and quick maneuvering. She appointed Zhang the kid as her chief commanding officer, emphasis on hers.

He had the claim, he had the reputation, and the skills. Heck, she found that he even had the loss. look, and a rather handsome one at that. But she had the brains, and she had the know-how. It's unknown exactly when the relationship between the 32-year-old wife of Zheng Yi and the 24-year-old adopted son of Zheng Yi became overtly sexual. But it was likely even before poor Commander Zheng's untimely end. But makes quite a bit of sense.

They were, after all, both of the same background, the Tonka boat people, and general life back story. They probably found, pretty quickly, they had a lot in common. And in the raw days after such a loss, that common ground very likely became her secret weapon. The fleet was a powder keg, squadron sniffing weakness, crewmen whispering about unheard of prospects of a woman at the helm, even a few hotheads testing the waters with grumbles about share quotients. but Widow Jung wouldn't be waiting for any spark.

She struck first. Invoking the Gongue to convene the color-coded commodores under flags of truce, she laid out the ledger. Jung-e's vision must remain intact, where the whole confederation would splinter then and there, leaving them all adrift against Qing depredations. But hang on, not quite so fast for the exits, fellas. There were also going to need to be a few,

Tweaks. There were a few provisos, a couple of quid pro quos. She sharpened the code's edge, mandating ironclad intel protocols, no more loose lips sinking ships, and zero tolerance for dissent. Public lashings for rumor mongers, swift beheadings for plotters, enforced fleet-wide to remind every deckhand that the code was not optional. Anthony quotes one surrendered pirates telling, quote, She walked the lines like a ghost, eyes that saw through storms, and not one man crossed her after the first blood. As for Zhang Bao Zai, he was front and center, her enforcer and face of the whole operation. Any mutinous whispers quickly faded into reverent obedience.

By dint of little more than her own will, the red flag fleet, just at risk of shattering into little more than driftwood, was instead able to re-step its organizational masts and catch the wind anew, all to stronger for it. Now, Widow Jung would enter into a very similar relationship with her younger and possibly more handsome partner as she had with Zheng Yi at first. The kid would serve as her official puppet at the helm, and as her personal plaything below deck. As for the adopted son's stepmom aspect, as ever, that was much more an affair of strategic collaboration than anything overly eyebrow-raising. As for Lady Zheng herself, she saw fit to occupy the same position she was already so adept at, the mind, the will, and the vision behind the veil.

And it would be under that steady course that Zheng Yi Sao and her boy toy Zhang Bao the kid, along with keeping to the code and adhering to their confederating agreement to the letter, allowed the Red Flag fleet to not only survive the death of its Lord Commander, but reach even new heights in the years to come. And that is the tale we will continue next time, with the Red Flag's crowning moment of awesome at the Macau's smash and grab, and of course, how it all came to an end. Until then, as always, thanks for listening.

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