Chinese Piracy
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Zheng Yi Sao
Zheng Yi Sao, known as Ching Shih, was a Chinese pirate leader who took command of a massive pirate confederation, the Red Flag Fleet, following the death of her husband Zheng Yi in 1807, commanding an estimated 1,800 ships and up to 80,000 pirates at its height. She imposed a strict code of conduct on…
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Zheng Yi
Zheng Yi was a Chinese pirate leader descended from a family with a piracy tradition, who unified various pirate fleets off the south China coast into a powerful confederation known as the Red Flag Fleet in the early 1800s. He married Shi Yang (later known as Zheng Yi Sao) in 1801, who assisted in running…
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Wang Zhi
Wang Zhi was a Chinese merchant-pirate who built a vast smuggling and piracy network along the southeastern China coast and in Japan during the Ming dynasty’s maritime trade ban, at times styling himself ‘King of Hui.’ He played a significant role in early trade contact between Japan and Portuguese merchants. Despite surrendering under a promised…
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Koxinga
Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga, was a Ming loyalist military leader and son of the pirate-merchant Zheng Zhilong, who inherited and expanded his father’s maritime forces to resist the Qing conquest of China. He is best known for defeating the Dutch East India Company and expelling it from Taiwan in 1662, establishing…
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Cheung Po Tsai
Cheung Po Tsai was a Chinese pirate who, according to tradition, was captured as a boy and adopted by pirate leader Zheng Yi, later becoming a key commander within Zheng Yi Sao’s Red Flag Fleet and reportedly her second husband after Zheng Yi’s death. He commanded a substantial squadron within the confederation. After the fleet’s…
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Zheng Zhilong
Zheng Zhilong was a Chinese merchant and pirate who built a powerful trading and piracy fleet based in Fujian and Taiwan, later gaining an official Ming naval commission to combat rival pirates and Dutch forces. He was the father of Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga). After the Ming dynasty’s fall, he defected to the Qing, but was…
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Shap-ng-tsai
Shap-ng-tsai was a 19th-century Chinese pirate commander who led a fleet of roughly 70 junks based near Dianbai, extorting protection payments from coastal traders and villages in the South China Sea. His forces were blamed for sinking several Western merchant ships in 1849, prompting a joint British-Qing naval campaign. His fleet was destroyed at the…
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Chui A-poo
Chui A-poo was a Chinese pirate active around Bias Bay near Hong Kong, whose forces clashed repeatedly with British colonial shipping in the late 1840s, including the killing of two Royal Navy officers in early 1849. A British naval squadron destroyed much of his fleet in 1849. He was captured in 1851, tried in Hong…
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Xu Hai
Xu Hai was a former Buddhist monk who became a leading commander among the wokou pirates raiding China’s southeastern coast during the mid-Ming dynasty, operating from bases in Japan’s Satsuma Province with a coalition force reportedly numbering in the thousands. He achieved notable tactical victories against Ming forces, including at the Battle of Sanli Bridge.…
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Lai Choi San
Lai Choi San was reported to be a female pirate commanding a fleet of junks in the South China Sea during the 1920s-1930s, described in journalist Aleko Lilius’s 1931 book I Sailed with Chinese Pirates. Because Lilius was a source of questionable reliability with a history of fraud allegations, and no independent corroboration of her…