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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

8. In the Business of Piracy: Entrepreneurial Women Among Chinese Pirates in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Author : C. Nathan Kwan

Published in: Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The success of Zheng Yi Sao, perhaps the most successful pirate chieftainess in history, shows that women in South China participated, sometimes prominently, in piracy. This chapter shows that women’s involvement in Chinese piracy continued after Zheng Yi Sao’s surrender in 1810. The British colonisation of Hong Kong and the opening of treaty ports to foreign trade in 1842 produced new opportunities for women and Chinese pirates. Through the case studies of Mrs Bigfoot, Ng Akew and Liu Laijiao, Kwan explores the interactions between women and Chinese pirates. The chapter argues that these women engaged in the business of piracy, profiting from association with pirates. Piracy provided entrepreneurial opportunities for women, marginalised by Chinese society, to advance and improve themselves in mid-nineteenth-century South China.

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previous chapter On Their Own in a ‘Man’s World’: Widows in Business in Colonial Australia and New Zealand

next chapter The Business of Self-Endowment: Women Merchants, Wealth and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Luanda

The Qing ruled China 1644–1912. Robert Antony, ‘State, Community, and Pirate Suppression in Guangdong Province, 1809–1810’, Late Imperial China 27, no. 1 (2006), p. 21.

At the peak of Atlantic piracy, in 1720, there were no more than 5500 pirates active in total. Robert Antony, ‘Overview’, in idem (ed.), Pirates in the Age of Sail (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), pp. 33–34.

Yonglun Yuan, Jing haifen ji [Account of Clearing the Sea of Foam], (1830), lower juan, pp. 20–21, reprinted in Kwok-kin Siu and Wing Kin Puk (eds), ‘Jing haifen ji yuanwen biaodian jianzhu [An Annotation of the Account of Clearing the Sea of Foam]’, Tianye yu wenxian: Huanan yanjia ziliao zhongxin tongxun 46 (January 2007), pp. 8–20. Official sources referred to pirates as ‘sea foam’.

Robert Antony, Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2003), p. 19.

The principal studies are Jonathan Chappell, ‘Maritime Raiding, International Law and Suppression of Piracy on the South China Coast, 1842–1869’, International History Review 40, no. 3 (2018): pp. 473–492; Yu-hsiang Chen, ‘Qingdai zhongye Guangdong haidao zhi yanjiu (1810–1885) [A Study of Guangdong Pirates in the Mid-Qing Dynasty, 1810–1885]’, Chengda lishi xuebao 34 (June 2008): pp. 93–130; and Ei Murakami, ‘Shijiu shiji zhongye Huanan yanhai zhixu de chongbian: Min-Yue haidao yu Yingguo haijun [Reassessing Order on the South China Coast in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Guangdong and Fujian Pirates and the Royal Navy]’, Zhongguoshi yanjiu, 44 (October 2006): pp. 131–148.

See John C. Appleby, Women and English Piracy, 1540–1720: Partners and Victims of Crime (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013).

Shannon Lee Dawdy and Joe Bonni, ‘Towards a General Theory of Piracy’, Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 3 (2012), p. 682.

Appleby, Women and English Piracy, pp. 207–223.

See Dian Murray, ‘Cheng I Sao in Fact and Fiction’ in Jo Stanley (ed.), Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages (London: Harper Collins, 1995): pp. 203–239.

Dian Murray ‘One Woman’s Rise to Power: Cheng Is Wife and the Pirates’, Historical Reflections 8, no. 3 (1981), p. 149; Murray, ‘Cheng I Sao’, p. 210; Antony, Like Froth, p. 48.

Appleby, Women and English Piracy, pp. 92–95.

For a general account, see Dian Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 85–87.

Guangnan Zheng, Zhongguo haidao shi [History of Chinese Piracy] (Shanghai: Huadong ligong daxue chubanshe, 1998), p. 301 and p. 306.

Murray, ‘One Woman’s Rise to Power’, p. 149.

Yuan, Jing haifen ji, upper juan, pp. 3–5.

Ibid., pp. 5–6; Murray, ‘Cheng I Sao’, p. 210.

Rescripted memorial collection, First Historical Archives, Beijing, 1058/2, quoted in Murray, Pirates, p. 58.

Dian Murray, ‘Living and Working Conditions in Chinese Pirate Communities, 1750–1850’ in David Starkey, E.S. van Eyck van Heslinga, and J.A. De Moor (eds), Pirates and Privateers: New Perspectives on the War on Trade in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), p. 62.

Antony, Pirates, p. 41.

Zheng, Zhongguo, p. 308.

Yuan, Jing haifen ji, upper juan, p. 6.

Murray, ‘Cheng I Sao’, pp. 252–253.

Antony, Pirates, p. 42.

Rebecca Berens Matzke, Deterrence Through Strength: British Naval Power and Foreign Policy Under Pax Britannica (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), p. 47.

Dian Murray, ‘Guangdong de shuishang shijie: ta de shentai he jingji [The Cantonese Water World: Its Ecology and Economy]’, trans. Ping-tsun Chang, in Hsi-yung Tang (ed.) Zhongguo haiyang fazhanshi lunwenji (Collected Essays on the History of Chinese Maritime Development), Vol. 5 (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1994), pp. 147–148; Ernst J. Eitel, Europe in China: The History of Hong Kong from the Beginning to the Year 1882 (Hong Kong: Kelly & Walsh, 1885), pp. 131–132.

Susan Mann, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 4–7, 28–30.

Janice E. Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 20, 170; Kazuko Ono, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850–1950, translations edited by Joshua Fogel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 1–4.

Helen F. Siu and Zhiwei Liu, ‘Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan: Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of South China’, in Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton (eds), Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 285–291, 296–298.

Murray, ‘Cheng I Sao’, p. 207. Contrast this with characterisation of English piracy as ‘intensely masculine’ with the pirate ship as ‘a haven for male security’. See Appleby, Women and English Piracy, p. 88.

Robert Antony, Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), p. 132.

Extracts from the Pingyang xiangzhi (Gazetteer of Pingyang County), 1925 edition and the Maxiang tingzhi (Gazetteer of Maxiang subprefecture), translated by Lanshin Chang. See ‘Doc. 17: Cai Qian and Matron Cai Qian, early nineteenth century’ in Robert Antony (ed.), Pirates, pp. 119–120.

Murray, ‘Guangdong’, p. 148; Siu and Liu, ‘Lineage, Market, Pirate and Dan’, p. 292.

Antony, Unruly People, p. 26.

Joseph Mackay, ‘Pirate Nations: Maritime Pirates as Escape Societies in Late Imperial China’, Social Science History 37, no. 4 (2013), pp. 565–566.

Murray, Pirates, 140–145; idem, ‘One Woman’s Rise to Power’, p. 159.

Mann, Gender and Sexuality, p. 14.

See ibid., pp. 5–6.

Murray, ‘Cheng I Sao’, p. 212.

Chen, ‘Qingdai’, 123; Murray, ‘One Woman’s Rise to Power’, p. 159.

A.R. Johnston to Earl of Aberdeen, 21 October 1842, Colonial Office Records: Hong Kong, Original Correspondence CO 129/3, The National Archives (TNA), London, p. 149.

Frederic Wakeman, Jr. Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 23–25; Murakami, ‘Shijiu shiji’, p. 135.

Fanny Loviot, A Lady’s Captivity Among Chinese Pirates in the Chinese Seas, trans. Amelia B. Edwards (London: George Routledge & Co., 1858), p. 78.

Report by the Commander-in-Chief of the Guangdong Water Forces, undated (early 1850s), Foreign Office Records: Kwangtung Provincial Archives, FO 931/1047, TNA.

Report on the Arrest of He San Sao, author unknown, undated, FO 931/1254, TNA. Kowloon, the mainland peninsula on the opposite side of Victoria Harbour from Hong Kong, was then Qing territory.

Ibid.

Mann, Gender and Sexuality, 7.

Richard Lufrano, Honorable Merchants: Commerce and Self-Cultivation in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 1997), pp. 3–6, 35–38, 99.

FO 931/1254.

Appleby, Woman and English Piracy, pp. 52–54.

FO 931/1254.

G.B. Endacott, Government and People in Hong Kong, 1841–1962 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1964), pp. 33–38.

John M. Carroll, ‘Colonialism and Collaboration: Chinese Subjects and the Making of British Hong Kong’, China Information 12, nos. 1/2 (Summer/Autumn, 1997), pp. 17–18; Carl T. Smith, ‘Abandoned into Prosperity: Women on the Fringe of Expatriate Society’, in Helen F. Siu (ed.), Merchants’ Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), pp. 130–132.

See Carl T. Smith, ‘Protected Women in 19th-Century Hong Kong’, in Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (eds), Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude and Escape (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994): pp. 221–237.

I have only been able to find reference to Ng Akew in English language sources. The special exhibition ‘The Dragon and the Eagle: American Traders in China, a Century of Trade from 1784 to 1900’ at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum from 14 December 2018 to 14 April 2019 featured Akew, giving her Chinese name as Wu Ajiao.

Friend of China, 13 October 1849. In 1849, only Hong Kong, Macao and the five treaty ports (Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai) were open to foreign trade and residence.

Smith, ‘Abandoned into Prosperity’, p. 138.

China Mail, 27 September 1849; Friend of China, 13 October 1849.

China Mail, 27 September 1849. On Cumsingmoon, see Robert Nield, China’s Foreign Places: The Foreign Presence in China in the Treaty Port Era, 1840–1943 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), p. 82.

John W. Davis to Clayton, 26 September 1849, and Bonham to Davis, 9 October 1849, MS Despatches from the US Minister in China, Volume 5, National Archives (United States). Accessed through Nineteenth Century Collections Online: http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/96wG83

Xu Guangjin to Bonham, Daoguang reign (DG) 20th year/8th month/17th day (3 October 1849), Foreign Office Records: Superintendent of Trade, China Correspondence, FO 677/26, TNA, p. 83.

Friend of China, 13 October 1849.

China Mail, 27 September 1849.

Smith, ‘Abandoned into Prosperity’, p. 138; idem, ‘Protected Women’, p. 231.

Pottinger to Ellenborough, 3 May 1842, FO 17/56, quoted in Christopher Munn, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1880 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), p. 33.

John M. Carroll, The Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 48.

Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), p. 50.

Arnold J. Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America, 1847–1874 (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation, 2004), pp. 77–81.

Po-keung Hui, ‘Comprador Politics and Middleman Capitalism’, in Tak-wing Ngo (ed.), Hong Kong’s History: State and Society Under Colonial Rule (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 34.

Munn, Anglo-China, p. 48.

Smith, ‘Protected Women’, p. 231.

Edmund Sharp, Minute on CSO 1458, 3 June 1881, Edward O’Malley Papers, FOL. DS796.H757 OMA, Vol. 7, Foyle Special Collections Library, King’s College London.

James William Norton-Kyshe, The History of the Laws and Courts of Hong Kong, Vol. II (Hong Kong: Noronha and Company, 1898), p. 317.

See Elizabeth Sinn, ‘Women at Work: Chinese Brothel Keepers in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong’, Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 3 (2007): pp. 87–111.

Ibid., p. 97.

Smith, ‘Abandoned into Prosperity’, pp. 138–139.

Idem, ‘Protected Women’, p. 232.

Memorial by Xu Guangjin, DG 30/4/22 (2 June 1850), FO 931/1202, TNA.

Imperial Edict to the Grand Council, DG 30/5/dingsi day (5 July 1850) in Qingshilu [Veritable Histories of the Qing], Xianfeng Reign, juan 10.

Ono, Chinese Women, pp. 8–10.

From China Mail, 9 August 1855 and Peking Gazette, 15 August 1855, quoted in Douglas Sellick (ed.), Pirate Outrages: True Stories of Terror on the China Seas (Fremantle, Australia: Fremantle Press, 2010), p. 147.

Hay to Collier, 23 October 1849, Admiralty Records, China Station Records ADM 125/145, TNA, p. 99.

China Mail, 28 September 1848.

China Mail, 4 October 1849.

Chappell, ‘Maritime Raiding’, p. 481.

FO 931/1202.

Supplement to the Canton Register, 10 March 1842.

Murakami, ‘Shijiu shiji’, p. 134.

Antony, Robert (ed.), Pirates in the Age of Sail (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007)

Antony, Robert, ‘State, Community, and Pirate Suppression in Guangdong Province, 1809–1810’, Late Imperial China 27, no. 1 (2006): pp. 1–30CrossRef

Antony, Robert, Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2003)

Antony, Robert, Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016)CrossRef

Appleby, John C., Women and English Piracy, 1540–1720: Partners and Victims of Crime (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013)

Carroll, John M. ‘Colonialism and Collaboration: Chinese Subjects and the Making of British Hong Kong’, China Information 12, nos. 1/2 (Summer/Autumn, 1997): pp. 12–33

Chappell, Jonathan, ‘Maritime Raiding, International Law and Suppression of Piracy on the South China Coast, 1842–1869’, International History Review 40, no. 3 (2018): pp. 473–492CrossRef

Chen, Yu-hsiang, ‘Qingdai zhongye Guangdong haidao zhi yanjiu (1810–1885) [A Study of Guangdong Pirates in the Mid-Qing Dynasty, 1810–1885]’, Chengda lishi xuebao 34 (June 2008): pp. 93–130

Dawdy, Shannon Lee and Joe Bonni, ‘Towards a General Theory of Piracy’, Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 3 (2012): pp. 673–699CrossRef

Eitel, Ernst J., Europe in China: The History of Hong Kong from the Beginning to the Year 1882 (Hong Kong: Kelly & Walsh, 1885)

Endacott, G. B, Government and People in Hong Kong, 1841–1962 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1964)

Hui, Po-keung, ‘Comprador Politics and Middleman Capitalism’ in Tak-wing Ngo (ed.), Hong Kong’s History: State and Society Under Colonial Rule (London: Routledge, 1999): pp. 30–45

Loviot, Fanny, A Lady’s Captivity Among Chinese Pirates in the Chinese Seas, trans. Amelia B. Edwards (London: George Routledge & Co., 1858)

Lufrano, Richard, Honorable Merchants: Commerce and Self-Cultivation in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997)

Mackay, Joseph, ‘Pirate Nations: Maritime Pirates as Escape Societies in Late Imperial China’, Social Science History 37, no. 4 (Winter 2013): pp. 551–573

Mann, Susan, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRef

Matzke, Rebecca Berens, Deterrence Through Strength: British Naval Power and Foreign Policy Under Pax Britannica (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011)CrossRef

Meagher, Arnold J., The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America, 1847–1874(Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation, 2008)

Munn, Christopher, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1880 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009)

Murakami, Ei, ‘Shijiu shiji zhongye Huanan yanhai zhixu de chongbian: Min-Yue haidao yu Yingguo haijun [Reassessing Order on the South China Coast in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Guangdong and Fujian Pirates and the Royal Navy]’, Zhongguoshi yanjiu, 44 (October 2006): 131–148

Murray, Dian, ‘Cheng I Sao in Fact and Fiction’ in Jo Stanley (ed.) Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages (London: Harper Collins, 1995): pp. 203–239

Murray, Dian, ‘Guangdong de shuishang shijie: ta de shentai he jingji [The Cantonese Water World: Its Ecology and Economy]’, trans. Ping-tsun Chang in Tang Hsi-yung, (ed.) Zhongguo haiyang fazhanshi lunwenji (Collected Essays on the History of Chinese Maritime Development), Vol. 5 (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1994): pp. 145–170

Murray, Dian ‘Living and Working Conditions in Chinese Pirate Communities, 1750–1850’ in David Starkey, E.S. van Eyck van Heslinga, and J.A. De Moor (eds) Pirates and Privateers: New Perspectives on the War on Trade in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997): pp. 47–68

Murray, Dian, ‘One Woman’s Rise to Power: Cheng Is Wife and the Pirates’, Historical Reflections 8, no. 3 (1981): pp. 147–161

Murray, Dian, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987)

Nield, Robert, China’s Foreign Places: The Foreign Presence in China in the Treaty Port Era, 1840–1943 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015)CrossRef

Norton-Kyshe, James William, The History of the Laws and Courts of Hong Kong, Vol. II (Hong Kong: Noronha and Company, 1898)

Ono, Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850–1950, translations edited by Joshua Fogel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989)

Sellick, Douglas (ed.), Pirate Outrages: True Stories of Terror on the China Seas (Fremantle, Australia: Fremantle Press, 2010)

Sinn, Elizabeth, ‘Women at Work: Chinese Brothel Keepers in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong’, Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 3 (2007): pp. 87–111CrossRef

Sinn, Elizabeth, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012)

Siu, Helen F. and Zhiwei Liu, ‘Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan: Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of South China’, in Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton (eds), Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006): pp. 285–310

Smith, Carl T., ‘Abandoned into Prosperity: Women on the Fringe of Expatriate Society’ in Helen F. Siu (ed.), Merchants’ Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010): pp. 129–142

Smith, Carl T., ‘Protected Women in 19th-Century Hong Kong’ in Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (eds), Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude and Escape (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994): pp. 221–237

Stockard, Janice E., Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989)CrossRef

Wakeman, Jr. Frederic, Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966)

Wang, Wensheng, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)CrossRef

Yuan, Yonglun, Jing haifen ji [Account of Clearing the Sea of Foam] (1830), reprinted in Kwok-kin Siu and Wing Kin Puk, (eds) ‘Jing haifen ji yuanwen biaodian jianzhu [An Annotation of the Account of Clearing the Sea of Foam]’, Tianye yu wenxian: Huanan yanjiu ziliao zhongxin tongxun 46 (January 2007): pp. 8–20

Zheng, Guangnan, Zhongguo haidao shi [History of Chinese Piracy] (Shanghai: Huadong ligong daxue chubanshe, 1998)

Title: In the Business of Piracy: Entrepreneurial Women Among Chinese Pirates in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Author: C. Nathan Kwan
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33411-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-33412-3

Copyright Year: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33412-3_8