Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Pirates: Piracy in the South China Seas About this episode Zheng Yi Sao was a pirate leader so formidable that she made Blackbeard and Captain Morgan look like amateurs. From humble beginnings as a sex worker in Canton, she rose to command a vast pirate fleet that wrought havoc in the South China Sea. She took on the Qing Dynasty, the Portuguese and the East India Company and still managed to walk away free.
In the second episode of our 'Pirates' mini-series, Dan is joined by Andrew Choong, Curator of Historic Photographs & Ship Plans at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, to uncover the story of one of history's most successful buccaneers.
You can discover more about the exhibition and book tickets here https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/national-maritime-museum/pirates.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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2:26 Dan Snow? She was the queen of pirates. More formidable than Blackbeard or Captain Morgan. She commanded a confederation of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men. Her pirate kingdom operated a highly-drilled navy. There were separate squadrons demarcated by a strict colour-code system. Her men were trained, severely disciplined. Punishment for disobedience would have made Nelson’s navy blush for their severity. One could lose a nose or an ear for insubordination. As a result, China’s Qing navy, even its European allies, struggled to contain
3:08 Dan Snow? her fleet, whom she outsmarted and outmaneuvered on numerous occasions. Her name: Zheng Yisao. And she terrorised the South China Sea at the turn of the 19th century. First alongside her pirate-boss husband, then as undisputed leader herself.
3:27 Dan Snow? The South China Sea has got a maze of islands and coves and narrow passages, choke points. It was, and well, it still is, ideal for pirate operations. This was a golden age for ocean trade, particularly between Europe and East Asia. There were ships laden with tea and porcelain and silk and opium and weapons, entering and leaving ports like Canton, modern-day Guangzhou, every day. There was plenty of opportunity for the pirates to gobble up prizes.
4:00 Dan Snow? So this is the second episode of our Pirate series, right here on Dan Snow’s History at, and I’m joined by Andrew Chung. He’s curator of Historic Photos and Ships Plans at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich. Together, we’re going to delve into the history of piracy in the South China Seas, how it differed from piracy in the Caribbean, we’re going to look at the rise of Zheng Yisao, and the dramatic battles between her pirate empire and the East India Company, the Portuguese Empire, and the Qing, who all teamed up and still couldn’t beat her. If the Qing rulers had put her in charge of their navy, maybe history would have been very different.
4:46 Dan Snow? Andrew, merci de nous parler.
4:47 Speaker 04 C'est un plaisir, Dan. Merci.
4:49 Dan Snow? Donc, la dynastie Qing en Chine, énormément puissante. Alors, qu'est-ce qui se passe dans le 18e et 19e siècle qui permet à la piraterie de se développer sur les côtes de cet énorme empire?
5:01 Speaker 04 La dynastie Qing souffre de nombreux problèmes, Dan. C'est cette puissante organisation, comme vous dites, mais cette apparence de force élargie se cache bien quelques faiblesses. Une partie de la façon dont elles organisent leurs défenses maritime était l'issue. Donc, la défense locale des côtes était très probablement la responsabilité des mandarins et d'autres autorités, et il n'y avait pas autant de coordination qu'il pouvait y avoir. Donc, les réponses navires chinoises à l'activité piratique étaient souvent très dispersées. Vous trouveriez parfois que les forces centrées contre les pirates étaient en fait plus faibles que les personnes que elles poursuivaient. Et quand vous avez les problèmes de corruption, de rivalité et de mépris,
5:43 Speaker 04 il n'est pas inhabituel de trouver que les forces impérialistes chinoises ne seuls ne seuls ne seuls ne se coopèrent pas efficacement les uns les autres, mais parfois abandonnent leurs collègues à leur fate si ça ne va pas bien. Donc, ils ne s'agiraient pas comme un navire européen plus organisé. C'est très important de se concentrer sur la première mission.
6:04 Dan Snow? Et comme les européens apparaissent sur la scène et érode plus fort la puissance de cet empire chinois, est-ce que ça ouvre aussi des trous pour les pirates d'exploiter sur les côtes?
6:16 Speaker 04 Absolument. L'arrivée des européens bénéficie aux pirates de deux façons. Comme vous dites, ils faisaient baisser la dynastie Qing en la frappant non seulement militairement, mais aussi économiquement. Et dans le cas des Britanniques, l'influx d'opium commence à causer de grands problèmes sociaux à la dynastie Qing.
6:34 Speaker 04 The other issue is that the Europeans bring with them an increase in the volume of trade. Now, bearing in mind before European trade exploded in Southeast Asia and Chinese waters, it was difficult enough for the Qing dynasty to police its own waters. Now you've got even more trade coming through the area, which it presents the pirates with more targets, essentially.
6:56 Dan Snow? So it's a heaven sent, it's a boom time for pirates?
6:58 Speaker 04 It is, yes, and they are ideally placed for it because the pirates themselves are well established in this region. They've been there almost since recorded history began. And by the time Europeans arrive in numbers, you get the equivalent of, I'll call them pirate kingdoms. If you think about a late medieval European kingdom and how much manpower that those entities could command. The Chinese pirates and the Southeast Asian pirates are very generally in the same sort of position. They have thousands of men at their call, hundreds, sometimes even thousands of ships. They are very formidable forces.
7:35 Dan Snow? That's amazing, so we're talking about very different phenomena, the lone wolf pirates of the Caribbean in the 18th century, for example.
7:41 Speaker 04 Yes, completely different. These are much more organised, on a much bigger scale. And it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that they're almost countries in their own right. Their chieftains sign treaties with their neighbours to occasionally settle disputes between themselves. Some of them even have their own trading network, so when they rob the ships of one nation, they'll happily sell on the goods to another nation.
8:06 Dan Snow? Are they based in places like Taiwan off the coast? Or are they right on the coast of China, right under the nose of the emperor and their officials?
8:13 Speaker 04 They are everywhere. There are pirate organisations along the Chinese coast, some of them distressingly close to cities like Canton or Guangzhou, as it's known today. The Pearl River Delta is a huge nest of piracy. And throughout Southeast Asia, you get large pockets of pirate communities. They're in Borneo. You also find them in the Aname States, what's today known as Vietnam.
8:38 Dan Snow? Incredible. So Europeans come along and trade just multiplies by many times over. These pirates, are they lying in wait off the coast, are they attacking ports as cargo is being unloaded? What's the chief practice?
8:52 Speaker 04 It's a bit of both. They will normally attack ships when they're passing along the coast because, as with so many other parts of the world, for aid of navigation and also general safety, it makes sense for a lot of the merchant traffic to follow coastal routes. And the Chinese pirates know this as well as anybody else does. And so they're often lying in wait in a convenient cove for the shipping to pass. When it comes to smaller, less well-protected towns, they were not above attacking or threatening to attack those in order to extort protection money. So that was another favoured tactic of theirs.
9:27 Dan Snow? My goodness, that does sound like as the power of the Qing state dwindles, it's just ripe for these little semi-autonomous, almost, as you say, kingdoms to spring up and chaos.
9:40 Speaker 04 Yes, indeed. Yes, the Qing dynasty was always quite weak in the maritime sense because although Chinese trade flourishes, you do find that their naval forces are never quite up to the task. And as their problems multiply, they're less and less able to deal with things. And this is what begins to prompt the European powers to want to try to solve the problem themselves. But they bump up against these huge pirate organisations that are not like anything they've ever encountered before. And even worse, although the European navies begin to have a presence in Asian waters, if you come up against a pirate of the calibre of, say, Cheng Yixiao, you have an organisation that is vast and powerful,
10:21 Speaker 04 but you as a European naval officer, you're operating at the logistical limit of your capabilities. The homeland and your dockyards and your support mechanisms are literally on the other side of the planet. And you're captain under God with maybe two or three other warships. So going up against fleets of 50 or 60, I'll say you have to pick your battles carefully.
10:41 Dan Snow? Yeah, I'll bet. And you made me think when you talk about the Qing and their grip on naval forces. Of course, they're not maritime people, are they? They're from the steppe originally, the Qing. Their genesis was from the nomadic peoples, the North. So I guess it's just they're not instinctively... Attuned to naval matters.
10:56 Speaker 04 No, they really are not. And sad to say, the people in whose hands they leave the naval defence. I don't want to write them all off as being incompetent or ineffective, but largely speaking, they never quite managed to get a coherent navy together in this early period, the late 17th into the 18th and then the early 19th centuries.
11:17 Dan Snow? What sort of tech, when Europeans arrive and they've got the kinds of ships that people will be familiar with, images of Nelson's navy, are Chinese pirates operating the same kind of hardware? Or is there big differences?
11:28 Speaker 04 Visually, they're quite different. So the ubiquitous junk, which comes in various sizes and flavours, is the staple for the Chinese pirates. It's a vessel ideally suited to Asian waters. It's been developed on the strength of millennia of experience of operating in those waters. The very largest pirate junks would be massive great two-deck, forty-gun warships. They wouldn't disgrace a European navy if they stood in a European battle line. And then you get everything down to armed sampanes, which lurk in the river deltas and just come out to quickly board a ship once they've stopped it, and everything in between. So you get various sizes of pirate vessel.
12:10 Speaker 04 They tend to be very sturdily built, and the ones that have cannon are very heavily armed indeed. The only advantage that the Europeans have, relatively speaking, is that their guns tend to be more modern. And the European navies are just beginning to benefit from shell-firing guns, whereas those of the Chinese pirates, they don't have exploding shells, they have solid shot. The sort of thing Nelson's navy would have been much more familiar with.
12:36 Dan Snow? But you suggest these pirate kings, they had access to iron foundries, they're making iron artillery, they're presumably gunpowder, shipyards. The logistics of this are very impressive.
12:46 Speaker 04 Yes, they are. And largely speaking, the larger pirate organisations are completely self-sufficient. So anything they can't make themselves, they tend to steal. And so when you hear stories of some of the larger clans actually swooping in on, say, a Chinese coastal town and ransacking it and taking all the guns from its fort, it's not necessarily the case that they need those guns for themselves, but they're simply depriving the town of its ability to protect itself in future and therefore leaving it open to their protection racket. Don't make us come back and do this again.
13:20 Dan Snow? And during the late 18th century, there's opportunity for them to stretch their wings and learn their trade. Is it along what we now call the Vietnamese coast, so just further south?
13:28 Speaker 04 Yes, so even in its period of upheaval towards the end of its life, the Qing Dynasty was still quite expansionist in nature, and they had always regarded the Anamis States, as you say, modern-day Vietnam, as at worst a vassal state, at best part of the Chinese Empire. Now, of course, the Vietnamese took a slightly different view of this, and the pirates did benefit from a series of dynastic wars fought between the Chinese-sponsored Nguyen Dynasty and the local dynasty, which was a bit more popular. The reason this was great for the pirates is because they were already quite well-established. Both sides tried to woo them and tried to recruit them. Now, one of the benefits of being recruited
14:13 Speaker 04 in the middle of a war is you gain combat experience, you gain training, you learn new tactics. You also get the chance to procure firearms. In many cases, the firearms are given to you as part of your contract of service. So even after these conflicts die down, it leaves the Chinese pirates and the local Asian pirates in a very strong position because they've got all this experience, they've got all this stuff, and they have the beginnings of the bureaucratic infrastructure to go completely independent.
14:43 Dan Snow? I'm always struck in Chinese history and geography by these great rivers and these waterways inland that run inland. So presumably not just talking about deep-sea piracy and offshore piracy, but does that piracy extend into up the Pearl River, for example, but even in some of these amazing canals that you hear about that join key parts of the Qing Empire together?
15:01 Speaker 04 Yes, they do. The pirates are everywhere, and you would think in geographical terms they'd be easier to hunt down and corner on a river, but they're not, because very often the smaller pirate organizations who function on these rivers, they're very adept at disappearing into one of the endless waterways or to simply blending in with the local population. Others find it's very easy to enter cozy relationships with the local authorities, and after a bit of bribery and the promise of a percentage of the takings, it's amazing how ineffective the responses to their activities become.
15:37 Dan Snow? In terms of named individuals and well-attested episodes of piracy, tell them about some of the classics. Who are the biggest figures in this world?
15:45 Speaker 04 I'll start with the biggest one, and this may surprise Western listeners because she's a lady. Cheng Yisau was arguably the most successful pirate ruler throughout this period of history, and indeed possibly the most successful pirate ever. So she is born in the late 18th century, and she doesn't get off to the best start. She's born near Canton, and in her early life, she ends up working as a sex worker in a floating brothel. And she somehow ends up marrying a pirate chieftain. And he seems to recognise quite early on that she's got a great deal of organisational ability. She's quite courageous, and she can be ruthless when she wants to be.
16:29 Speaker 04 So everyone soon realises that she is the brains behind the operation, and she makes herself the de facto chief administrator of this enormous pirate kingdom, that she's one of the ones who ends up running thousands of ships and tens of thousands of men. When her first husband is killed a few years later, she keeps the dynasty going by marrying his adopted son, so maintaining a sort of level of authority there. And they just carry on a very successful career. It peaks in about 1809, 1810, where she begins to annoy a number of Europeans by attacking their ships. But even then, with European powers cooperating
17:13 Speaker 04 with the forces of the Qing dynasty, they can't really make any impression on her. Whenever they think they have her cornered, her ships manage to fight their way out. There's a moment in 1809 where they think they've got her. A fleet of about 80 Qing and Portuguese vessels have them trapped in a bay, and they manage to keep the government forces at bay until the wind changes and they can make their escape. And to add insult to injury, they capture one of the major government ships on the way out, which is rather embarrassing for all concerned. It's a measure of her power and influence that towards the end of her career, where partly she may have felt she didn't want to do this anymore, but also the pressures on the Pirate Confederation she built up were increasing.
17:57 Speaker 04 And not all of her former friends were as friendly as they used to be. She is able to negotiate the terms of her retirement with the Qing dynasty. She actually tells them, you know, this is what I want by way of a payoff. And if you agree to my terms, then I will disband my fleets and your pirate problem will go away. Her second husband actually gets a commission in Qing service. It's part of the terms of this agreement. So she ends up living very comfortably until her death in the early to mid 19th century, running a rather successful gambling den.
18:31 Dan Snow? Oh my goodness, so she has several careers.
18:34 Speaker 04 She did, yes, very, very talented lady, one who history has largely overlooked and could do with being brought out into the spotlight a bit more, I feel. But she is very much the exception. She is on the top of the pile.
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22:22 Speaker 04 So, do we know anything about how she ran these fleets? Yes, quite a lot of information has survived. So, there's multiple levels here. The first is how she ran the whole organisation virtually as a monarch. So, she had her own legal system. She had her own system of rules about conduct aboard ship. And these are basically run almost like a national military. So, when you're a crewman aboard a ship, you have your set watches as you would on a naval vessel. You have your very specific duties. You're expected to look after your weapons and to maintain a certain level of training. You're not allowed to go ashore without permission. I mean, we have this lovely image of pirates as being these carefree, I'll do whatever I like in a loose authority system. There wasn't a bit of that.
23:06 Speaker 04 These were highly disciplined people. And the penalties imposed for indiscipline or disobedience would have made Nelson's navy blush for their severity. So, for going ashore without permission, you could have your nose and ears chopped off, which was very much a Qing dynasty punishment. So, she'd learned a lot from the government. It wasn't something unusual, but it was a very well enforced system. And she got results from it because her laws were fair. I mean, obviously, a pirate captain would get more of a percentage than an ordinary sailor. But it was a well understood and reasonable system of, I'll call it, wealth reallocation. In terms of how her fleets operated tactically, they were incredible. They put the Qing dynasty to shame.
23:50 Speaker 04 So, they used a very well- Thought-out colour-coding system for divisions of the fleet. So you'd have your red squadron, your blue squadron and so on. And they would train in everything from fleet tactics to ganging up on another vessel in twos and threes. Individual captains would very often practise their own skills for the inevitable one-to-one engagement. They were very much a credible naval force, in a sense that would even give a European power pause. And it was only thanks to the slight antiquity of their weapons relative to what Europeans had that gave the Europeans a bit of an edge, because otherwise, in terms of discipline, in terms of organisation and in terms of training, there'd be very little to differentiate between the two.
24:35 Dan Snow? If the Qing had put her in charge of the Qing navy and made her Lord Admiral, I mean, history could have been very different indeed.
24:41 Speaker 04 It may well have been, yes, or at the very least, the European powers would have had to have worked a jolly sight harder to get as far as they did into Qing territory.
24:50 Dan Snow? So you're implying that by this stage, the Qing are working with European navies to try and deal with this problem of piracy. She ends up fighting a range of enemies?
24:58 Speaker 04 She does, yes. So as European ships appear more frequently in Asian territory, inevitably, they come under pirate attack. And it was no different with Cheng Yisau's fleets either. So by the time you get to the end of the first decade of the 19th century, so 1809, 1810, the Portuguese and the Dutch are beginning to lend their naval muscle to the Qing dynasty. And they corner Cheng Yisau's fleet in an area called Tung Chung Bay. And they hope at this point that they're going to sort her out once and for all. The Qing dynasty and their Portuguese allies have massed a total of about 70 ships. And although Cheng Yisau has got roughly the same number, maybe slightly less,
25:43 Speaker 04 you'd think this one was in the bag, but it's not. The pirates form up with superb discipline and they repel the first few attacks that the besieging fleet makes. They can't really try to escape at this point because the wind is against them, it's coming into the bay. But after a few days' worth of... Fighting, which is quite incredible in itself. A few days of sustained naval operations. The wind shifts, which allows the pirate fleet to break out. And during the latter stages of the fighting, almost to make a point, they managed to capture one of the largest Qing vessels and make off with it. It's quite incredible, as a Parthian shot goes.
26:22 Dan Snow? There's an impression that the pirates who were in the Caribbean in that Golden Age of piracy, quote, "They realised they were sort of outlaws. There was something transgressive about what they were doing." Is there a sense these Chinese pirates felt the same way? Is there a political edge to what they're doing? Or are they just seizing what power they could, like warlords when China goes through those periods of dissipation? Would she have seen herself as an exciting political rebel?
26:47 Speaker 04 I don't think that would be the case. She would certainly be very different in a society which was very male dominated. But in terms of the organisation that she was part of, and indeed the organisation that she very much made her own and moulded in her image. She was very much continuing a tradition that had been around for a very long time. Asian pirates were aware that they were operating outside the law as far as other countries were concerned. But they didn't really see themselves as criminals on the run. They were very much in an alternative power struggle, another tribe, if you will. And hence the diplomacy with other smaller kingdoms in South East Asia and the way they behave like monarchs in their own right.
27:29 Speaker 04 If anything, they're slightly confused by the European attitudes when the Europeans come in and go, "No, you're pirates. You're nothing but outlaws." They seem to be ever so slightly affronted by that. But well, no, we're not actually. You know, when you see who we are and what we do. And that cultural gap is never fully bridged. Even when you get pirates who are lower down the scale, because of course Cheng Yixiao is exceptional. But another good example and someone who we have represented in our gallery is Ching Chai, who commanded a much more modest fleet relative to Cheng Yixiao. He never had more than 100 vessels at any one time.
28:06 Dan Snow? It's all not bad going.
28:07 Speaker 04 Not bad going for a pirate lord, but still putting him in that relative camp. But he never ran his organisation as a state as such, but he's representative of the lower-tier pirate who still has this impressive fleet. And I suppose you could call him a fleet admiral as such, because his ships are organised and disciplined in much the same way. He's got a strict series of rules governing training, governing code of conduct. Pirates are strictly told then not to lay any hands on the goods until his assessors have been through it and totted everything up and had a chance to distribute it. So he, even though he's much more representative, is still part of that culture. And he won't
28:49 Speaker 04 turn around to the Qing authorities and say, "You call me an outlaw, but really, I don't think of myself as such. Or if I even give it any thought, I'm not that bothered, really." Because he operates in an environment, as do all his fellows, where if they were desperate, the Qing dynasty authorities, or indeed another local kingdom, would hire him as a general or an admiral to solve their problems. So that lends these Asian and Chinese pirates a bit of legitimacy that their European equivalents never have.
29:20 Dan Snow? Is he the pirate who is associated with that amazing object down in the gallery?
29:24 Speaker 04 Yes, he is. So that wonderful tapestry, which as far as I am aware is unique as a piece as far as British collections go. I mean, none of them were ever the same, but not many of these altar pieces survive. So it looks like it should be a flag, but in fact, it's a gigantic hanging that's meant to sit behind an altar on one of the large junks that would have been in the fleet. So it's really an item of worship. And just to describe this marvellous thing, so of course, you've got this enormous tapestry, and it's dominated by a huge, somewhat imposing figure. He's got the big staring eyes and the bushy eyebrows that the Chinese often work into their depictions of male deities.
30:08 Speaker 04 So you have the imposing figure of the god Chiwei Dadi, who in Cantonese tradition is one of the four Junior Emperors of Heaven. And he's widely regarded in the Cantonese community as a friend and protector of mariners. But it's not just about him because you've got four big Chinese characters in red above his head and they say Tianhu Holy Mother or Holy Empress. And she is a goddess who is particularly favorable to mariners. She's supposed to be able to control the weather, she calms storms, she looks after her adherents. So it's an interesting perspective into the pirates as they're still culturally part
30:49 Speaker 04 of their home nation, their home culture, but they carry that with them. You don't normally think of pirates as being particularly religious folks, but of course sailors the world over are a superstitious lot. There is a lot of symbolism in this banner relating to luck and fortune. So Chi Wei Dadi holds up a big yin and yang emblem, but the yin and yang side of it unusually is in the shape of two fish. He's got fish chasing one another across his clothing, there's a fish motif on his boots, and there's also a line of bats at the end of the hanging. And what these represent, they're a play on the Chinese words which both mean bats and
31:29 Speaker 04 fish, but they also with a slightly different inflection can refer to prosperity and good fortune and wealth. So it's fairly obvious what the pirates are asking for. So this enormous thing would have been hanging on one of Shapen Chai's war vessels and ahead of it would have been an altar with the usual large bowl for joss sticks and offerings. And so by way of making a plea or a prayer or a general obeisance, you would come up, you'd light your joss stick and bow and place it. And so this would have been a very sacred part of the ship, it would have been treated very reverently. I suppose the equivalent would be if you have a chapel on a European vessel, the same, if not more reverence placed around this space.
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33:55 Dan Snow? So, speaking of European vessels, we've got the Royal Navy, among others, entering this coastline, this space in the 19th century. Do they help deliver this death blow to these East Asian pirates? Because as you've hinted at before, the Royal Navy by the 19th century is starting to enjoy the benefits of coming from that industrialized economy. The weapons, the ships are getting qualitatively better in this period.
34:18 Speaker 04 Yes, and thankfully, we do have a handful of accounts by naval personnel who are actually part of these efforts. And another item we have on display in the gallery is a wonderful watercolour by a naval surgeon by the name of Edward Cree, who was on the paddle gunboat HMS Fury. Cree is a very interesting character, out-and-out Victorian. He served in the navy from 1837 to 1869, always in the medical role, but he was a very astute observer. And not only did he leave these wonderfully detailed diaries, but he was also a very talented watercolourist. Now, the watercolours can be a bit problematic, because Cree was very much a man of his time, and he carried certain attitudes with
35:02 Speaker 04 him about the sense of where Europeans were and their place in the world versus the Chinese. So a lot of his paintings are slightly caricatured, but they're very much of their time. And it must be said, he doesn't exactly spare Europeans either when it comes to being a caricature artist. But in terms of the visual quality, they're an invaluable resource, because this man was an eyewitness. He didn't waste any time putting his impressions down in word and on art paper. And even better, HMS Fury, with him on it, was involved in what should have been the last battle to finish off Shapun Chai. He is described in Cree's journals as a most desperate robber,
35:43 Speaker 04 which is selling him a bit short, given that we've talked about how large a fleet he commanded, and how well organised it was. So during this battle, the Royal Navy teams up with the Qing Dynasty, and as you say, they bring this technological edge with them. Fury is a paddle steamer, she's not reliant on the wind.
36:02 Dan Snow? She's got a steam engine.
36:03 Speaker 04 She has a steam engine, and it sometimes proves a bit temperamental, but generally speaking, it does what it has to do.
36:08 Dan Snow? Which is revolutionary, because while other ships are waiting for the wind to blow, you can just beetle across that stretch of water and close with the enemy.
36:15 Speaker 04 Yes, and another tactic the Chinese pirates often favour is with their knowledge of river currents and the good hiding places in river mouths. They know how hard it is for a sailing ship to beat up a river when the current is against you, which is why a common pirate tactic is to form up in line across the river and just pour gunfire into oncoming ships as they're trying desperately to get at you. All of a sudden, up comes HMS Fury with her paddle wheels, and she's not in the least bit bothered by this. So it's a very different experience for the pirates, having to fight this new technologically advanced enemy. The other problem they have is they've got nothing to match the shell firing guns.
36:56 Speaker 04 So when you're a wooden vessel, no matter how well-built you are, if a shell penetrates your side and then explodes on your gun deck, it's going to make a much bigger mess than an ordinary iron cannonball punching through. And the pirates don't really have an answer for this. But the Europeans, it must be said, need every edge they can get because the numbers are so much against them. And again, Cree's account of the battle against Chiang Chi bears this out. So when the Royal Navy sends its force against the pirates, they don't go alone, they team up with the Qing dynasty, and there are eight government warships and three Royal Navy warships. When they finally track Chiang Chi down on the Vietnamese coast, they find themselves
37:40 Speaker 04 facing sixty vessels, which is a tiny disparity in numbers. And the only thing that saves them is that a lot of these vessels appear to be prizes rather than warships. Estimates of the number of warships that Chiang Chi had on the 21st of October 1849, the day of the battle, they vary between thirty and sixty. So we'll never quite know how many of those were unarmed captures and how many were heavily armed pirate vessels. But Cree's account of the action describes a very, very hot exchange of fire as the warships approach. Very fortunately for the British, quite early on, the vessel they take to be Chiang Chi's
38:21 Speaker 04 flagship takes a bad hit and explodes, possibly because the powder magazine was hit, we're not entirely sure. And thereafter, the balance of the fighting shifts in the favour of the British and their Chinese allies, and slowly the Chinese fleet is reduced.
38:38 Speaker 04 Do they succeed in eliminating him? Unfortunately not. Many of the pirates escape, and Shatun Chai himself is reported as successfully getting away with about four or 500 of his men. So it's not quite the wipeout the Allies were hoping for. But, on the other hand, they have broken one of the major pirate fleets, and they've at least temporarily made that stretch of water a bit safer.
39:03 Dan Snow? And with the Qing working alongside the British like this, clearly that's great to the British Allies, but they're slightly unreliable. Did they try and absorb some of that British technology practices into their own national navy?
39:15 Speaker 04 They did after a time. The Qing Dynasty suffered from some rather unfortunate mental baggage. For centuries, the Chinese had been culturally and technologically convinced that they were on the top of the pile, and they never stopped referring to the Westerners as barbarians or foreign devils, because it doesn't matter how impressive their weaponry is, they're still several cuts below the Chinese who have reached a higher plane of civilization. The problem with this thinking is it makes it very hard for you to eat humble pie and adopt the technology of the barbarians. So while there are a number of Chinese generals, admirals, and politicians who instantly perceive the need to metaphorically up-gun, they come up against
39:59 Speaker 04 a lot of opposition within the Qing court, and it makes it very hard. That said, they do realise they can make common cause with the British, and in some sense, the British and other Europeans could solve a problem for them that they've been trying to unsuccessfully to solve on their own. The other factor to consider is, and this is another statement really of how anxious everyone was to solve the pirate problem. When Cree sets down his narrative of this battle, it's late 1849, less than a decade earlier, Britain and China have fought the First Opium War, and there's still a lot of bitterness and bad feeling. And although Cree describes
40:44 Speaker 04 General Huang, the Chinese naval commander they're working with, as a very amiable, genial fellow who gets on very well with the British... There were quite a few in the Qing Dynasty's ranks who had very bitter memories of the war. A lot of them would have fought in it. And you can almost feel the last thing they want is to have to undergo this added humiliation of having to work with these people who've just beaten them in a military campaign so that they can force you to buy their drugs. It's very, very awkward for the Chinese, but then practicality rules. The pirates are such a threat that they can't really afford not to.
41:23 Dan Snow? Does this era of piracy, is there a legacy today? Is there a sense of vulnerability about the coastline? Or, you know, how does this history manifest itself in the 20th and 21st centuries?
41:32 Speaker 04 Piracy in Asia has never gone away. It has never been successfully suppressed at any point. There were moments when its flames sputtered incredibly low and came close to extinction. But then it only takes a slight relaxation in any nation's naval patrols and it will flare up again. The colonial powers, even when they've become very established in Asia and even had all these footholds in China, and as the British did, Hong Kong becomes an important naval base, so does Singapore. But even then pirates run rampant through the region and the job of putting out these piratical bushfires never stops.
42:13 Speaker 04 One of my favourite examples from the 20th century is the Shun Tian incident. I mean, how many people out there would think aircraft carriers versus pirates was a thing? But in 1934, the carrier HMS Eagle had to divert to deal with a pirate attack on a British merchant ship, the Shun Tian. And they're lucky, they put up aerial patrols and they're able to find the pirates. The pirates give themselves away by firing back, otherwise the British would have never found them. But then the aircraft have to fly over, make sure that they've got the right pirate base, and then they drop leaflets on them saying, "We know you've got hostages. We want you to give the hostages back unharmed
42:54 Speaker 04 or we will come back in however many hours and bomb and strafe you out of existence." And there's some tense moments where it looks Like the pirates are not going to relent because they know full well they've got the hostages and they're counting on the British not wanting to just attack. Because if they do, they might risk innocent lives. But in the end, they let the hostages go, so it's a near-run thing. But yes, so there you have a fleet aircraft carrier, one of the largest aircraft carriers in the Royal Navy, having to go after pirates in junks, in sailing junks. So, truth being stranger than fiction and all that.
43:32 Dan Snow? Thank you to Andrew for that tour de force, what a treat that was. As some of you may know, one of my dreams is actually take a boat, sail out into the South China Sea and make some podcasts, make some TV shows about, well, many things, some of the wrecks there, but also the great Chinese expeditions of the 15th century, when it was China that was the maritime power that dominated Asia and the east coast of Africa. So this podcast's been a great opportunity to get back into some maritime history in that part of the world. I really recommend going on a trip to see the Pirates exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, it's in London if you can. As we mentioned in the episode, this really stunning object, that enormous original altar hanging from a Chinese pirate ship is in the exhibition. And it is really is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, so please go and take a look at that.
44:16 Dan Snow? The exhibition will be on till January, you can find out more on the link in the show notes. Join me next Monday as the series takes us across the oceans to another arena of pirate warfare. We'll be heading to what's known as the Barbary Coast, that's Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and for a time as well, the Sultanate of Morocco, so we're talking north central, northwest Africa. We're going to be telling the story of the dramatic battle that took place in 1816 when a powerful British-Dutch fleet under Admiral Lord Exmouth bombarded the port of Algiers to force the day, the ruler of Algiers, to release over a thousand European slaves and end the practice of Christian slavery. For nine relentless hours, cannon shattered shore fortifications, sank Algerian ships
45:01 Dan Snow? and ignited flames in the harbour that were visible for miles.
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