Subject: 海盜 hǎidào pirate
Culture: Cantonese Chinese, Sino-Vietnamese
Setting: south China coast late 18th-mid 19thc
Context (Event Photos, Primary Sources, Secondary Sources, Field Notes)
* Antony 2003 p11
"[T]he contradictions inherent in maritime society in the mid-Qing period fostered conflict, violence, and predation in the form of large-scale piracy characterized by a preponderance of poor seafarers engaging in crime as a means of survival. Paradoxically, the height of the 'prosperous age' between 1780 and 1810 was also the height tide of massive pirate disturbances. Maritime society, though interdependent, was divided economically, socially, and culturally. Rising commercialization was offset by the more than doubling of the population during the first half of the Qing era, producing a society of great opportunities and even greater anxieties. By the end of the eighteenth century, on the South China coast, a lumbering subsistence economy clashed head on with a vibrant commercial economy. Although the maritime world boasted great wealth, it was unevenly distributed. As the gap between merchants, shopkeepers, and gentry on shore and fishermen and sailors at sea widened, quiescent frustrations, mistrusts, and apprehensions increasingly flared up into violent confrontations. Piracy was one of the chief weapons in the arsenal of poor and marginalized seafarers who waged a war on trade not to wreck it, but to gain a fair share in it. What they wanted was the opportunity for a decent living and an evenhanded access to the things denied to them by privation and prejudice."
* Pennell ed. 2001 p255 (Dian Murray, "Cheng I Sao in fact and fiction" p253-282)
"Piracy in China, as in the West, is one of the oldest professions. Records dating back to the fourth century B.C. suggest a continuous tradition of petty piracy: a small-scale, income-supplementing activity that could be practiced out of a neighborhood cove using the equipment at hand. Its size, intensity, and ebb and flow were often determined by external circumstances, and by the political and social events of the world around the sea. The piracy of the most famous woman pirate of all, Cheng I Sao, took place during a rebellion in what is now Vietnam. The leaders' need for a privateer force gave employment to Chinese pirates who answered their call. Later, when Vietnamese patronage was no longer an option, leadership from within the pirate ranks enabled an essentially military organization to be transformed into a big business. This vehicle was a confederation composed of six (and at times seven) well-ordered and regulated fleets consisting of between 40,000 and 70,000 individuals who at their height were under the leadership of Cheng I Sao."
* Antony 2003 p38-39
"The large-scale piracy in South China during the mid-Qing had its origins in the 1780s, when over the next several decades many of the petty pirate gangs gradually transformed into several huge, well-organized fleets. The patronage of the Tâyson rebels in Vietnam was crucial in this transformation in Guangdong, as Dian Murray has shown, but had little effect on developments in neighboring Fujian. The rebels, who needed both money and men for their cause, actively recruited Chinese pirates. Even after the Qianlong emperor recognized one of the Tâyson leaders as 'king' of Vietnam in 1788, the latter continued to pursue a risky double-edged policy of sending tribute missions to the Qing court in Beijing while simultaneously backing piratical raids along the China coast. Rebel leaders guaranteed Chinese pirates safe harbors, supplied them with ships and weapons, and rewarded them with official ranks and titles so they would engage in piracy as a means of obtaining revenue. Every spring and summer from about 1790 to 1802, when the Tâyson insurgents were finally overthrown, fleets of 'boat bandits' (tingfei) left their bases along the Sino-Vietnamese border for Chinese waters. They returned each autumn laden with booty, which they shared with their Tâyson patrons."
* Pennell ed. 2001 p97-98 (John L Anderson, "Piracy in world history: An economic perspective on maritime predation" p-82-106)
"The next large-scale episode of piracy in Chinese waters followed the cessation of war between factions in northern and southern Vietnam in the late eighteenth century, again a time of famine and civil disturbance in China. Chinese naval mercenaries moved north to their home waters and put their naval, organizational, and strategic skills to use in large-scale and systematic predation for about two decades. Such was the scale of their operations that they were able regularly to engage and defeat fleets of imperial war-junks. The pirates levied tribute in the land areas over which they had some control. In effect, the set up a pirate state, mimicking some aspects of the structure and functioning of the increasingly ineffectual imperial Qing state and adding to the burdens of an already impoverished peasantry.
"Although the power of the pirate 'state' was broken by internal divisions and the official diplomacy that exploited those divisions, there were further regular outbreaks of Chinese piracy during the nineteenth century. These episodes were generally associated with the crises characteristic of a dynasty in decline and the consequent poverty, lawlessness, and weakening of government control both on land and at sea. In addition, the illicit opium trade in the first half of the century was associated with an increase in parasitic piracy."
* Cordingly ed. 1998 p222, 223 (Dian H Murray, "Chinese pirates" p212-135)
"Initially, upon returning to China from Vietnam, Chinese pirates found themselves involved in internecine competition for resources. Within an atmosphere of strife, bands that had once been loosely allied now turned rapaciously against one another in a free-for-all that continued until 1805. At that time the leadership of the pirates had passed indisputably into the waiting hands of ... Cheng Ch'i's distant cousin, Cheng I (Cheng the First). [...]
"The major accomplishment of Cheng I and his wife was the unification of the warring pirate gangs into a formidable confederation that, by 1804, included some four hundred junks and seventy thousand men. In contrast to the ad hoc procedures that gave rise to petty pirate gangs, the confederation came into being as the result of a written agreement (li-ho-yueh) signed by Kwangtung's seven major pirate leaders in 1805. Its goal was to regularize the internal operating procedures of the member units, to prescribe methods of conduct and inter-group communication when at sea, and to stipulate how business transactions with outsiders were to be conducted."
* Pennell ed. 2001 p259 (Dian Murray, "Cheng I Sao in fact and fiction" p253-282)
"By 1808, the pirates held the military initiative along the coast of Kwang-tung and demonstrated their prowess by killing the provincial commander-in-chief of Chekiang, Li Ch'ang-keng, who had sailed into Kwangtung province on a special assignment. Within the year, the pirates had also destroyed 63 of the Kwangtung area's 135-vessel fleet, and in August 1809 they threatened to attack Canton itself. The strength of Cheng I Sao's confederation forced officials in Canton to enter into a series of negotiations with the British for the short-term use of the vessel Mercury, fitted out with twenty cannon and fifty American volunteers. These were followed a few months later by similar negotiations with the Portuguese for the lease of six men-of-war to sail with the imperial navy for several months in late 1809."
* Antony 2003 p20-21
"The third pirate wave, between 1780 and 1810, was marked by the rise of several major pirate leagues, composed of thousands of vessels and more than seventy thousand individuals. Although petty piracy continued, nevertheless many of the smaller gangs of 'local pirates' (tudao) were transformed into larger, more powerful fleets of 'ocean bandits' (yangdao). By that time too the nature of piracy had changed significantly in China. European freebooters and the great merchant-pirates of the earlier epochs had all but disappeared; instead, this was an age dominated by commoner seafarer-pirates. As one local official, Xie Jinluan, lamented in 1804: 'In the past sailors worked for merchants, but now sailors work for pirates; in the past sailors transported good for merchants, but now sailors transport goods for pirates.' Cai Qian was the most notorious pirate operating on the waters around Zhejiang, Fujian, and Taiwan, while Zhu Fen ravaged the border region between Fujian and Guangdong. Further south, all along Guangdong's craggy coastline, several pirate chieftains, most notably Zheng Yi, Wushi Er, and later Zhang Bao, had formed a loose confederation that plagued the South China Sea and challenged Qing authority in the region for over a decade. Yet all of a sudden, between 1809 and 1810, at a time when these pirates were apparently at the height of their power, they utterly collapsed. With their demise the golden age of pirates in China came to an end, though piracy has never completely disappeared in the region."
Costume
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Weapons
* Antony 2003 p107-108
"Pirates used a wide variety of ships and weapons, which they obtained by capture or by purchase. .... The largest pirate junks usually had twelve six- or eight-pound guns (some of these had been manufactured in the West), and had crews of up to two hundred men armed with swords, lances, and muskets. Smaller boats, such as the sampans and rowboats, carried lighter weaponry and fewer men."
* Cordingly ed. 1998 p228 (Dian H Murray, "Chinese pirates" p212-135)
"The pirates' most deadly weapon was a bamboo pike with a sharp, saberlike blade used in the hand-to-hand combat at which they so excelled. The majority of the pikes were fourteen to eighteen feet (4.2 - 5.5m) long and were hurled like javelins. The pirates also had shorter pikes with shafts of wood and slightly curved blades that were sometimes sharpened on both edges. In addition, they wielded knives of all sorts and rounded out their arsenal with bows and arrows."
