The World of the South China Sea

The South China Sea is one of the busiest waterways on Earth. It stretches from the coast of Vietnam in the west to the Philippines in the east. To the north lies the coast of China, and to the south lie the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

For thousands of years, traders have sailed these waters. Chinese junks carried silk, porcelain, and tea to ports across Southeast Asia. In return, spices, tropical wood, and exotic goods flowed back to China.

The city of Canton, now called Guangzhou, sat at the center of this trade. Canton was one of the richest cities in the world in the eighteenth century. Foreign merchants from Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands all competed for access to its markets.

The Qing dynasty ruled China during this period. The Qing emperors were Manchu, not Han Chinese. They had conquered China in 1644 and built one of the largest empires in the world. By the late 1700s, however, the Qing dynasty was beginning to weaken.

Corruption spread through the imperial bureaucracy. Tax collectors squeezed peasants and fishermen for every coin they could extract. The gap between rich and poor widened year by year. In the coastal provinces, many people lived in desperate poverty.

The fishing communities along the Guangdong coast were among the poorest in China. Entire families lived on small boats called sampans. They were born on the water, worked on the water, and died on the water. The imperial government called them the Tanka people, and it treated them as outcasts.

Tanka families were forbidden from living on land in many areas. They could not take the imperial examinations that led to government jobs. They were locked out of mainstream Chinese society by law and by custom. For generations, they had no path to a better life.

Piracy offered an alternative. If you could not rise through legal means, the sea provided its own economy. Pirate fleets raided merchant ships, extorted fishing villages, and smuggled goods past imperial patrols. For many coastal poor, joining a pirate crew was a rational economic decision.

The waters of the South China Sea were ideal for piracy. Thousands of islands, inlets, and river mouths provided hiding places. Dense fog and sudden storms made pursuit difficult. A fast junk with a skilled crew could vanish into the coastline in minutes.

Meanwhile, the opium trade was beginning to reshape the region. British merchants shipped opium from India to China in enormous quantities. The drug was illegal in China, but the profits were so vast that the trade grew every year. Smuggling networks stretched along the entire southern coast.

This was the world that produced Zheng Yi Sao. A world of vast wealth and grinding poverty, separated by a thin strip of ocean. A world where empires competed, and the law of the sea belonged to whoever was strong enough to enforce it.

The European powers saw China as a market to be cracked open. The Qing government saw the Europeans as barbarians to be managed. And the pirates of the South China Sea saw opportunity in the chaos between them.

By 1790, pirate fleets in the South China Sea numbered in the hundreds of ships. They were not disorganized criminals. Many operated as disciplined naval forces with hierarchies and codes of conduct. The largest of these forces was about to become the most powerful pirate fleet in history.