The History of China - #308.5 - Zheng Yi Sao, Pt. 3: The Tiger's Mouth
Episode Date: August 23, 2026Please check out this entire series-arc, re-written, expanded, & re-recorded as of Aug 2026:- Ep. 306: Dead Men Tell No Tales: https://megaphone.link/ARML5251369441- Ep. 307: Murders & Acquisitions, M...ostly: https://megaphone.link/ARML6215286599 - Ep. 308: The Shadow State: https://megaphone.link/ARML7890860851 Bottled up in Tung Chung Bay, subsisting for three weeks on caterpillars & boiled rice, the largest pirate fleet in the history of the world meets six Portuguese ships and the arithmetic that finishes it. What follows is the biggest criminal amnesty the world had yet seen, and a question very few pirates ever get to ask themselves: what does a cutthroat do with retirement? Time Period Covered: 1809–1844 CE Major Historical Figures: Red Flag Confederation: Zheng Yi Sao (AKA Ching Shih, née Shi Yang), Commander of the Red Flag Confederation [1775–1844]Zhang Baozai (Cheung Po Tsai), Fleet Commander of the Red Flags, later Qing navy vice-commander at Penghu [1783–1822]Guo Podai, Commander of the Black Flag Fleet [178?–181?]Mei Ying, a captive of the Red Flag Fleet [d. 1809] Qing Empire: The Jiaqing Emperor (Aisin-Gioro Yongyan) [r. 1796–1820]The Daoguang Emperor (Aisin-Gioro Minning) [r. 1820–1850]Bailing (Zhang Bailing), Governor-General of Liangguang [1748–18??]Sun Quanmou, Provincial Fleet CommanderZhou Feixiong, physician of MacauWu Yaonan, government official [fl. 1810–1840]Lin Zexu, Viceroy of Liangguang [1785–1850] Portuguese Empire: Miguel José de Arriaga Brum da Silveira, Ouvidor of MacauCaptain José Pinto Alcoforado de Azevedo e Sousa, Commander of the Macau FlotillaGonçalves Carocha, pilot British East India Company: Richard Glasspoole, second mate of the Marquis of Ely [1788–1846] 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. Glasspoole, Richard. A Brief Narrative of My Captivity and Treatment Amongst the Ladrones (1809); see also Owen Rutter, ed., Mr Glasspoole and the Chinese Pirates (Golden Cockerel Press, 1935).Leonard, Jane Kate. “Maritime China in Transition, 1750–1850,” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 9, Part 2: The Ch’ing Dynasty to 1800. Murray, Dian H. Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810. Van de Ven, Hans J. Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China. Yuan Yonglun. Jing hai fen ji (靖海氛記, 1830), translated by Karl Friedrich Neumann as History of the Pirates Who Infested the China Sea, 1807–1810 (London, 1831). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.
Every Tuesday, we cover the latest security news on Security Now.
Hi, this is Leo Lipport from the Twit Podcast Network, inviting you to join me and Steve Gibson.
This week, what we call a propeller hat episode, put your thinking caps on.
Steve's going to take a deep dive into how AI models are made and how they can be unmade.
The secrets of obliteration on Security Now.
You'll find it at twit.tv slash SN or wherever you.
you get your podcasts.
Hello and welcome to the history of China.
Episode 308.5,
Zheng Yi-Sao Part 3, Into the Tiger's mouth.
The chief's wife frequently sprinkled me with garlic water,
which they considered an effectual charm against shot.
Richard Glasspool, second mate of the Marquis of Eli,
on his 11 weeks as a prisoner of the Red Flag Fleet,
1809.
Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat
if you feel the heat around the corner.
Neil McCauley, Heat, 1995.
Six ships against 1800.
That is where we left off last time.
And before we find out how that all goes,
I need to hand you three things you're going to want in about 20 minutes.
The first is a man we've already heard from, Richard Glasspool, the second mate of an East India Company ship called the Marquess of Eli.
On the 17th of September, 1809, he was put onto one of her cutters with a seven-man fleet and sent off to find a pilot.
He didn't find one. The weather came up. His ship left, and after three days of pulling around the Pearl River estuary looking for her, he and his crew were taken by the Red Flag Fleet.
He spent the next 11 weeks and three days aboard their ships as a hostage, through everything
we're about to cover, and was then able to come home and write it all down.
Which means we have a first-hand witness.
The second is the paperwork.
Yuan Yong Lund's account of the Confederation gives us the single best line anyone wrote about
how Zheng Yi Sa ran it.
Quote,
The wife of Zheng Yi was very strict in every transaction.
Nothing could be done without a written application, end quote.
And the third is Mazu.
The tank about people held to a sea faith centered on the Empress of Heaven,
protector goddess of seafarers.
And a good part of Dong Bao's authority over his crews rested on the belief that he stood well with her,
that he was a man the sea simply would not take.
Sailors follow leaders who look protected.
The Red Flag High Command was not asleep through any of this.
Jungie Sao had understood perfectly well
that killing a Portuguese crew to The Last Man would provoke something,
and she was prepared for it,
reinforcing the estuary approaches with shore batteries
and putting scout junks out to watch imperial movements.
And then, in early November,
she did something that, in hindsight,
looks less like a strategic decision
than like the maintenance schedule coming due at the worst imaginable moment.
She took part of the fleet out of the Pearl River entirely, up to Dong Jong Bay,
on the north side of Lan Tao Island to careen and repair.
On November 4th, Portuguese ships came probing at the anchorage,
and she sent for Zhang Bao Zai,
who came up with the remainder of the red flags and drove them off.
And then, having seen what a nicely sheltered bay it was,
decided to bring his own ships in for repair as well.
On the 8th of November,
six Portuguese vessels closed the mouth of the Dong Jong Bay behind them.
On the 20th, 93 ships of the provincial fleet arrived to make it airtight.
Glasspool, who was aboard and had a rather better view than anyone riding dispatches,
counted the cork in the bottle himself.
Quote,
The Invincible Squadron and Imperial Fleet, consisting of 90,
war junks, six Portuguese ships, a brig and a schooner, end quote.
A hundred and one holes across the mouth of the bay, and his choice of adjective is doing
a certain amount of work there. And there they sat. The pirates tried repeatedly to force the
entrance and repeatedly failed. Not for want of nerve. The wind sat in the wrong quarter,
and a junk that could not sail out of a bay cannot fight away out of one either.
On the 23rd, they took a provincial ship and killed her whole crew, which helped the supply situation, but did nothing at all for the strategic one.
It had become a siege, and glass pool was inside of it.
Again from him, quote, during our captivity, we lived three weeks on caterpillars boiled with rice, and quote.
That's your pirate fleet at the absolute height of its power.
20,000 men, 1,500 guns, and three weeks of caterpillars.
Now, back to Glasspool, because he is the reason we can say any of this with confidence,
and he deserves better than to be quoted only when convenient.
What he watched was, in the main, atrocious.
He is very clear about the treatment of prisoners, men beaten, mutilated, cut to pieces,
and about the ordinary conditions of life aboard, which included rats deliberately bred for the table and eaten, he says, as great delicacies.
He is not writing propaganda.
He's writing the diary of a frightened young man who expected to be killed and largely could not believe what he was seeing.
And something belongs beside that.
Back in part one of this whole thing, I laid out the code or the Gong Yue, the protection.
for foreign captive women, rape punishable by death and carried out publicly,
and presented it as though writing it down had settled the matter.
Well, no surprise here, it didn't.
Yuan Yong Lund's account has a woman named Mei Ying taken off the coast,
who fought the man for came for her and would not stop.
Quote, the pirate bound her to the yardarm,
but on abusing him yet more, the pirate dragged her down.
She laid hold of his garments with her bleeding mouth,
and threw him and herself into the river, where they both drowned."
Both things are true at once. The code existed, it was written, and by the standards of the
trade it was extraordinary, and it was a policy rather than a fact, and May Ying is what the
gap between the two looked like from inside it. It's easy to look at the compliance manual
and take it for the actual conduct, but that would be an error. But Glasspool all
also gives us something that exists nowhere else in the record.
At some point during the siege, the chief's wife came along the deck to where the English hostage
was standing and sprinkled him with garlic water.
Quote, the chief's wife frequently sprinkled me with garlic water, which they considered
an effectual charm against shot, end quote. Frequently. Not once as a curiosity, but
repeatedly as a practice. Put that next to what we said at the time.
talk about Ma'zu and the sea cults and Zhang Bao Zai's borrowed divinity, because there it is,
from a hostile witness, a prisoner, a man with no reason on earth to invent it, at the worst
moment of her career. The tactician, the mastermind, the woman who would not let a hostage
be ransomed without the proper paperwork being filled in, was walking her own deck with a bowl
of garlic water and doing the thing that the men believed needed doing. And not just to her crew,
but also the English prisoner, worth several thousand dollars alive, but nothing whatsoever dead,
who she was going to considerable trouble to keep breathing, and was apparently unwilling to leave
unprotected either. Personally, I don't think she believed a word of any of this, but I don't think
that matters even a little. On the 28th of November, Sun Quan Mo tried to finish it,
converting 43 of his own vessels into fire ships and sending them down onto the trapped fleet.
And the pirates hauled the fire ships ashore, put them out, and stripped them for timber.
Which is delightful.
It's the least romantic and most competent thing that we look at here today.
The dread device of naval warfare arrives, and 20,000 professionals treat it as an unexpected lumber delivery.
Then the wind changed.
Two of the fire ships blew back onto the provincial fleet and set two more of Sun Quan Mo's
own ships alight. And on the 29th, with the wind at last where they wanted it,
Zheng Yi Sao and Zhang Bao Zai took their fleet straight through the blockade and into the
open South China Sea. The provincial fleet lost three ships and at least 74 men.
The pirates lost 40 men and not a single hull.
And here's Glasspool again, with probably his most useful sentence of his entire narrative.
Of the fire ships, he writes, quote,
The Portuguese claim the credit of constructing these destructive machines, and quote.
And then notes that they, quote, actually sent a dispatch to the governor of Macau,
saying they had destroyed at least one third of the Ladron's fleet, and quote.
One third of the fleet reported in writing to the governor by the men who were there.
The fleet lost nothing, not one ship.
Quite the difference of reported versus actual outcomes.
That was the Battle of Dong Jong Bay.
And if this were a film, it's where the film would probably end.
The trap closes, the fire comes down, the wind turns, and Lady Zheng sails right out through the gap.
In Hong Kong, where the same fight is called Czech Lapcock, that's more or less how it's remembered.
eight or nine days of siege and Zong Bao Zai slipping away through the fog.
It's also, unfortunately, not the end.
Because the Portuguese didn't just go home, the embargo did not lift, and the alliance held.
Through December, the six ships kept the sea.
Around the 11th, Zang Bao Zai brought a squadron down near Macau to force the issue,
and was beaten off by gunnery he could not get.
get inside of, losing perhaps 15 ships by Portuguese count, and shortly afterward, the
Senate of Macau had Alcoferado deliver him a letter promising to pursue him to his death
unless he surrendered to the Qing. His reply on the day after Christmas is one of the great
documents of this whole affair, as it shows exactly how he understood his own position.
He proposed a separate piece with Portugal alone, the Qing left entirely out of it, one commercial power to another,
and offered, as his side of the bargain, two or three provinces.
Provinces, which were not, by the way, his to give, offered anyway, in writing, to a city magistrate.
The Portuguese declined.
They had 80,000 tales and restoration of privileges.
riding on the Qing Alliance, and against that they had the word of a pirate.
And then the Confederation began to come apart from the inside.
Guo Pu Dai, commander of the Black Flag Fleet, had sat off to the east through the entire
Dongjiang siege without so much as lifting a finger. And he had his reasons, which Yuan Yong
Lung Lun is fair enough to let him give. He'd been Zhang Yi's man before he'd
been anybody's, and he had watched command of the Confederation pass to a woman and her
20-something husband, and his calculation was not complicated. Let the Qing break the red flags,
and the black flags inherit the sea. So, he sat. And when the two fleets finally met near
Hü-Mun, Zhang Bao Zai put it to him directly, quote, Why did you not come to my assistance?
and quote.
And when the answer didn't satisfy, quote,
I have sworn it that I will destroy the wicked man, end quote.
They fought, and Zhang, worn down and short of everything, lost.
Then, Guo Pōori ran the numbers again and liked them a good deal less,
because the black flags were not strong enough to replace the red flags,
and what he'd actually achieved was the Qing on one side,
and a blood feud on the other.
On the 13th of January, 1810,
he surrendered to Bailing at Pinghai in Daiye Bay,
and was rewarded with the rank of sub-lieutenant,
the first of the great fleets to come in.
There is a Qing scroll painting of the moment,
and it shows him kneeling in front of Bailing,
already wearing his official hat.
Alcoferado inflicted further losses on the 3rd and 4th of January,
And on the 15th, with the Portuguese squadron now effectively hunting them, the pirates opened negotiations of their own, offering to hand over 100 war junks and 30 lorches in exchange for safe passage.
When it was refused, that left them only one option.
Every Tuesday, we cover Apple News on Mac Break Weekly.
Hi, this is Leo Leport from the Twit Podcast Network.
Inviting you to join me, Jason Snell, Andy Anacco, and Christina Warren.
talk about the new versions of iOS and macOS that just came out if you're on the betas.
We'll also talk about what's going to happen in three weeks, including a new folding phone,
maybe. And if you got a spyware warning from Apple, you're not alone. A lot of them went out.
We'll explain what it all means. That's this week on Macbreak Weekly. You'll find it at
twit.tv slash MBW or wherever you get your podcasts.
On January 21st, Alcoferado anchored his six ships off Landau Island, and Zhang Bao
I brought everything he had. Over 300 ships, 1,500 guns, and 20,000 men, against six vessels
and 120 guns. His plan was sound, though again it was the only plan available to him,
negate European gunnery by closing the range, swarm in, grapple on, and turn it all into
a boarding melee at which the red flags had never once been beaten. So he split his
force into six squads and sent each one at a single Portuguese ship. Six versus one, all along the
line. This is the Barreto problem again, and I did ask you to hold that thought. In the middle of
1807, a single Portuguese brig had beaten off a pirate squadron and taken its flagship by boarding,
and the red flags had drawn the correct conclusion and stopped trying to fight Europeans at close
quarters. Well, now, two and a half years later, there was nothing left to do but try it again
at a hundred times the scale against six of them at once this time. If the plan sounds familiar,
it should, because it's exactly the Spanish plan at Gravelines in 1588. Because it's exactly the
Spanish plan at Grave lines in 188. A fleet built to grapple and board, carrying the finest infantry in
Europe, trying to get to grips with a smaller enemy who simply declined to be got grips with
and shot at them from outside their reach instead. The armada could not make the English fight
the battle the armada was designed to win, and it turned out neither could Zhang Bao Zai.
Three hundred ships is not an advantage in a confined anchorage. It's more of a traffic problem.
The pirate squadrons fouled one another trying to close, while the Portuguese had to be. The Portuguese
the weather gauge, the shorter reload cycle, and nowhere to go, which meant they could just
stand still and fire into the mass as it came on. Mast, sustained, and accurate gunnery at a range
the junks could neither answer nor cross. When Carocha's gunners blew apart the great floating
pagoda at the center of the pirate fleet, the squadrons lost their formation, then their cohesion,
and then they broke entirely. Zhang Bao Zai took what was left of them out under cover of
heavy fog, and ran for the shallows of the Xiangshan River mouth, where ships of European
draft could not follow. He got away, and he got most of them away, and none of it made the
slightest difference. He had just spent 300 ships and 20,000 men failing to sink six.
Every man aboard those junks now knew it, and ashore, Bailing's embargo went on with its slow
strangulation of the supply lines that fed them all.
The Portuguese call this the Battle of the Tiger's mouth, the Batala de Boca do Tigre,
and count it among the great feats of arms in the history of Macau.
Ariaga was received in triumph, and the celebrations ran into June, and Alcoferado was made
governor of Timor for it.
The Chinese accounts of the same four months tell a different story entirely.
The eight days at Czechlapcock.
The fire ships turned back on the men who sent them,
the breakout under sail and the withdrawal under fog.
A fleet never destroyed and never sunk,
never boarded, and never beaten into surrender by anybody's guns.
And now you know what to do with that.
Glasspool already handed it to you 20 minutes ago.
The same Portuguese who reported destroying a third of the pirate fleet with fire ships
had in fact destroyed none of it.
And that overclaim is not an inference made two centuries later.
It's a contemporary eyewitness watching a dispatch go out
and noting at the time that it was false.
Both traditions are telling us something real,
and neither tells us all of it.
Which is not a failure of the historical record,
but simply what a historical record is.
And if you'll recall how we handled the death of Zhang Yi two episodes back,
It's something of a Jung family tradition at this point.
By the end of January, Madam Zheng had opened contact with Bai Ling through intermediaries.
The go-between was a Macau physician named Joe Fei-Sion,
who had some prior acquaintance with Zhang Bao Zai,
and carried Byling's overture out to him in person.
Local merchants and officials in Canton handled the rest,
and Ariaga, naturally, inserted himself squarely in the middle.
mediating between pirates, Portuguese, and Qing all at once.
The Qing were positively eager.
A year of public humiliation at the hands of what the throne insisted on calling a rabble,
had made ending this without further risk very attractive indeed.
And Ba Ling already used amnesty to good effect against smaller bands.
Zeng Yi Sao could see the fleet's condition, had watched Guo Pōruai walk,
and understood better than anyone that the supply lines were being closed off, one after the next.
She also had leverage, and both sides knew it.
200-odd ships isn't nothing, and a cornered red flag fleet could still cost the Empire blood it could not spare.
The negotiations ran on for several weeks on exactly that mutual understanding.
This next part gets dressed up in a great many ways.
I'll try to give it to you in as orderly a way as possible.
On February 21st, 1810,
Zhang Yi Sao, Zhang Bao Zai, and Governor Beiling met face-to-face
aboard Zhang Bao Zai's flagship with Ariaga present.
And that is the meeting that would settle the war.
On her deck, on her terms, under her guns.
The famous image, the pirate queen walking unarmed into Canton
at the head of a delegation of women and children to face down the viceroy is not a legend.
That happened on the 17th of April at the viceroy's Yaman in Guangzhou,
and she brought 17 women and children with her.
But note the order of those two events.
She did not walk into Canton to beg for terms.
She walked in eight weeks after the terms were already signed in order to close the deal.
The delegation was no supplication.
It was a signing ceremony and staged by her.
Bai Ling agreed to pardon the overwhelming majority of the pirates,
to bring key leaders into the Qing military command structure,
and to fund their transition from the one career to the other.
Zheng Yi Sao and Zhang Bao Zai,
hearing quite clearly that the music was about to stop, accepted.
And the formal handover came three days later at Fu Rong Sha in Xia.
And now for the part that I can't tell you, which is what was actually handed over.
This isn't me dodging.
The three main traditions of this story give three different inventories, and they're not close
to each other.
The scholarly reckoning, drawn from the Qing Archives, gives 226 ships, 1,315 guns,
2,798 assorted weapons and 17,318 men.
The Macau Portuguese tradition gives about 280 ships, 2,000 guns, over 16,000 men, and 5,000 women.
The Chinese local tradition around Shenzhen gives 470 vessels, 16,000 men, more than 30,000 weapons, and over 400,000 tails of silver and
provisions. They can't even agree on the day. You'll find the third of the fourth lunar month,
the 15th of April, the 20th of April, and the 22nd of May, depending on whose calendar and
whose report you happen to be reading. One could pick a set and read it out with tremendous
confidence. But the honest answer here is that this was the largest criminal amnesty in the
history of the world to that point, conducted by three governments, who each had their own
reasons to either inflate or deflate the count, and nobody was auditing anything.
What all three agree on is the overall shape of it. Several hundred ships, well over a thousand
guns, and somewhere between 16 and 25,000 human beings, laid down in a river mouth in the
spring of 1810 in exchange for a piece of paper. One figure can be given without any hedging at all.
It's as specific as it is lovely.
Of that entire total,
Zheng Yi Sao personally surrendered 24 ships
and 1,433 people.
That was her own household squadron,
the ships that answered to her directly.
Everything else in that inventory belonged to men
who had agreed to do what she told them.
The punishments were, by the standards of the age,
almost incomprehensibly light.
126 pirates were executed. A further, 151, banished for life, 60 exiled for two years,
and 14 of the worst were beheaded, with their heads set on pikes along the road between Macau and Tian Shan,
in case anyone had yet missed the point. Everyone else, tens of thousands of them,
including every single one of the leaders, received a total amnesty.
60 of them received military rank in the Qing Navy,
and some 17 or 18,000 received payments to help them start their lives over.
An extraordinary deal, given that the only arrangement a pirate normally reaches with the government,
involves a short trip down a rope,
though it must have truly been infuriating to be one of the 126 selected as the sacrificial offering to imperial dignity
while everyone else walked away Scott Free.
For both sides, it was the pragmatic solution.
The Qing avoided a final assault they might well have lost,
and Zhang Isao secured safety and status for her and her people.
The Portuguese made no claim whatever on the booty,
though the agreement had entitled them to half of it,
which impressed the Qing officers a great deal,
and did the Portuguese no good at all,
because the Chinese authorities kept essentially none of the promises in the seven articles.
The privileges were not restored.
Macau's reward for saving the Pearl River Delta was to have demonstrated at close range
and in front of witnesses that the Qing could not save it themselves.
And that was not a service the dynasty was prepared to acknowledge or reward,
though it would be forced to acknowledge it soon enough.
The campaign restored Qing control of the Delta,
and small-scale piracy went right on along the coasts well into the 1850s.
What ended in 1810 was not South Sea Piracy.
It was merely South Sea Piracy Incorporated.
So, what's a pirate queen to do with the rest of her life?
Not what most retellings really linger on.
The usual version has her walking off the deck at Furohang Shah
and directly into a gambling house in Canton,
where she spends her remaining decades as a genial underworld matriarch,
which is about 30 years compressed into an afternoon,
and it skips the strangest chapter of her entire story.
What actually happened is that she became a naval officer's wife.
She and Zhang Bao Zai married in 1810 with Governor Bailing standing as witness,
a rather astonishing thing to say.
Zhang was commissioned into the Qing Navy, given command of 30 government ships,
and permitted to keep 30 of his own,
as a private squadron on top.
He was posted well away from Guangdong, where he would have been policing men he used to lead.
Instead, he went across to Fujian, to Mian, where their son, Zhang Yulin, was born in 1813.
And eventually out to the Penghu Islands in the Taiwan Strait, where he rose to vice commander
of the garrison.
He spent the rest of his life hunting pirates with every bit of the energy he'd once given
to plundering government ships.
and he was very good at it.
A great deal of the Qing's success in finally clearing these waters through the 1820s
was accomplished on Zhang Bao Zai, The Kids, Back.
Zheng Yi Sao went with him, holding the formal title of an official's wife, Ming Fu,
and drawing the stipend that went with it,
and a daughter followed at a date nobody bothered to write down.
For a dozen years, the most successful pirate in the history of the world
lived in a garrison town on the Fujian coast and in the Taiwan Strait as a decorated officer's wife.
And there's very nearly nothing in the record about it, which I suspect is exactly how she wanted it.
Then, in 1822, at 39, Zhang Bao Zai died while still in post at Peng Hu.
Not in a storm or skirmish.
The tidy echo of Zhang Yi's ending is a thing storyteller's reach for.
But that isn't what happened here.
Instead, his was a far more ordinary and considerably crueller ending
for a man who spent his entire youth being unkillable.
He got sick and died.
Twice widowed, and now in her late 40s,
she took her son and went home.
And by 1824, she was back at Nan Hai on the outskirts of Canton.
It's here in her fifth.
that the gambling house finally appears.
She ran it in and around Guangzhou for the last 20 years of her life,
catering to the churn of humanity across the Delta's docks and moorings.
Her legendarily strict management almost certainly carried over.
One rather doubts anything got done in that house without a written application either.
And local accounts have her as a respected figure in the city's underworld,
her pirate career fading into legend.
Canton kept the clientele coming, and her money held out, which is more than most ex-pirates could say once the loot ran dry.
Some of the more colorful furniture of this period, the brothel, the salt trade empire, the unnamed third husband,
I haven't been able to substantiate anywhere that I would trust. It may all be true.
It may equally be the ordinary silt that accumulates around any good story.
But the last documented act of her life beats it all.
In the year 1840, yeah, 1840, you know exactly what else is happening in Canton in 1840,
Zheng Yi Sao had her day in court.
She filed suit against a government official named Wu Yao Nan,
alleging that he had embezzled 28,000 tales of silver,
which Zhang Bao Zai had handed to him back in 18,
to buy an estate with. Thirty years she'd been waiting on that money, and now, in her mid-60s,
she took it to the Qing legal system. The Viceroy of Liangguang petitioned the throne to dismiss
her case, and the throne obliged. The Viceroy of Liangguang, in 1840, was Lin Zeshu,
sitting in the same chair Ba Ling had sat in when he stood witness at her wedding. Same city, same year,
in the middle of the opium crisis that's going to occupy us for a good long while after this.
And he found the time to make certain that the pirate queen did not get her 28,000 tales.
You'll sometimes see it said that Lin had crossed her path once before,
as a censor in 1820 filing a memorial reminding the court not to forget what had happened
the last time a maritime clan got comfortable in the Taiwan Strait,
and that Zhang Bao Zai was never promoted again.
afterward. That won't run down to a document, so it stays unasserted. The coincidence in 1840 is
on the record, and quite enough on its own. In 1844, at about 69, she died at Nanhai as Canton was
shifting into its treaty port existence under the Treaty of Nanjing. There is no recorded cause.
Her death drew essentially no notice from a dynasty thoroughly preoccupied with foreign difficulties.
which is, in its way, the final proof of a lifelong strategy of staying well clear of the official spotlight,
and her gambling house presumably passed to family or associates, quite possibly her son,
though nothing survives to confirm it.
There is no tomb, no headstone, no marked grave of any kind for Sheyang, the wife of Zhang Yi,
or at least none that anybody knows of.
She rose out of a floating brothel on Canton Harbor
to command the largest pirate fleet ever assembled on any ocean and any century.
And the Chinese source that recorded her defeat
is careful to say that she was considered the commander of all the squadrons together.
That nothing in it moved without her written consent.
She took two fleets to sea at Da Wan Shan and broke a provincial commander with them.
She went back up the river to Xin Hui,
with 500 ships.
She fought the Qing Empire,
the Portuguese Empire,
and the East India Company
to a standstill.
And she is one of the bare handful of people
in the history of piracy anywhere
who got to decide for herself
when and how
it would end.
She lost battles,
she lost badly off Laun Tao,
and the men she buried afterwards
were exactly as dead as anyone else's.
But she was,
was never destroyed, never captured, and never had terms dictated to her.
She walked off her own deck, kept her money, buried two husbands, raised her children, ran
her house, and died abed at 69.
And the story's been told and retold ever since.
In the folklore of the Pearl River Delta, in the tides and breaking waves of the timeless
sea, and, most importantly of all, by Possible.
podcasters.
Thanks for listening.
Every Wednesday we cover Microsoft News on Windows Weekly.
Hi, this is Leo Lipport for the Twitter Podcasting Network,
inviting you to join me, Paul Therod and Richard Campbell, this week,
as we talk about the Windows Insider program,
some new stuff are coming your way.
It's pretty big releases, actually.
Amiga is back.
I know you've been waiting for that.
And shenanigans at Lenovo.
That and a whole lot more this week on Windows Weekly.
You'll find it at twit.
or wherever you get your podcasts.
