Morgan Episode 49 Cheng Shih

In this transcription, two friends discuss a badass lady pirate known as Cheng Tsao. They explain that not much is known about her early life, but she became a sex worker on a floating brothel before marrying a pirate named Cheng Yi. Cheng Tsao insisted on being an active participant in the pirate gang and eventually became the mastermind behind their operations. She united various pirate factions and consolidated power within the Pirate Confederacy, becoming the most successful pirate of all time. Cheng Tsao implemented strict laws and severe punishments within the pirate community. click-click all right ready I think you've conditioned yourself to yawn mm-hmm cover the face yeah welcome to illiquid history where two super cool ladies who are also best friends tell you a cool story from history I'm Morgan joined by my glowing stardusty get away from me and I'm sorry oh like xenon 45 he was light years ahead of us he thought God that night and that God is that boy slim how are you doing today Emily yeah that's I dig that fine I'm also just here we're just yeah we be vibing a little just a little bit yeah yeah it's totally fine well let's hop into our skeet today you know as well as I do that the seas cannot be tamed what a way to go what if no maybe oh no I bet I bet his wife takes over I know I've never met a scarier person in my life that was perfect exactly what I wanted I couldn't have done better yes we're talking about another badass lady pirate me too and the cool thing about this badass lady pirate is she is considered the most successful pirate of all time yeah so today when it was the crazy thing is that we don't even know her name yeah we only know like the only names we really know her by are in reference to her husband because we are in the South China Seas in the late 1700s today so we don't really know what year she was born we don't know her name because as we talked about in the Wu Zetian episode they didn't really take records on girls that were born in China so yeah she's got a big spank face so but the some names that we can call her and I'll be calling her there's multiple ways to spell I saw several just doing Google searches of her but she's known as Cheng Tsao which means wife of Cheng or Cheng Shi which is with Cheng's widow which I'll get to in a little bit okay so our story opens not with Cheng Tsao but in the the Qing dynasty in the late 1700s in China things aren't great they're fine but they're not super great especially the farmers they there was like some natural things going on like some famine and the culture at the time was not super great politically so some farmers were starting to turn to crime to yeah because when you're poor and you can't feed your family a lot of times you turn to crime it's just something that happens in politics in general or they're just kind of running fast and loose at the time so warlords were starting to pop up in different provinces around China and pirates were on the rise in the 1700s yeah additionally in 1771 there's a rebellion in Vietnam called the Taesan movement I think I pronounced that right I'm not sure I am NOT Vietnamese so don't come at me we are really trying there's going to be some also several Chinese names that sound very similar I'm going to do my best I'm not Chinese so I know I'm going to butcher the pronunciations I'm sorry so that the Taesan movement this was an uprising it was a revolution and it was a civil war it was just a really big mess that lasted years and this led to a lot of Vietnamese people fleeing to China and a lot of pirate gangs started popping up in China in that area of Asia just in general and there's also a history of like Chinese privateers working for the king of Vietnam so just pirates everywhere I mean they're right on the coast especially our story is really like Southeast Asia or Southeast China and Vietnam borders Southeast China so yeah again like I said earlier we don't know a whole lot about Cheng Tsao we don't really know anything about her early life we suspect she was born around 1771 ish in 1801 ish she was a sex worker working on a floating brothel which honestly that like it was like a ship that was also a brothel yeah she was very popular she was super well known for her beauty her intelligence her charm and she caught the attention of a man named Cheng Yi who he was a pirate he fell in love with her and was like please be my wife she was like yes but I want as full of like participation in your pirate gang as you do I'm not going to be some yes she's like I'm not going to just be some pirates wife like sitting at home or in the cabin while you go around gallivanting I want just as much of like the share of being a pirate as you do yeah and he was like yeah cool sure and you know what she was basically the mastermind behind the whole operation that was going on while all this turmoil is going on between like between Vietnam and China all that's going on Cheng Yi is working to start uniting all the pirate factions so this has been going on in the background for a while and also at the same time this is going to be really weird I'm going to try to explain it as best I can just remember this different culture different time so Cheng Yi years before this happened had come across at the time a teenager named Cheng Pao I saw in some places he was a captain of a ship I saw in other places he was a fisherman so Cheng Yi captured Cheng Pao and at some point I don't know when they became lovers which was not unusual for homosexual relationships to go on on pirate ships but he also adopted Cheng Pao and from what I gathered because I was looking into this I was like that's very strange adoptions in China at this time were not like for kinship they were not familial they were closer to like business transactions for like inheritance purposes so what I assume is that Cheng Yi was like something may happen to me I may die this is before he had met Cheng Pao so he's like I want someone to pass on my things to if something something happens to me so he adopted Cheng Pao so from what I could see there was not like a father-son relationship in addition to the the lover relationship but it's also weird as well it wasn't something that was super common because he still adopted him it's it's weird I can't explain every single nuance of it anyway so when Cheng Pao married Cheng Yi she also took Cheng Pao as a lover too so there were like a whole throuple thing going on yeah mm-hmm so at some point again I can't figure out like a pinpoint but around 1802 so a year after they met and probably got married Cheng Yi managed to unite the pirates floating around the Kuangtung province and also the Taifan rebellion ended so there was no more piracy in Vietnam so they all went to China so Cheng Yi and Cheng Pao united the displaced pirates under their rule and this was from an article I read by Dan Murray said quote while Cheng Yi was a unifier and the patriarch his wife was consolidator and organizer and at this point they had 400 junks or Chinese ships and in the skit I have a picture of a junk it's not as big as like European ships it's smaller and they have these fan like sails that are really cool looking yeah and they had 400 of them and 70,000 men I don't know and their entire operation wasn't just on the boats I'll go into it later but they also have some land-based operations too ish I've seen up to upwards of 80,000 and 400 junks yeah so they in their league in their Confederacy they had six leagues red white black blue green or purple I've seen both and yellow and Cheng Yi and Cheng Pao were primarily under the red league this is another quote from the Murray article I read quote the Cheng's were so successful in establishing the pirates in Kuangtung province that within a year they precipitated the downfall of the provincial commander-in-chief and the death of one of his leading generals old tiger Huang end quote so they're like completely disrupting like governments yeah with their piracy big gap in time yeah it's crazy so there's a big gap in time between 1802 and 1807 I couldn't really find what was happening in these five years I assume pirate shenanigans pirating yeah but in 1807 Cheng Yi died it is suspected he died in a storm and like fell overboard but no one knows 100% for sure Cheng Yi or Cheng Tsao was like well someone has to take over this operation now so she immediately got the loyalty of Cheng Pao Yang and Cheng Anpeng and these are the two the top two leaders in the organization and she appointed herself as Admiral over like the entire Confederacy yeah and also at some point she married Cheng Pao I couldn't find one and she appointed Cheng Pao as a leader of the Red Flag Squadron and he was like super respected by many of the ship captains leaders of the Pirate Confederation and I'll start calling her Cheng Xi from now on because Cheng Xi means widow of Cheng she trusted him to completely follow her orders you know be loyal to her he wasn't going to be pulling any shenanigans on her so now she is like the queen of the Pirate Kingdom of like 70,000 pirates her fleet her pirate forces were double Spain's Navy yeah so she consolidated power within the Pirate Confederacy and she installed a system of laws that were very strict and if you broke these laws punishment was extremely severe so I have a list of the rules so the first rule was a top down order of command which meant that you cannot act like perform any like actions like a mission or like pirate things without someone else telling you to do that like a higher-up as a subordinate did something on their own they're decapitated mm-hmm like I'm telling you swift and severe punishments and it's also if they disobeyed an order from a higher-up decapitated rule number two no underhanded business dealings everything had to go through her so a ship that captured booty the ship got 20% of the haul the rest went into a public fund for like the entire Pirate Confederacy if you pilfered from the public fund decapitated yes rule number three no harm came to any women that were captured you're not going to like this next one attractive women would be sold into sex work and or slavery yeah and unattractive women were let go but no harm of any kind was to come to captured women if a pirate raped a captive or as a pirate and or a captain and a captive had consensual sex head chopped off decapitation mm-hmm you could take a captive as a wife or a concubine because as we talked moves that in concubines were common in Chinese culture you had to be faithful to her or your head would be chopped off yeah and honestly this didn't come up but it wouldn't surprise me she had like her own things going on to like her own brothels her own and it never came up I never saw anything that said that mm-hmm rule number four no harm to come to allied villages so what any kind of villages that had allied themselves with the pirates that provided them supplies if you stole from them or harmed from them decapitation yep yep and the last one if you deserted just your ears would be chopped off but then you would be humid like paraded in front of all your fellow pirates and humiliated yeah and I assume like if you need to leave like you can but you can't just like ditch you can't desert so I don't know the rules about like I had a medical issue and I can't be a pirate anymore I don't know but she was there yeah she was very highly respected by all the pirates they're like yeah she was like okay these are my I'm coming into power these are my rules and they're like cool yeah she also this is super sneaky her and Cheng Pao they also engage in religious manipulation so a lot of their crew were religious and they would go to temples and get like signs from the gods that their missions would be auspicious they would be beneficial they would go well so Cheng Pao had a temple constructed on one of the ships like a pretty really nice temple and before like a big mission he would go in and like talk to the priests beforehand like hey this is what Ching Xiao's this is what she wants them to change she this is what she wants them to do we need you to say that this is fine and so then the priests would like confer with the gods and say like yes this is a blessed mission you should do this oh I'm sure a lot yeah and this really helps cement Cheng Xi is not just politically but religiously as well but she's a very intelligent woman as well she knew that just pirating on its own is not going to be enough to sustain like 70,000 crew so she gets involved in the salt trade which was extremely profitable there were salt mines all over the Kuangtung province in southeast China so what they started doing is there there were like merchants and I think even some government ships that were involved in the salt trade and the pirates kept capturing the ships oh at some point I can't find a date but at one point only four of the original 270 salt junks were outside of pirate control for yeah so then what happened is that the salt merchants were like fine we'll just deal directly with you and so now she has she set up a protection ring for all the salt merchants to do their trade in an exchange they bought they're at very exorbitant prices they bought protection from the pirates and this started extending to landowners and villages by 1809 a little bit yeah I think they're also paying them so they wouldn't be attacked by like other pirates that weren't in their gang you know there was like official government sanctioned privateers that would attack merchant ship so it was kind of like we won't attack you or we won't capture you if you pay us you know it was all that kind of stuff going on so Cheng Shi started establishing headquarters in major provinces along southeast China and in the in like the I don't know what you call it just like the Southeast Asia general like I don't know how much they went into like the Philippines or anything like that I saw Macau was brought up a lot that was really it and I can't remember if Macau was in the Philippines. Let me see. Or Macau. Oh no, it's in China. I'll tell the coast of China. Just kidding. So she had major provinces along the southeast of China. She had agents acting on her behalf to collect money for protection deals, buy weapons. She even had a tax office in Canton where people like paid taxes to her. Yeah basically and Macau in China was super lucrative in this business practice and made a lot of money from protection deals from fishermen and merchants. She also understood the necessity of not just exploitation but establishing good relationships with people. The pirates provided some goods but they mostly traded in information and this included with bandits and intelligence agencies in the different local governments. This is also probably in the actual government. Some of the best providers of intelligence were government officials and not even government ships were safe from the protection racket. Like it basically came to a point like you cannot leave the harbor if you didn't pay for protection cultivated a fighting force that was virtually undefeatable. She was an expert strategist. She was comparable with any great military leader and she also ensured pirate wives could fight on the front lines with their husbands. Yeah she's most of the way there. So we're backtracking a little bit because this is all like from this is all within three years between 1807 to 1810 that she established all this going on. I know yes so we're backtracking down back to like 1804 when the pirates were like all over the place. The Cantonese Navy was not willing to leave the shore and because they were so afraid of the pirates attacking them and so they would literally if they thought there is a pirate close by they would shoot off like shoot guns so the pirates would like avoid them because they didn't want to get up to attack by pirates. They're like we're here we have guns don't come close and they're like okay. And quote by the end of the decade the situation had deteriorated to the extent that military personnel afraid to go to sea at all were sabotaging their own vessels so they wouldn't have to go out where all the pirates were. The pirates had overwhelmed land-based garrisons too so it wasn't just naval attacks they were starting to go like attack like land-based military operations. And of course they were super well trained in hand-to-hand combat too. No. Yeah and in 1808 the Czech young provincial commander-in-chief was killed by the pirates when he sailed into Kwantung. So it's just it's a lot. One day in 1809 the pirate the her pirates captured five American schooners in Macau captured a Portuguese ship and blockaded a tribute mission from Siam. In one day all the that happened. Yeah they're like yeah we just captured like all the stuff. Yeah American schooners. The government was desperate at this point. Cheng Shih and her pirate kingdom were unstoppable. They perceived them to be unstoppable. So the Cantonese government were negotiating with the British and Portuguese governments to help them stop the piracy going on around China. So now Westerners are like coming in and like doing pirate battles and all that. So in 1810 things are starting to deteriorate. Things within the pirate kingdom are starting to deteriorate. Captains are starting to- no one's going against Cheng Shih but the pirate the pirate captains are starting to butt heads with each other. There's also Britain had a trade like an opium trade going on with China and that was being disrupted as well. There's just a lot of things going on. So Cheng Pao came forward with the offer to negotiate with the British and they he agreed to refrain from attacking British ships but I couldn't see what he was going to get in return. I couldn't find what that was but nothing really came of it. And the Portuguese were also keen to negotiate and Cheng Pao said that if they loaned him three to four man-at-war he would give the Portuguese some land after he conquered Macau. I also don't know if that happened either. I don't think it did. Yeah well if you like Cheng Pao was like well you give us like three to four of your biggest warships we'll conquer Macau and you have like three to four provinces in Macau. Don't think it went anywhere. So I also think at this point I think a lot of people were kind of tired of being pirates. I think Cheng Hsieh knew this. So on February 21st 1810 Cheng Hsieh and Cheng Pao met with the Liang Kuang governor and Miguel José de Arriga Brum de Silveira who is the second highest official of Macau. I know. That's quite the name. It's a very nice name. So the governor-general demanded they give up all their ships and weapons and Cheng Hsieh and Cheng Pao wanted to keep 80 junks and 5,000 crew. They came to the meeting with 260 ships and 14,000 men under just the red squadron and they wanted to also get full pardons for not just them but for everyone in their pirate confederation. They were like nah. There is a stalemate and negotiations went back and forth and nothing was really agreed upon and finally on April 8 1810 Cheng Hsieh went without Cheng Pao. She only went with some other pirate wives and children to meet with Pai Ling who is the highest official in the province. She demanded not just the 80 junks and 5,000 men that she started the negotiations with but an additional 40 junks to continue her salt trade. She was steadfast and obstinate in her side of the deal. She didn't listen to any counter offers Pai Ling made and she was like if you don't do what I ask I'm just going to continue pirating and he was like okay and met her demands. So two days later that all the pirates surrendered to the governor-general without any fuss and Cheng Pao and the other pirate leaders were given official military and government positions. Yeah really and this is another quote from the Murray article quote for Cheng Hsieh's wife ambition did not end with her retirement from the sea for just as she had propelled Cheng Pao's meteoric rise through the ranks of the pirate hierarchy so too had she made possible his second equally spectacular rise through the ranks of the Imperial military bureaucracy. So she just not only propelled herself but propelled her husband's too. Cheng Pao was quickly promoted to colonel because he was a pretty effective like strategist and good at military things and Cheng Hsieh immediately used his rank to her advantage. Quote from Murray again in 1821 she petitioned the government asking for the relevant title despite the fact that for remarried widows such a conferring of rank was illegal but the stipulations of the law notwithstanding Cheng Hsieh's wife seemed to have prevailed and therefore thereafter referred to herself as a wife of an official or Ming Tsao. Yeah yeah break the law for me thank you bye and everyone's like okay that's fine. Like I have two depictions of her in the the skit the ones like an artist's rendition of her being super badass. Yes and then the second one is from what I can gather is a photo of her like an actual photograph of her. She is very pretty she was known for her beauty and she also looks scary as fuck. I'm sure it was. Mm-hmm one guy's literally like has his hand by his chest he's like oh no another guy is shooting at her and she's like I don't give a shit. Mm-hmm mm-hmm pretty badass. Mm-hmm so another big time skip we're jumping from 1810 to 1822 Cheng Pao yeah 1770 ish. Ish yeah yeah so in 1822 Cheng Pao died I can't figure out what from and Cheng Hsieh returned to Kwantung which is where she was from with her children. I've seen varying accounts of how many children she had. She had a couple with Cheng Yi she had a couple with Cheng Pao. Not 100% sure. She lived out the rest of her life in relative peace. She had some brothels and some gambling dens in Canton. Yeah and I just like how she continued like the the kind of like underbelly actions going on. I have I'm almost done this is going to be a shorter episode today. So this is another quote from the Murray article quote significant perhaps in Mrs. Cheng's story is the reversal of the old phenomenon of marriage as an avenue of upward mobility for women. Instead marriage to Cheng Yi's wife appears to have been an avenue of mobility for the men. She aided Cheng Yi by enabling him to transform the refugee pirates from Vietnam into a formidable confederation of which he became the undisputed head. Then she permitted Cheng Pao to rise within the pirate hierarchy to command the red flag squadron and to make this transition from outlaw to official. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And she made the government officials like follow her lead. No one. And it was crazy that any pirate who surrendered would be placed within a respectable position of society. Like they was like all right like we're just going to pretend you're never a pirate at all and actually you'll be given like ranks and honors and like be seen with honor. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a little money. Just don't do pirating ever again. We'll be cool. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And she was so highly respected by not just those within her confederacy but those outside of it. You know. And like I said she's considered one of if not the most successful pirates of all time. Like I was reading something that I think like Blackbeard who's one of the most notorious pirates of all time only had like a couple thousand crew mates at one time and he died like a really horrible violent death. Or she had like double the naval force of Spain under her command. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Not that I could find. Like she she pirated. She had a protection racket. She was in the salt trade. And then she was like all right I'll surrender on threat of continuing to be a pirate. And you're just going to give us all a good life. And they're like okay that's fair. That's a fair deal. And I'm still cracking up of like she added to her own deal. She was initially like I want 80 ships and 5,000 men. And they're like no. She's like I want 80 ships 5,000 men and 40 more ships. And they're like okay. And what a power move to like show up to this government officials like I don't know palace or house or whatever with no men just yourself and some pirate wives and children on your ships and be like this is my deal. Take it or leave it. Oh oh 100 percent. They all fought on the front lines with their husbands. They were all just as much pirates as anyone else. Yes. And Chengxi died in 18 the 1840s in her late 60s or 70s. Not 100 percent sure. Yeah. Yeah. Especially like in the 1800s like living to your 70s that was definitely like good job. Yeah. Being. Yeah. And not just survive but like rose to like complete power. Yeah. By being cold hearted and very intelligent and not giving any ships. Yeah. Yeah. She seemed pretty faithful to her husband. I mean there was I don't know the thing with Chengxi and Chengpao and how they were like a throuple. I don't know all the details behind it. I don't know if it was secret. I don't know if it was like I don't know. I don't I have no idea. It's a lot of the sources which I mean I really only have a few sources because it's kind of hard to find some things about her. And some things were contradicting. So like if one I saw a couple source that said one thing and another source said something else I was like OK I'll look at these two. But my sources were Chengxi the pirate widow menace of the South China Sea by biographics on YouTube. I have a link to that video. There's a really cool article I found by D.N. Murray called One Woman's Rise to Power Chengxi's Wife and the Pirates. I found out on JSTOR used our new subscription to that. That was pretty cool. A couple of things about the Taishan Uprising called The Taishan Uprising Society and Rebellion in Eighteenth Century Vietnam by Ku Boon Dar. And finally the Chinese female pirate who commanded 80,000 outlaws by Urvija Banerjee Banerjee. So yeah that's Chengxi. Call her a what? The pirate widow menace. To everyone else. It's OK to have complicated feelings. Yeah and she lived like a long life. She lived a quiet life. Successful life. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. We'll do socials and then we can talk about a clip from our bonus episode. That's it. Nice little nugget. Yeah. They're very fan like. Yeah. And there's a bunch of other different styles too. Like if you look up Chinese junk there'll be a bunch of different types of junk to pop up. And actually when I was watching the video it kept saying junk and I was like what is he saying? It wasn't until I read it I was like oh. It's all J-U-N-K. Yeah. Because it's small it's sleek. It's got really big sails compared to like its size. Yeah they have flutes. Mm hmm. Let's do it. Illiquid History podcast page and group. Illiquid History. Illiquid History at gmail dot com. At Illiquid History we have really funny videos when we remember to upload. Patreon dot com slash Illiquid History where you have access to bonus episodes and we're going to play a little clip of this month's bonus episode for you. Just a little teeny bit. Should we have like a piece of the drama? Okay. Right. We'll put it like a piece of drama to entice people to come listen to all the drama llama. Doesn't that make you want to come subscribe to our Patreon? Yeah. It's almost three hours. We I think most of our episodes are about to at least two hours long or close to it. So you definitely get your money's worth. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And I think we've been talking about starting to sell like T-shirts maybe. And so we're trying to think about how we're going to go do about that. That's going to be like a Patreon exclusive. You know however we want to do that. Tell us how to do our job please. Let's go. Have a great Thursday and we'll see you next week for our 50th episode. It's not our anniversary yet. We're getting close to it though. It's in May. I don't know. I have to check a release schedule. Yeah. One either listen to a badass pirate queen or two become a badass pirate queen. Next T-shirt idea. All right. Okay. Bye.