1. Ching Shih: The Pirate Queen who ruled the seas

Ching Shih: The Pirate Queen Who Ruled the Seas | She Changed History

In this episode of 'She Changed History,' Vicky and Simon explore the incredible story of Ching Shih, the Pirate Queen who defied expectations and ruled the seas in the early 1800s. From her beginnings in a floating brothel to commanding a fleet of thousands, Ching Shih's story is one of ambition, intelligence, and sheer determination. Discover how she navigated the treacherous waters of piracy, implemented a strict code of conduct, and ultimately secured a peaceful retirement with her loot intact. Dive into the life of one of history’s most successful and fascinating female pirates.

Sources today are:

• History rae told https://historyraetold.com/ching-shih
• History Hit article by Lucy Davidson Nov 2021
• National Geographic Overheard Podcast Episode March 2022 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/overheard/article/queens-of-the-high-seas
• Miltary.com Article by Blake Stilwell 2023
• Atlas Obsura Article by Urvija Banerji 2016 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ching-shih-chinese-female-pirate

00:00 Pirate Eyepatch Myth Busted

01:17 Introduction to She Changed History

01:53 Meet Ching Shih: The Pirate Queen

03:58 The Rise of Chinese Piracy

06:55 Ching Shih's Early Life and Marriage

10:24 Power Moves and Pirate Politics

16:52 Ching Shih's Code of Conduct

17:46 Strict Pirate Code and Brutal Punishments

18:17 Fair Distribution of Loot

20:28 Revenue Streams and Naval Battles

21:55 Torture and Expansion of the Red Flag Fleet

24:23 Ching Shih's Female Warriors and Peak Power

26:47 Retirement and Negotiations with the Chinese Government

32:03 Legacy and Lessons from Ching Shih

35:26 Conclusion and Listener Engagement

Transcript

0:07

Oh, I've got a pirate fact. Oh my gosh, tell me. Pirate fact, right? Um, about eyepatches. So, I always assumed that pirates wear eyepatches because they've been fighting. And lost an eye. Skewered in the eye and lost an eye, yeah. Nah, nah, nah. Apparently, they wear eyepatches, um, so that one of their eyes is permanently sort of in the darkness and therefore adjusted to low light conditions. Because then when they board a ship that they want to rob from or take over or something, when they go underneath and it's dark down there, they can just whip their eye patch off and immediately see better in the dark. You know it takes you a few minutes for your vision to adjust to the darkness. So that's my little pirate fact. It's amazing. Also, it makes me think you'd have a massive headache if you couldn't seem to do different things all the time. But if that's true, then yes, love that. I've got new headphones and a new webcam. So it's premium, premium Simon is here to stay. I love it. I'm ready. Let's do this. Hello. Hello. And welcome to She Changed History. I'm Vicky. I'm Simon. And we are here just to share some history stories, really. Just histories from women that you may not know, but they are the most audacious and fantastic women, and we think you should know about them. We tell each other a story each week, this week's story is Particularly audacious and particularly cool and, um, it's a little bit out there as well. So I'm really excited to tell you, are you ready? What have you got for us this time? It's called Ching Shih, The Pirate Queen Who Ruled The Seas. Yeah, that's a strong title. That's brilliant. So imagine a world dominated by women pirates, a world where fearless and fierce female captain commanded a fleet of thousands, outsmarting and outgunning the most powerful navies of her time. Meet Ching Li, the most successful pirate captain in history. From humble beginnings to a life of plunder and power, her story is one of audacity, ambition, and unwavering determination. Join us as we delve into the life and legend of Ching Shi, the pirate queen who defied expectations and ruled the seas. Boom. Incredible. I love it. I was so excited to tell you. Um, I sent you a picture of Ching Shih and she looks both audacious, ambitious, and determined in that photograph. She looks lovely. We've got a ray of sources today. The main ones I'm going to hit on are a National Geographic podcast episode from March, 2022, which is called overheard a history hit article by Lucy Davidson, which is November, 2021, and a history rate old article by this guy who tells history in a blog, and it's hilarious. And I kept it in because it was just the best. So, uh, and there's going to be other ones that are, we'll put them in the notes at the bottom. I can't even guess what sort of time this is from, a pirate, pirate queen, Chinese or Asian? Absolutely. So she's Chinese, which is really, I don't know anything about Chinese history. So we're going to learn a lot together. We're in the early 1800s, which is the Georgian era for us, but we're in China. But Ching Shih was actually born in 1775. And so there's going to be two timelines I'm going to share with you. I'm going to share with you the Chinese history timeline, and then I'm going to explain. What Ching was up to and how that links in. Yeah. Cause I think it's important that you need to know, need to know both. Let's start with the Chinese one. So originally piracy in China was basically a side hustle, but for fishermen. So the fishing season tended to be really good in the winter, but rubbish in the summer because of the monsoons, so you couldn't go fishing when there was a ton of monsoons happening. So come the summer, the fishermen were like. I don't know what to do. You know what we'll do? We'll loot. We'll, we'll steal some stuff. So it was very like a seasonal, like, um, you know, that summer when you're like year 11, year 12, year 13, then you have like three months, you can pick a job for three months. It's that, um, piracy. Yeah. So piracy was that in China for a long time. Um, a typical pirate crew might have a couple of dozen men on one ship. Um, but by the end of the 1700s, the Chinese pirates would become very powerful. So there was lots of these speckled ships around the sea, but what would happen is they would team up with a rebel group and they would overthrow the government of Vietnam. So already quite a big event happening. And then in return, um, the pirates got financing from the rebel group and they got experience in battles. So by 1800, this had grown and grown and grown to a couple of speckled pirates around the sea to full on squadrons, fleets, you know, that was a real turning point in the history. More like a Navy. Yeah. And also I think overthrowing the government helped. That's always, always one big thing, isn't it? But even with the squadrons and fleets, they still fought each other in those squadrons and fleets. They killed each other off. There was battles, like classic pirate movie images in your head right now. Pirate gang warfare. Absolutely. Lots of screaming, lots of bits of gunpowder here, all that kind of stuff. And then eventually they got smart, which is just what you were saying. And they ended up teaming up and collaborating. And that's when I, the Confederation came in. And the pirates agreed to work together. The confederation was another turning point in the Chinese pirate history. And it's when it became a little bit more professional. So it's like, now you're in graduate job stage. Yeah. So you've done your A levels, you've gone to uni up here. And now we're in our first proper big job. So, The confederation outlined some ground rules, for example, there was a policy on how to register your boats. If you needed to talk to a boss, you had to go through this specific system of how to get to the boss. Piracy wasn't part time anymore, it was becoming really professional. Professional piracy. Yeah, we're ready, we're organized, we've got, we've got paperwork. We're sorted. I've registered my boat. Oh, what more do you want from me? So this is sounding less and less piratey. You wait, just you wait. So this is when Ching Shih comes into that picture. Um, she, I'm going to call her Ching Shih throughout, but she had many names. So she had her original name. She had a married name and things like that. Ching 1775 in the coastal city of Guangzhou with Which, as Europeans would know as Kandahar, the city was so overcrowded that it actually spilled into the water. So what ended up happening was there's like these floating villages, which sounds beautiful. Sounds cool. It sounds very Disney, very stunning that you could live on a little village on the, on, I imagine a calm lake. People just sort of wafting about, a bit of fishing, maybe sort of plaiting flowers and things like that. Gorgeous. I'm guessing it's not quite like that. I don't know, I didn't see any photos, but let's, you know, let's keep that in our minds. So pretty much anything you could do on land, you could also do there. And that included visiting a brothel. So, I know, so they had floating brothels, which they called flower boats. Classic Disney. Flower boats. That's so cute. Darling, I'm just popping to the flower boat. And she wouldn't question that. She'd be like, of course you can go to the flower boat. Ideal. So Ching Shih actually became part of these brothels. She became famous quite quickly in her area due to her brothels. Beauty, poise, wit, and hospitality. These attracted several high profile customers, such as Royal courtiers, military commanders, and rich merchants. We're going to learn a little bit about Ching Shih's personality throughout this. Um, so pick up on these things that I'm saying are just from my, remember them for later. So Ching Shih apparently used her secrets. She learned it to, uh, whilst prostituting to wield power over her wealthy and political connected clients. That is sensible. Honey trap, but for herself. Absolutely. Um, just point out, we don't have any Chinese sources for this, but that is kind of the tale that was built and you'll see later on that is probably true because of what else happens in her story. She used this to her advantage. One of her clients was the leader of the pirate confederation. So that thing that we've just spoken about getting set up. His name was Zeng Yi. Eventually he married So Ching from Canton. There's two stories about this. One is the classic, he asked her to be his wife, classic, you know, Disney still. But the other version is that, um, Ching basically persuaded him and she sought him out, she, position herself very strategically that he would be one of her customers and she planned this from the start. Uh, this adds to her portrayal as a highly astute planner and a political operator who recognizes and exploits situations for her own benefit. Um, either way they get married. So. I want to believe the latter of those. Yeah, I mean, I base this on nothing. I would like to believe that the latter is true. You're talking about pirate confederations and flower boat brothels. My mind has gone off Disney now. Yeah, fair, fair, fair. You know, if she's a, you know, higher end client, she's in that position, that's, that's good sense. Yeah. If anything, it makes me like her more, that side of the story. Yeah. You've got a bit of edge. You've got a bit of grit about you. I quite enjoy that. So Ching's gone from working on a floating flower boat to co running a pirate fleet, right? She, when she got married, she demanded equal control of this pirate fleet as a condition of that marriage. Oh yeah. That's definitely true. Yeah. They got married in 1801. Uh, Marie says in one of the sources where, uh, business acumen starts to display itself in a way she became the overall head of the entire confederation. So power, power has happened to Sheng Xi, which is brilliant. And it kind of what we were just saying there, like, I think what we were trying to get at is this rare or is this, was this the sign of the times, you know, 1800s China? And one of the articles described female pirate leaders as a rare phenomenon. There was only one other woman commander, a Mrs. Hon Cholo, who was active in Hong Kong in the first half of the 20th century. Okay, so quite a bit later then. Yeah, so pirate, female pirate leaders were a thing, but yeah, maybe they were rare and maybe that does lead to some of her tenacity as well. Hmm. And that's maybe my sort of unconscious bias coming along. But if you ask me to think of a pirate, I think of a peg leg man with a big old beard. You think Pug Wash Okay. Yeah, pug Wash, captain Hook, black Beard, you know. Yeah, all of that, and like shanties and burly fishermen and all that. A hundred percent. You don't think, yeah, absolutely not. So now we have a married couple running the red flag fleet. That's what it's going to be called. I'm going to stumble on that a lot. So it turns out when you're a pirate captain, your chances of reaching old age are very slim, which means trying to make a pirate dynasty is very tricky. So the best that you can do is basically make a A baby pirate, ideally a boy, and then, you know, if for whatever reason you don't make it to adulthood, you've got someone to give you a legacy, but this didn't happen with Ching Shih and her husband. So in order to secure her husband's legacy, what he decided to do was, and it's very important here, adoption slash kidnap a sexy young fisherman. There's a lot to unpack there, yeah. Like adoption rules were a bit different back then. Well, good question. So, the sexy young fisherman was called Shung Po, and he was going to be the sun and the air. But Jinx has been basically, so he was like late teens, early twenties, like he had already had quite an established upbringing on the boats. He was a fisherman, you know, he, that's why kidnap is probably very important. Yeah. That sounds pretty sensible. Cause I guess being a pirate baby, I mean, you're quite easy to drop overboard or. I must be a dangerous life being uh, the pirate captain. Also you're not contributing to the ship are you? Yeah, it doesn't really explain why they chose to do that apart from they wanted to secure that legacy and quickly. So, um, Jungpo came into the, into the scene. Adult adoption was actually, you know, a perfectly normal thing to do. In Chinese culture at the time, they trained, it says here, Cheng Po had a great adult childhood on the ship, training to be a pirate captain. And it says also for some reason, Shagen, his adopted pirate dad. So that also happened. It's very important to note that the husband and the adoptive son had sexual relationships, and that was less common. Like the adopting, the adopting things fine, the sexual choices. Sleeping with your new dad less so. Yeah, I try not to think about it. Too much. It's, you kind of, was it a hole I wanted to go down in the research? No, no, it wasn't. It was a hole he wanted to go down. We should cut that out. No, I enjoyed it. Stay in. Um, so six years into their marriage, the husband dies. Um, that is at the age of 44. To not know, not much is known about how he passed away. I've put in my notes here. Suspicious. Sounds suspicious. Sounds suspicious. Some accounts indicate that he was killed at sea by tsunami while others insinuate that he was murdered in Vietnam. Um, by who? doesn't answer that question either which makes me think, I don't know, if he's got these relations going on and maybe there was some jealousy, I don't know, I'm speculating. Yeah, it could have been a tsunami, it sounds more like Desperate Housewives kind of scandal. Yeah, absolutely. So regardless of the circumstances, his death left Ching Shih in a very precarious position and the red flag fleet without a captain so a point of jeopardy the obvious choice was shang po her son slash ex boyfriend of the dad as he is the second in command but ching shi was having none of this which i fully appreciate so she Stick with me here. She decided to marry the adopted son. So he's been having relations with the dad and now he's together with the mum. And the reason she does that is because that cements Ching Shih's, that cements her leadership. Like it's a sensible power move. Absolutely. And I'm really glad he's adopted. And also probably get one, get one over on her husband, maybe. Maybe, I don't know. It's an enormous relief he's adopted slash kidnapped. Oh my gosh. This story would not make it on the podcast. Um, so with the second marriage, she takes control of the red flag fleet in its entirety. The. Pirate confederation was powerful, but precarious. The system was mostly based on personal relationships. And if the other pirates turned on her, it could all fall apart. So she could put her admin skills to work. Qingxi first did a couple of things to kind of secure her power. She wanted to cement this and cement it hard and quickly. So what she did was. implement this thing called a code of conduct. I don't know if you've seen like movies like Pirate of the Caribbean. It's quite common in movies that they say the pirate code and it's this elusive thing. This comes directly from Ching Shih. This is her code. Yeah. Do you want to learn about the code? Tell me more about the code. Would you like some pirate code specifics? So only Ching Shih could authorize an attack, number one. If there was any other attacks that she didn't action, the people who put those in would be punished by beheadings. So she, she decides who, what, where, and when. If you deserted your post, your ears were going to be cut off. If you deserted your post two times, you would then be beheaded. Okay, I'm guessing beheading comes up quite a bit in these. It's a theme, I would say. Okay, yeah. If, um, you raped anyone, you would be beheaded. Good. If you had consensual sex without Ching Shih's permission, that also meant a beheading. Oh, she really did want power over it all, didn't she? Oh my gosh, she wanted everything. So the man would be beheaded and the female partner would be sent to sleep with the fish. Which, um, makes me laugh a lot. Um, pirates had to marry female prisoners before they could be ravaged. Cheating on your new spouse or treating her poorly was beheading. But probably the most important part of the code was that the loot, any loot that was gathered by superiors. would be distributed fairly. So if you didn't do this, you would get beaten. But then if you did it again and again and again, so if you tried to keep the loop for yourself, I guess, 100 percent right. So you would have, you would have been there. You would have sorted this out. I mean, it's, it's brutal, obviously, apart from something it's difficult to. I'm not saying I endorse beheading. I've got to be careful here because I don't actually want to behead anyone. So we just put that on the baseline. Yeah. Yeah, just for the record. Don't want to behead anyone, but like a punishment for raping. That's yeah, that's fine. And then the other things sound really sensible when you've got such a rabble on your hands, as I'd imagine pirates are and keeping that semblance of control, but, you know, That's a really good carrot, the way that it's all dealt out equally. So, like, removing that incentive for people to go on there, do their own thing, or revolt against the leader, sort of, keeping them all happy. Everyone pull your weight, you'll all get something. Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons she became So popular and her power spread so wide. So whenever they unloaded their stolen treasure, there was a system for dividing it up fairly. That's the trick, isn't it? So 20 percent of the captured goods would be allotted to the people who actually did it. So that's like the booty. And then so the remainder 80 percent went to communal treasuries and the article I was reading actually Compared it to a Scandinavian welfare system that we have today. So she was definitely on the right money. Norwegian wealth fund or something. Yeah, I think it does sound like that. Doesn't it? Yeah. And I guess I don't, I've never been a pirate, but I suppose if there's a particular bounty that you really want before this, you would have killed other pirates to get there first. You're all racing for that, for that jackpot, aren't you? But in this case, you just, you get some danger money for actually doing it. But otherwise, nobody's losing out. So in those days, the pirates had a lot of booty to pay out. They created a steady revenue stream by forcing the, this is the thing I like, like it wasn't just one revenue stream. You've got lots of revenue streams. So they forced other ships to pay an expensive fee for not being attacked. Um, they even issued official. passports to the ships that paid up. Fishermen wanted a piece of that so in groups of hundreds at a time they gave up fishing and then joined the Jinxi's fleet. And one of Jinxi's favorites, favorite tactics was to sneak up on an unsuspecting ship. And if you couldn't outrun the pirates, you'd better surrender anyway. So otherwise they'd have no mercy on you whatsoever. The fighting was primarily like hand to hand. They did have some, Cannons and guns, but they weren't au fait really in that kind of thing. And then one of the things that really made me laugh was that pirates also improvised stink bombs out of gunpowder. So like when you were in year seven at school, they did that, they did that. And it worked because. They would distract them and then they would catch the crew, tie the crew up and beat them and then steal all the loot. That's embarrassing if you get caught out by a stink bomb. It's so cartoon, comical isn't it? Yeah. A lot of the things that are doing sound like the Mafia, maybe not the modern Mafia as such, but like the protection racket stuff. Sounds quite mob like. But by far the worst torture was saved for the Chinese Navy. By this point, the pirates had grown so powerful that the Chinese Navy didn't really have enough money or manpower to stop the pirates attacks. The Chinese should really have learned how to say that. King Q U I N G. dynasty naturally wanted to put an end to the red flag fleet. How big was the red flag fleet at its peak? How many ships did you get on board? It's peaked, well, 2000 ships, 80, 000 men. So we're talking a lot. That is An awful amount. It's like a city, isn't it? Like a moving city. Mandarin Navy vessels were sent out to confront the Red Flag Fleet in the South China Sea, but after just a few hours, they were decimated by the Red Flag Fleet. And Ching Shih used the opportunity to announce that the Mandarin crew would not be punished if they joined the Red Flag Fleet. So that's how she was growing so quickly. And that's how she amassed this floating system in the Sea. So the Red Flag Fleet grew And, uh, King Destiny lost a huge portion of his navy. If they had any government or military officials on board, they loved beheading them, which is probably not a surprise. Uh, sometimes they would take their hearts out and eat them because they thought it would give them that military prowess. So again, it's all about power, isn't it? Yeah, that is brutal. That sounds quite in line with Chinese medicine. And like how they'll grate up a rhino horn or something to give them extra vigour. So another thing they did was they would turn navy sailors into shark food. By sailing, by nailing their feet into the deck, hacking them to pieces and throwing them out in the water. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. Oh, flippin heck. Yeah, so this absolutely torturous reign carried on for about three years. Do you think it was the rules that kept people in line? Were they all like, oh actually this is pretty nice, we'll just go along with this? Was it the overwhelming threat of violence? Was there any sort of uprising against her that, that was planned? Or how did she protect herself from all of this? That's Some people must have been unhappy about the headings. I don't know, I think it's quite a cushty life, isn't it, as well? You've got to think their alternative is fishing for six months of the year. I maybe it's just a more lucrative life. Yeah. It sounds like a lot of them were blackmailed and coerced into it anyway, so they probably didn't get any choice. But it's important to note that there are lots of women in her pirate clans led by Ching Shih. For example, they, you know, They do the cooking, the laundry, um, many of the male pirates even brought their wives and kids along to the ships. They did live in extremely close quarters. Sometimes an entire family would be in a really small area, so like four by four. But it's really important to note that women's weren't always stuck in these supporting roles. Ching Shih also led a group of warriors, female warriors, and they were very faithful to Ching Shih. They would always stand by her side when they were fighting. And they'd fight battles together, so very much like this, yeah, very tribal, yeah, like very tribal, very, there's always like those power scenes in movies, isn't there, where they start at the heels and then they scan up to these women in amazing power suits and stuff like that is very much women against the world.

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so Ching, she's in like her peak, right? She's got her Amazonian women around her. She's got, millions of people and ships and everything. She's living her best life. The emperor of China. Meanwhile, he's an unhappy bunny. Not having a great time. completely humiliated that a woman of all things was controlling an enormous part of the land, the sea, the people, and the resources, which technically belonged to, to him. Obviously all these attacks weren't really working either, because he just kept losing the navy every time he put them in. he did attempt a peace offering, to the pirates of the Red Flag Fleet he put this like olive branch out to Ching Shih, at the same time the fleet came under attack. by the Portuguese Navy. So the Portuguese Navy, they're pissed because they've been defeated twice before. So Ching's already had them twice. Oh, by Ching Chee? I, I guess they've got a lot of trade and shipping across there as well, aren't they? So they're interested around the world. Yeah. So this time they've come prepared with, superior supply of ship and weapons. As a result, the red flag fleet was absolutely devastated. Wow. Cause I guess it's still just a collection of fishing boats and things like that. Overwhelming them with numbers and stink bombs, but against a properly equipped Navy, it's probably a bit more difficult. So, the way she retires is by accepting this offer from the Chinese government. So I think it was like serendipity that they almost happened at the same point and she was like, well, I've got a really easy out right here. I've got this great offer on the table. But that doesn't mean she just accepts the offer from the Chinese. She then uses all her skills that we've learned all the way from her young adolescence up to now to negotiate her way to a very, very cushy retirement. she agrees that the government will stop trying to kill her, number one. the, quite an important one to get on the list. Absolutely, this is going to work. It's amazing that, so the government's just making her an offer to stop rather than pursuing, destroying her, eliminating her. They're just at this point doing anything to get her. They're just like, calm down Cheng. Wow. Calm down. God's sake Cheng. They pardoned almost her entire crew, which according to this source was about 17, 000 people at this point. Maybe because they couldn't hold them all because that's so many, isn't it? For someone so keen on beheading, that's a very altruistic thing to do, isn't it? Not just worried about herself. Also, they let her keep all the stuff that she's stolen, like all the loo, all the, all the jewels and the whatever that she's got it. She doesn't have to give any of it up, even though she stole them, most likely from him Yeah. And then on top of that, she wants them to pay a very comfortable pension for the rest of her years. She's incredible. And the reason she justifies that, look, I've given you my ship I'll, you can keep my ship, you can park my ship there, but I want you to pay me for giving you the ship back. And that's how she works it. So she's like, it's fascinating. It's so cool that she managed to twist that.

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Isn't it?

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It makes me think about, like, we talk a lot in the UK about people of privilege and the, like the Oxbridge crew and the Eaton crew fill up so many positions of power and the number of public school people who end up in government. And

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so it's.

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Still to this day, there are lots of politicians and leaders who haven't had that privilege upbringing, but still seems to be more so, or at least a good combination of both privilege and ability, but then you think of all these people who've got an innate ability. To be, I don't want to say wonderful, because it sounds like she killed a lot of people, We're not endorsing, you know, that side of it. But she was clearly, socially very smart, business wise very smart. She was really good at controlling and manipulating and managing people. Um, negotiating. She had all of these skills that if she'd have started off with some privilege, I wonder what she could have then done. Becoming like a legitimate enterprise rather than piracy, but she just made the best out of what she had, didn't she? Yeah, I love that. I think leaders, not all leaders, obviously, they have this certain amount of charisma. So she must have had something about her. She must have done. Indice all those women to support her as well, or to hold that back. There must have been something, what's the word? Enigmatic? Enigma? Enigmatic? Yeah. Around her. Yeah. And like, coming up, and you think that prostitution, I'm, my main reference for prostitution actually is Les Mis, where, like, when everything's gone wrong, the only thing you can turn to is, selling your body. But to then use that as an opportunity. And this is what we were saying in the last episode. Yeah, so the last episode we were saying, sometimes you have nothing to lose and sometimes that's a really good position to start from, isn't it? Freighting, isn't it? Yeah, well, yeah, I've never really been in that situation, but I imagine it's like quite, you know what I mean? Like Yeah. It's a theme, it's just an interesting theme. as part of her negotiations, negotiation skills, she gets the government to annul the adoption of her son slash husband. So she no longer is officially his mother and she could actually marry him for marrying him. You know what I mean? So that makes the whole, is it, I feel like, that's better? I think it's a little bit better? It's slightly better, yeah. And I feel more comfortable about it as well because it sounds like they didn't know him when he was an actual child. Like they didn't raise him. He was just a sexy fisherman. You know, he was just a sexy fisherman and I've seen some sexy fishermen and you know, so you want to make it a three. She, she took them off on this offer, which why you, why wouldn't you take them from this offer that you've managed to get all your boxes ticked? Absolutely. All the benefits of pirating without ever having to be a pirate. Insane. And, um, so then she goes into retirement. What she does with her retirement is she opens a casino. And then the casino has a bit of like a brothel on the side, because you know, that's, that's where we know her from competencies. We know that, uh, Xiong Po raised through the military ranks, so he actually joined the, he went legit, and they actually had a son together. we also know that Ching Shih died peacefully at the age of 69, and apparently she was a businesswoman until the end. Wow. And that's kind of where her story ends. You don't really hear much about Ching Shih as the pirate. Like you said, when you think pirates, you think Jack Sparrow, Blackbeard, you think all these things. You don't think of this, this insane story with a gazillion twists and turns. apparently she got a cameo played by Takako Fisher in the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, but they didn't really name her and it didn't really. That seems like a missed opportunity. Yeah, because this Bloody story. It didn't touch that on at all. It's probably for the best, actually, because it's like this story ain't Disney, is it? It's not, um, yeah. It's not Jack Sparrow fumbling through, with a pineapple in his hand or whatever. It's not the same. It's not the same. However, it's one of the best stories I've ever read. read and learn, and who knew that she was the most successful pirate of the sea, hands down. Ever. If you're talking about people of all time, if you're talking about people, resources, battles, when she's top, top of the tables, top trumps all around. And such a graceful exit from it as well. Such a stomper of an exit. How cool is that? But yeah, it's very, It's so interesting, and I think we should all shout about her. Yeah. What sort of little bit of uh, Ching Chi inspiration are you going to take from this? What can we learn from Ching Chi in the modern world? Oh my gosh, what a question, what can we learn from Ching Chi? Negotiate your bottom off in every scenario, because you're probably going to get it, I'm really taken by the

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Um,

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sharing out of loot and how she organized that, that, not knowing much about it, I would guess that played a big role in keeping that company together. Cause like if you run it as a dictatorship, dictatorships fail. Cause eventually people get tired of it. And eventually there's enough of, an uprising from one side or another to put an end to it. So you've got to keep people happy. And it wasn't. Obviously wasn't best for her in the short term or best for the individuals in the short term to be Sharing out this loot. Oh god, that's much more profound than mine I think I heard something from one of my business mentors the other day She was like you get to decide what leader you want to be and you know, just because Bill Gates leads a certain way, or just because somebody in your industry has led a certain way before. Like, you made the rules. You don't have to be this 5am hustle club. You don't have to be, um, like you say, the greedy cat. Why can't you give your wealth away? And why can't you share that out? And, actually maybe she made her own rules and that's quite cool. Yeah, that's great. And we're maybe moving away from, I hope we're moving away from like the alpha male, well definitely from the beheadings. We haven't beheaded anyone in my company for at least a year. But yeah, this sort of more altruistic, everyone, there's some phrase about when the tide rises, everyone rises with it. Yeah, I like, I generally like her approach. She's a short cookie. Thank you. And thank you for listening thanks for listening. Leave us some comments. Rate, review, subscribe, all those things. If you have a story that you want to share with us, please do. We've set up a Gmail now because we're very organized. It's SheChangedHistory at gmail. com. if you have any cool ladies in your family that you want to shout about for whatever reason, give them to us and we'll shout them about, that'd be so cool. Excellent. Okay. Thanks for listening. Thanks everyone. See you soon. Cheers Vicky.