Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 254 - Zheng Yi Sao, The Pirate Queen of China

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

A sex worker turned pirate queen builds a more powerful navy than the entire navy of China. Support the show! https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Murray, Dian H. Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790-1810 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ching-shih-chinese-female-pirate

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad free and is totally supporter driven we use that money to pay our bills buy research materials that make this show possible and support charities like the curtis red crescent the flint water fund and the halo trust consider joining the legion of the old

crow today and now back to the show hello and welcome back to lines of by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me today is everybody. Again, I have Nate and I have Tom in our virtual studio that is a bad website. How are you doing, fellas? I'm good. I shaved my head this morning and went and walked for a coffee and felt a breeze on my scalp for the first time since last year. Did you walk faster now that you're in Warrior Dynamic? A little bit little bit a little bit but it was so funny because i was getting dressed and my girlfriend just said you really look like a neo-nazi because i'm wearing like a fred perry shirt doc martens and like just plain black jeans he's like yeah you look like you're about to

commit a hate crime yeah he's gonna go do a full-on hostage situation until they bring szechuan sauce to mcdonald's in the uk it's fully like i'm just imagining what's the lamest thing a skinhead could do and it's like be a rick and morty skinhead that is that is a cursed fucking energy it exists somewhere i'm sure it's like yeah everybody knows that like rule about rule 34 but this is like a different version of rule 34 that if something exists there's nazis of it yeah like look i i love my uh my sharp brethren but like you know sometimes it's just so funny and like there's this dude on tiktok who has been like using like the ai generated speech thing to essentially have joe biden donald trump and barack obama argue about hardcore punk scene bullshit and like it just never gets old it's so funny i'm really glad that i recently

had to shave my head full i say recently is like what almost two months ago now uh for a minor surgery and i'm like man i'm really happy that i i live in a place where skinheads aren't really a thing uh so people just think i've like shitty style i used to shave my head for swimming every year it was the thing like even if you weren't actually competing in the state meet it was sort of like a solidarity thing that we all as a team which would bleach our hair for like sectionals i think and then we would we would shave it into weird fucking shapes. I had the Keith Flint side mohawk or double mohawk from the prodigy for, I want to say, for one of the conference meets or for the semi-state final. I can't remember exactly what it was called. And then for the state meet, everyone would shave their head. And you guys have both met me in person and you know what I look like. And you imagine me in Indiana in winter.

person and you know what i look like and you imagine me in indiana in winter i i never looked like a skinhead i looked like the the the stock photo they would use on like a fundraising appeal for combating childhood cancer because like i was gonna say you you look like some like weird escaped experiment like 11 from stranger things like from the creepypasta of the Russian sleep experiment, but it's Nate running through the Indiana wilderness. I genuinely looked like at that age, it was just, it was because I was the same height as I am now. So,

you know, I was six feet tall, but, you know, probably about 170 pounds, 165 pounds. And, you know,

weirdly cherubic face that never really wants to go away. And then you shave my head and i have no tan i'm like so white you can basically see through me like i genuinely look like yeah i genuinely look like you want to have some sort of sad orchestral music behind me in a voiceover that's just like together we can end childhood leukemia for 25 cents a day you could fund your local Nate. And since we are in the time of Lent, also me and Shox are currently doing our experiment of using the Mark Wahlberg Catholicism app.

I forgot you guys were actually doing that. I thought that was a bit for the longest time. No, I'm learning a lot about Beatitudes and St. John and stuff like that. Do you know what? I am shocked at how well designed this app is and how good the UI is. It's actually shocking that it works better

than something like Twitter or Spotify. Yeah, that's depressing. It certainly works better than Patreon. Oh, God. For Lent this year, I have simply given up. That's all I'm doing. I've given up fizzy drinks. I love a good can of Coke Zero, and I've just given up fizzy drinks.

I'm drinking probably like three liters of sparkling water every day just to beat the cravings. I have given up Crocodile. I never previously done it, so I feel like this one is a layup. Just start smoking crack and then give it up. Also, we're not going into drug talk again. No, we might alienate exactly one more person,

so let's refrain from doing that. Fellas, I have brought you here today to talk about a subject that we have never talked about. It's pirates. And I think I speak for everybody here when I say pirates fucking rule. It rocks. Yeah. I think this is like it's the joke when you turn like eight and you're a boy. You have to pick a personality.

It's like dinosaurs or pirates. I was a dinosaur kid myself. I was really into dinosaurs. I had a conversation about that with someone once, and they were like, oh, it's like space, dinosaurs, and something else. And it's like, it's really dictated by where you fall on the autism spectrum.

I don't know where dinosaurs fall on the spectrum, but that's where I ended up. I was a space kid. I was obsessed with outer space. Don't undersell the appeal of medieval knights to small children, small boys especially. I was not into dinosaurs. I was kind of a weird dragon kid

when I was sort of like a preteen. I had a little dragon gemstone necklace like an absolute dork. In fairness, I was living in New Mexico. So like, that's just normal. That's every white kid is basically raised by hippies. So it was made out of turquoise? Yeah, well, no, that'd be too expensive.

It was made out of some whatever bullshit fucking fake pewter. But I would say as a smaller child, I was 100% on some medieval knight shit. Like I absolutely was. And also I lived in Germany for three years as a kid. So from age five to eight i was in a place where like you could go to museums and see suits of armor and you know siege weapons and paintings of people getting like fully decapitated just like insane medieval concepts of how blood flows out of things in these paintings just like

just like a person basically basically praying you know with their with their hands like a japanese horror film when they're like just it's like a garden hose of blood yeah it's like that perfectly uh beatified face of person you know clasping their hands in prayer while their serene head is on the ground and it's just like what looks like what you just described like a single cut garden hose just kind of spraying out like bizarre artwork i i was a night kid for a while uh and i was in middle school i believe uh no elementary school and we went to medieval times i don't know if those still exist but there was one in illinois um which is quite close to where i lived in michigan at the time and we took a class trip to Chicago and we went to the medieval times in that general area.

And I'm like, wow, I've changed my mind. This is lame as fuck. I am no longer into knights. I was going to say, I had this recollection of this from when I was younger, which is that I seem to recall a weird almost like

profound sense of disappointment when it dawned on me that a suit of armor was a thing you had to put on plate by plate and it wasn't just like you didn't just jump into a metal suit like i guess i never i never thought of before like the mechanics of how you got into the suit of armor because i'd only ever seen them like assembled in like a standing pose thing in museums but then in one I think it wasn't in Trier but it was somewhere else in Germany my parents took me to

I recall seeing like individual plates they were all sort of explained you know bit by bit how you have to do it and I was just like wait so oh so you it's just like it's just like it's's just like, it's like a football uniform, but just more stuff. And then all of a sudden being a knight wasn't cool anymore.

What really ruined it for me was learning that they piss and shit inside of them. I'm like, well, that's not cool. Also, I didn't realize how much it sucked to be like a page boy and then a squire. Like you really had to just kind of suck eggs for fucking years before you got to be a knight. Yeah. You were pretty much a slave. Yeah. years before you got to be a knight yeah you were pretty much a slave yeah um unlike to be fair with squires it's very similar to like being like a ship boy on like a pirate ship yeah oh look at

that little segue repository look at that segue tom you're a fucking pro at this you are absolutely woof we all just gotta like this is one of those moments where they stop traffic and everyone stands out fucking salute the flag on a military base. I would like to point out. Everybody clapped. Tom is the more professional one here because he gave me an easy segue. Had I breezed right past it to tell a cum joke. Hey, you know what?

That's what our fans listen for. That's what they want. professionalism just like a pirate ship gone astray shattering on the rocks of two dumbasses who are so distractible that they can't just take an easy line and follow it and the the best part is is that i came up with that segue after three seconds of dialogue after i had to run downstairs to throw a phone in the bin because where i'm living is like right above the boiler for the entire building so i feel like the heat has made the battery expand and i was just like staring at it in my desk was like i don't want that to explode while i'm recording i don't want my podcast episode to be derailed by my samsung galaxy s7 now i'm i'm not really sure why we've never really talked about pirates on this show

um we've talked about privateers here and there for various wars and stuff that we've talked about in the past. And other shows have covered pirates. One of my favorite podcasts is called Last Podcast on the Left. They've talked about Blackbeard and Western pirates, which seems to be what everybody focuses on. Sure. Do you want to hear something really weird as an aside, Joe? Sure. Just a really quick introduction. this is just a really quick interjection i didn't notice this because i always just thought being american growing up watching

anything about pirates is that the whole like arty arty arty is that kind of fucking voice i thought it was just like no pirates just talk that way because like that's just how they wanted to talk but what i didn't realize was that's basically an accent in the west country of england like the accent that they have is just like the way people talk in somerset like i'm dead fucking serious lover it reminds me of that bit from the simpsons uh like why do you talk like that i had a stroke yes exactly yes yeah i should oh we're gonna cut that in now so people think i'm fucking insane

yes do you have a table for the mayor yes why do you talk that way i had a stroke it's like are you are we being ableist or are we referencing our favorite tv show from our childhood and also we're we're we're shining a

spotlight through the podcast, like, yes, we are all old. Oh, God. Well, yeah, I mean... Think for yourselves. You're, like, you're old at heart, and by that I mean you have cardiovascular disease. Also, like, I'm sure, Tom, I am sure you've been just

mashing the buttons, retweeting fucking Ireland Simpsons fans before. Don't act like you're so innocent. I'll talk about this off-mic irish simpsons fans but uh yeah continue now boys i'd like to point out the time before this we went off track for 20 minutes the time after that we made it 15 minutes now we're at 12 we're getting better slow but sure um slow improvements now we're not gonna be talking about black beer or anything in the West today because in comparison, the person we're talking about today makes all of these Western pirates

look like rookie shit. Or, you know, not comparing to the first pirates being teenagers who got internet connection. They run shit. We're all returning back to that, I've noticed. Now, the person we're talking about today is the Pirate Queen, who at one point was more powerful than the Chinese Imperial Navy itself, Zheng Yi Cao.

Once again, queen. Big queen energy. I do need to point out that she is known by several different names. Zheng Yi Cao is probably the most famous of them. So I'm going to stick with that. And this will unfortunately be confusing later on. I will do my best. Now, her early life is quite easy because really nobody knows anything about it. And what is known could be hearsay, rumors, whatever. So I'll do my best to paint of paint a mostly true picture from what I could

find. Zhang was born in 1775 in Guangdong, China, and what was known as a Tonka or a boat person. The Tonka were exactly what they sounded like. They were born and raised and lived on junks, which is traditional Chinese ships with flat sails. A thousand of these boat people would live together in giant floating towns in rivers and lakes, tethering their boats together to create literally a city where hundreds or thousands of people could live at a time. Everything that the Tonka would need to live and work

was located in these floating settlements, and they would eventually break apart and reform in different parts of rivers and estuaries as they moved around. It's for this reason and particularly because this reason that every imperial power that has ever controlled them from the chinese the british to the portuguese has attempted to stomp out their lifestyle culture and even independent language and it's for that reason that they were nicknamed the water roma so you can

imagine how much the british fucking them. Oh, not good. It reminds me of a joke that I saw that's like Europeans normally. And it's like friendly people like Europeans. You bring up Roma to just a picture of Adolf Hitler. Yeah. A similar one is the political compass where it's like, yeah, Europeans normally. And it's sort of like slightly center left. And there's Europeans when you're talking about Roma.

And they've added enough political compasses like quadrants to form a swastika and they're in the top right well like it's you know all of these like freaks in the u.s who like oh you can't try me in court because i only abide by maritime law and that's the wrong flag is like sovereign citizens yeah sovereign citizens like you know get some, go live on a boat, form a community, start Waterworld. I mean, to be fair, there was some weird libertarian who was going to build like a crypto living yacht thing. And I'm pretty sure it just evolved into fraud and sex crimes. Because, I mean, they're libertarian. That's all it ever devolves into.

Now, it was into this life that Jang made her way. Eventually, ending up as a prostitute and won the boat's floating brothels, because there's a lot of them. Now, we're not entirely sure when she started out in the world's oldest profession, but it was the late 1700s, so we can assume it was early. um now however jang was equipped with what we can call the pirate queen grind set and worked her way up the brothel corporate ladder until she was in charge of the entire operation when she was in her early 20s uh like nobody's really sure exactly how old she was but like maybe early 20s could be late teens but she was she was the fucking brothel queen uh she gained one hell of a reputation as well not only for running the finest floating brothel in the neighborhood, but what she used these brothels for, blackmail.

A combination of honeypotting and the time-honored tradition of powerful men who can't keep their fucking mouth shut after getting a nut off meant that Zhang soon became one of the best information brokers in South China, making her significantly more powerful than she seemed in the grand scheme of things so essentially she was running the floating version of the lolita express i mean yeah unfortunately you're probably correct because this is the late 1700s in southern china like the i would i'm just gonna not think about how young her employees are at the situation i'm just gonna say this though that once again all of the cringe and problematic

things notwithstanding she got there not by being like some sleazy dickhead fucking media mogul who ran a hedge fund for rich people that basically didn't generate any significant returns over market returns it just was a place to hang out and get on the scary plane or the sensual plane however you want to look at it like she she built an empire on her own all right so we already are like okay we can look at her we can assess the problems she just floats up to the shore like hey y'all want to get on the fuck boat exactly yeah you know i support people who live in moving flotillas, support unions, support sex workers. And this woman is doing it all.

Yeah, like literal a boat commune. And there are no photos of her with Elon Musk. So at the end of the day, she's doing better than Ghislaine Maxwell. Also, so let's let's I think we should dispense with the comparisons because she's in a category of her own already. Weirdly, Bill Clinton's name a category of her own already. Weirdly, Bill Clinton's name is still on the boat manifest. Bill Clinton is just like immortal.

Exactly. He's like the Highlander for white nerds. You just hear the blaring beat of a saxophone and Bill Clinton warps out of a different dimension that's that's the real reason steve jobs died was because you know he was the other version of the highlander and they had to meet and combat and uh bill gates killed him he

didn't actually just die from cancer because he just refused to take any medication and drink juice he punched him so hard of the chest to get easily treatable cancer and died but also when we're talking about this historical period, which Western empires would be in contact with them? And all I can think of is the Dutch. And so Bill Clinton's avatar in this era, like the fucking, I don't know, Cloud Atlas version of the South China sex trade is basically, he's like Wilhelmus de Clinton, but it's spelled with a K.

Nate, you're leaving out the British and the Portuguese, because if you look at a map where Guangdong is, you have Macau right there and Hong Kong on the other side of it Well there I am with egg on my face not knowing shit not knowing a goddamn thing about southern Chinese geography

like a simp, like a loser But as always I am in favor of blaming the Dutch regardless They know what they did they sure do it is through these means she came under the radar of a local pirate warlord confusingly also named Zhang Yi

look we'll get to the reason why that is the case in a second I'll simply do my best to differentiate the two Zhang Yi the man is also known by several names but Zhang Yi is the man, is also known by several names, but Zheng Yi is the most famous one. So yeah, Zheng Yi, again, the man, was also born in Guangdong about 10 years before Zheng Yi, the woman. He was born into a pirate family going back generations, many of whom

eventually were recruited to the Taesong Dynasty's navy as mercenaries over in Vietnam. This is during a long civil war period that you know pitted several different local factions against one another and the south chinese pirates played a huge role in the entire thing they effectively became the the vietnamese civil wars navy there's like ah let's outsource this shit to the guys from up north um and the pirates became a dominant naval force in the South China Coast. However, the Taesong eventually

lost, and the winning Nguyen dynasty realized, wow, we really cannot have all these pirates hanging around, and began a crackdown, causing the flee back towards Guangdong. Now, tens of thousands of pirates are all out of

work and are out at each other's throats because they're now having to fight over the same turf. And that is when in 1801, the Zhangs met. The story of exactly how this unfolded is not exactly clear. One is the time-honored story of a man and a woman meeting each other and immediately falling in love in a brothel, that old romance story. But it's probably not true because they're both very shrewd business people. The more popular story is that they met and the pirate warlord had already heard about her little side hustles and information broker and proposed marriage to her. So her information network could then only work for him. This is supported by the fact that zhang yi the woman would only agree to marriage if he signed

a contract that she would own half of his pirate fleet yes so yeah yeah chicks rock ah that like that is you know smart maneuvering right there you know that is real grind set shit you know uh like i feel like we need to have like a real housewives franchise set in this time real housewives of the floating brothel yeah of uh the south china coast but like it's really interesting around this time because like obviously on my other show um we're doing like the history of japan and like the history of trade in this region around this time is like super interesting how like essentially china vietnam and macau and thailand are all like super important in terms of like the control of like passage through that as the straight of what's it called again um the straightit of malacca so like essentially

if like they controlled access to like the western pacific ocean and it's like all of these companies like particularly the dutch as well in their exploration further east like they just had like a chokehold on like okay if you cannot get through like these couple of straits nothing is getting to europe so like essentially either pay us tax or we're gonna like burn your ships and steal all your shit yeah yeah uh and somewhat weirdly the straits of malacca is still a pirate haven to this day very true yes i was just gonna say too that it for those of you who aren't south china sea heads uh there is a true heads will know a major newspaper in singapore called the straits times because it's the straits of malacca so if you think of like the situated area here imagine singapore i thought that was the

paper brandon o'neill wrote for i'll spell it slightly differently but yeah you know what i mean um so yeah this is this is uh we think about how densely populated this area is, how strategically important this area is. Like, yeah, this is a part of this era of history that often we in the West don't learn about because we're learning about Waterloo and Trafalgar and so on and so forth. But yeah, around same-ish, not quite contemporaneous, but close. A lot of this stuff is happening.

Right now we're in the early 1800s, yeah. Oh, yes, right. So the Napoleonic Wars era, all this stuff. And this is just as important to, when you think about how important the Napoleonic Wars are in terms of understanding the political breakdown of Europe,

the borders we have, the conflicts, the given things about the geography and society there, so much of that is still in effect. And the same is true in the South China Sea, the same is true in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Southern China. Yeah. And I mean, not to mention this era of weakness from China, which obviously is a multifaceted situation, which we'll actually talk about more in a future series, directly leads to catastrophic series of failures, Chiang Kai-shek, communist revolution, et cetera. These things are all connected. It's like someone famously asked a historian what the importance of the french revolution was and this is like in the 2000s it's like it's too early to tell you know it's it's something

similar now this is actually where like these two pirates get married well i guess she's a pirate now contractually so um and this is where her name comes from zhang yi sao directly translates to wife of zhang yi um so that is why they both have the same name um and for some reason she is known by her marriage name more than anything else at the time of their marriage the pirates of the south china sea were involved in something of a civil war amongst themselves which was also tied to the conflict going on in vietnam that we already kind of touched on zhang the, which was also tied to the conflict going on in Vietnam that we already kind of touched on. Zhang, the man, was on one side of the war while his cousin,

Zhang Qi, was on the other. This eventually led to Zhang Qi's death when the war ended and that anti-pirate crackdown began. I mean, you know, the Nguyen's didn't want all the pirates hanging around when they had peace. Then they're just going to do pirate shit.

You can't have that. So when the Vietnamese authorities raided his cave lair, his pirate cave lair, because pirates are like a constant metal guitar riff, he was killed. But Zhang Yi's pirates were now without a leader and went and joined his cousin Zhang Yi's forces, who were fighting amongst each other in the South China coast. Now, after several years of this pirate warfare, the leaders of the various gangs came to the conclusion like, hey, if we continue down this route, we're just going to destroy one another. Like, what's the point, right? Like, the government isn't really doing anything to stop any of this because like whatever they're handling themselves this led to a pirate peace conference where they came to an agreement they would form a confederation of pirates organized along colored fleets the red flag fleet the black flag fleet go ahead and put a black flag drop here the white flag fleet the green flag fleet the blue flag fleet and the yellow flag fleet we look we love we absolutely love to see a union yeah yeah uh i mean we'll talk they even

have a constitution that honestly affords more rights to pirates than probably any other document in force in the world at that time. Now, these fleets, like it's a loose confederation. They would elect a leader that would command them all. And generally, this just went to the most powerful person

because they're still pirates, right? This happened to be the commander of the Red Fleet, which was Zhang Yi, the guy. This massive fleet didn't always stick together because, I mean, this is like hundreds of ships. So they would coordinate, though.

Each fleet commander was semi-autonomous. They would send messages back and forth to the overall commander asking what they should do. But they didn't always work together. But occasionally they would come together to do giant things, which we will talk about in a bit. But they did have a charter and a constitution which i already talked about being a pirate in the south china sea at the time in this confederation offers you more benefits than i think either of us ever had through an actual job okay tell me um so there's full medical care as well as a pension oh my god like a pension in the

fucking 1800s holy shit a pirate pension yes strict rules about the breakdown of who got what after a raid and it was supposed to be equal each ship was labeled with serial numbers rather than names so they could be easily tracked and one of the most

interesting things in the constitution that everybody had to agree with was not to kill people if they didn't have to and this even included government snitches it said quote we must restrain our anger and overlook their actions even though we may not be pleased we must not use our power as a pretext to seize or persecute them i mean you know it's funny because i someone explained to me before because i someone who was way more knowledgeable about Chinese history, and they were saying that the reason why China was a relatively stable empire for so long was that they were the first to develop bureaucracy and having an administrative system to keep track of things, taxes, all this sort of thing. They did it very well. So well it was bad.

Yeah, and, like, it's interesting to see that, like, even when you have, like, an autonomous organization, like a confederation of pirates, you still have some dude sitting in a house just, like, okay, calculating people's, you know, pension contribution. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Now, within a few short years this pirate confederation grew to the point it was a greater naval power than anyone in the

region this included the chinese the portuguese and the british governments in the area it included pirates who crewed up to 700 different ships that is insane by 1806 not a single ship that operate in the south china coast could do so without paying the pirates some kind of protection money and this included the chinese portuguese and british governments, we'll go into a little bit more detail about that in a second, but they invented a level of bureaucracy that is truly impressive. Now, you might be wondering how in the fuck these pirates were so successful. How were they able to grow to the point they were stronger than the government of the country that they technically lived in? Well, the south coast of China is kind of tailor

made for piracy. Colonial cargo ships sailed back and forth around the coastline after, like we just said, Hong Kong and Macau are both right there. There are countless waterways that drained in the South China Sea. Pirates could easily hide out in one of these and prepare ambushes. Chinese authorities found the surrounding archipelago of 700 different islands impossible to explore and therefore, to the government, they were completely unmapped. However, the pirates who grew up there knew them like the backs of their hand. Locals described this maze of canals, rivers, estuaries, and deltas that connect with the ocean as an inner sea.

And it was so completely unknown that if you're an outsider that went in there, you almost certainly going to run aground or get lost so the pirates could just hide out in there and i say like 700 different ships i don't mean that they had like giant fucking pirate ships like in the west like those ships were huge these are mostly junks as well like they're very small ships and like i suppose it probably lends itself as well to like navigating small waterways that like you're you're much more nimble and if you have like this massive dutch frigate that's trying to like follow you up an estuary you just like okay we're just going to take a right turn and let them run aground in some mud then we're just going to like jump on steal all their shit yeah and it was for this reason the chinese government just kind of gave up trying to police them and for a long

time the pirates while numerous weren't much of a problem. They were incidental, sporadic, and mostly unintimidating. The vast majority of the region's pirates belonged to small ad hoc gangs of off-duty off-season fishermen and ferrymen. They were just trying to make easy money during the off-season and to supplement their incomes. They were considered such an afterthought that the emperor of China simply declared they didn't exist enough to worry about. Now, piracy naturally springs forth from economic conditions. We have seen this in our lifetime. Famously, not that long ago, there's all of the stories about pirates off the Somali coasts. And for the same reason, extreme inequality combined with a lot of very rich,

easy to pick off ocean going commerce floating by and, you know, a lot of goddamn weapons. So it's like stealing Metallica singles in the late nineties, you know, they're rich, easy to pick off. And,

you know, I'm not paying 20 quid for a CD. Yeah. And that's also why i floated my junk by lars ulrich's house and fired a cannon through his window i was gonna say but that seems to imply then that if like a like a confederation of various imperial powers get together uh in order to stop this pirate bacchanal that it's basically going to be like the primitive recording industry artist association or the association of america whatever the ria is the basically the heavy artillery behind james

hetfield and lars ulrich crying about people on napster unfortunately that does happen at some point uh it's it's it's fun it's more fun to imagine the portuguese navy being commanded by metallica yeah but i'm also just imagining, yeah, someone very straightforwardly making the comparison that the floating brothel pirate army was the Napster of the 19th century. I mean, I guess in a way they had everything you could possibly want

on there, but it wasn't free. Who at this point is Dave Mustaine then? Well, the thing with I forgot about Dave Mustaine. Who's mega death of the situation? The British? I mean, I definitely think the late 19th century, if you want to talk about a single turn of phrase that summarizes the British experience in their colonies, it's mega death. But I mean, or at least for the people who lived there.

And specifically, this is the East India Trading Company as well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The Portuguese are definitely slayer then. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The Portuguese are definitely slayer then. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm just imagining, yeah. But who would be the... I guess in a way, who is so annoying that they get kicked out of Metallica?

But in 19th century geopolitics... Yeah, the Dutch. So that would mean that Dave Mustaine is canonically Dutch. He's spiritually Dutch. I think if Dave Mustaine is going to go go to england and fight you for that um also i'd like to hear mega death in dutch because it'd be hilarious i mean

like it it's close enough um his dave mustaine's ancestry is french german irish oh god you can tell he's american french german irish and finnish, and his mother was of German-Jewish ancestry. Dave Mustaine's family were Jehovah's Witnesses. So... How did I never know that Dave Mustaine was a fucking Jehovah's Witness? Oh, Dave Mustaine is like super religious now. It's really, really interesting. Wouldn't Megadeth in Dutch just be like Megamord,

but M-O-O-R-D? Gosh, we're playing Megamord. wouldn't mega death in dutch just be like a mega moored but m-o-o-r-d i'm sure it's pronounced like moored or something like that you know what you know everything is more cursed when it when it said a dutch like that like the the the spank me daddy thing yeah yes yes dutch listen listen to our long suffering Dutch speaking and or Dutch fans. You just have to understand it's an uncanny valley thing. Dutch seems very, very close to English in both the way when you hear it spoken and also in the way it's written, but in a way that's just so close that it's insanely weird. Dutch seems like... What if English, but spoken by a clown with a tbi yes dutch is to english basically like

it's like someone made a version of english to make fun of english that's the best way i can describe it i just have like a very funny excerpt from dave mustaine's the politics section of his wikipedia in in 1998 um mustaine caused a riot when megadeth played a concert in Northern Ireland after he dedicated a song to the cause, later claiming surprise that this was a euphemism for supporting the IRA regarding the problems between Northern Ireland's Catholic and Protestant communities. Oh, fucking Christ. Now, Dave Mustaine aside. fucking christ uh now dave mustaine aside um now from the time from that when the emperor said that pirates hardly existed to the rise of of the mega mega death pirate confederation was only about 10 years during that time the chinese state was in rapid decline the economy was equally as bad and we're still uh for the boat people of South China.

Soon, people couldn't make a living fishing or being a ferryman. And in one of the most poorest places in a very poor country, things kept getting worse. The boat people were also completely separate from the Chinese state and society. They had no social elites, no aristocracy, nothing. society they had no social elites no aristocracy nothing they were considered so divorced from chinese society that the government never even bothered to fucking tax them so they don't have any kind of loyalty like none of these red lines of you know we shouldn't shove a musket in a like a tax collector's face and rob him like why not to them the chinese government is effectively a foreign government they have

nothing to do with them this coincided with a massive boom in shipping in the colonial regions of that area and of course that did not benefit normal people and especially not the tonka for people who did magic get in on that train a massive labyrinthine mess of imperial chinese bureaucracy often drove them to simply say fuck it and go into the black market where things were easier this in turn encouraged smuggling which was pretty much welcome next door in vietnam of course smuggling and piracy go hand in hand and smuggling hotspots soon became piracy safe havens and remember that giant civil war in Vietnam Barry talked about. They hired literally tens of thousands of pirates to be full-time seamen fighting for one side of this civil war or another. That meant within a decade, this thing that had been an off-season side hustle for fishermen and ferrymen had turned into an actual no-shit career.

All while the Emperor of China pretended that they did not exist and you know it as well like a lot of pirates in the south china sea were trained in vietnam as well yeah they sure were uh so like like soon the emperor of china is not only going to have hordes of pirates to deal with there are hordes of hardened war veteran pirates who've been fighting at sea for years who now don't have a job i mean it's pretty much just like vietnam veterans isn't it except that the piracy is committed via rascal scooter just some pirate like going around like lieutenant dan i'm just imagining but what if like if if some of these pirates got taken prisoner by the british for example does that mean that the, the pirate confederacy in the South China Sea or in the Straits of Malacca had like a, until they all come home, POW, MIA flag, but it had like something that was a picture on it that was racist to white people?

Never forget, it's just a picture of a pirate. Never forget, it's just a picture of a pirate. So yeah, by the time the dumb emperor paid attention to his southern coast, the pirate confederation outnumbered the entire Chinese navy three to one. They were so powerful that they were no longer a regional hazard, not a national hazard, but an international problem. Like I think in terms of like like pure strength of numbers they probably rivaled a lot of the fleets in you know western europe as well like the dutch and the portuguese oh absolutely yeah like especially like the numbers that they actually had deployed

in the south china sea yeah i mean that's what that's why when i say that they're more powerful in the portuguese and the british i mean in comparison to the forces they have stationed in macau and hong kong not not like the british and the British. I mean, in comparison to the forces they have stationed in Macau and Hong Kong. Not like the British and the Portuguese empires. They were so goddamn powerful, they changed their tactics. They no longer acted like pirates at sea. They acted like a fucking navy. Before, they would only take ships that they knew they could attack and win.

Obviously, ships smaller than themselves. And their weapons weren't good at first. And this is like the off-season fisherman era. And not to mention, off-season fishermen are not exactly hardened soldiers or sailors. But that quickly changed after years of war in Vietnam. And they now had more weapons at their disposal and they knew how to use them. They quickly began taking down any kind of ship they wanted though cutting edge weapons for the day in the region were not exactly the best weapons on

earth remember this is early 1800s firearms are very common in the world but the pirates generally don't have them yet instead they would pull up alongside ships with a 15 to 30 foot long bamboo pole with a machete duct tape to the end and just swing it over the deck set people i'm coming for them knees motherfucker oh this is this is incredible it's just like leaning over like poking holes in the other ship like this is you know once again it proves that sometimes you know simple solutions are the most effective. Like, we could worry about having gunpowder and cannons. No, I'm just going to, like, swing a knife on a rope at you.

This is like going to war against, like, you know, a premier. Like, if the US invaded your country, like, I got this. And you just, like, drive a nail into a baseball bat. Like, I'm'm gonna fuck them up yeah exactly they brought all like all their stuff to defeat IEDs and fucking like really high tech stuff but they weren't expecting people to hit them with

spiked bats and just like drum barrels full of scrap wood that's on fire firearms were uncommon they are not prepared to fight hobos hobo with a shotgun getting slapped with a bindle Firearms were uncommon. They are not prepared to fight hobos. Hobo with a shotgun.

Getting slapped with a bindle. Their favorite weapon, at least my favorite weapon, was the jingal. This was an eight-foot-long musket that required three men to fire. They would ride alongside of a ship, load the jingal with nails and scrap metal, and fire it across the enemy deck. But they also had homemade grenades. And these are probably not like the grenades you assume were homemade in the 1800s. They would fill a clay pot with gunpowder, metal, and gin, and then throw it at people. Ah, okay, okay.

Now, they originally didn't have cannons on their ships either. It wasn't a normal weapon for them, nor did they really use it while fighting in Vietnam, so they weren't really used to it. But, thankfully for them, the government armed them to the teeth with cannons on accident. Now, finally reacting to the pirates, the imperial government began handing out cannons to landowners

to defend coastal towns free of charge. So you're probably just thinking, well, they just raided these towns and stole them, right? That is not nearly baller enough for the pirate confederation. The pirates would simply walk into an imperial government office, claim to be a coastal landlord and be like, cannon, please. And then they would get them. They did this thousands of times. It's just like some random

dude in afghanistan rocking up to a toyota dealership and no ship was safe for them and soon huge swaths of territory fell under their administrative control this is while they got fucked up before battle on a mixture of wine and gunpowder incredible it's just these people are so fucking based just like bleeding out of their eyes because they're freebasing gunpowder. Incredible. These people are so fucking based. Just like bleeding out of their eyes because they're freebasing gunpowder and walking into a government office like, I need a cannon please! I need a fucking

cannon! Sorry, can I get one cannon please? This podcast does not support you drinking gunpowder at home um do it again supports your theory joe that no one took a solid shit until like the 19th century could you imagine how awful you were you were feeling after getting ripped out of your mind and wine and gunpowder good god i'm trying to like why mix gunpowder i'm wondering that reminds me of the liberian

civil war of mixing gunpowder and cocaine like when when you have effectively a floating group of people who have no life other than committing acts of violence they're gonna do weird shit like drink and start gunpowder they would steal goods and ransom off captains and crew. And they were generally known for taking care of their captives. That aside of when they sent an alert to, say, the British, Portuguese, or Chinese government that they had captured someone important, they would send a finger with it. But in the grand scheme of things, getting your finger cut off isn't as bad as being murdered. with it, but in the grand scheme of things, getting your finger cut off isn't as bad as being murdered.

But this did not count for naval vessels of the Chinese Imperial Navy. Seamen of the Chinese Navy who fell into the pirates' hands would have their feet nailed to the deck of the ship and then being beaten to death. They were not fans of the government.

Sounds extremely bad. Why would they be? Speaking of that, soon the pirates are so powerful that they're directly fighting the government. They would raid naval bases, steal ships, weapons, and slaughter entire garrisons before running out into the sea. This also gave them the ability to roll out another hustle of theirs. They'd put on stolen military uniform, get on a stolen naval ship dock at a naval base walk in and be like we would like guns and then they would simply get them oh my god like just like for a loose confederation of pirates they're they're just geniuses like and also like i suppose when you have like that level of bureaucracy you have to just, okay, anyone who shows up in a uniform, just give it to them, give them the proper paperwork, and just get on with it.

Yeah, and the Confederation of Pirates grew so powerful that the land that fell under their administrative control turned into a gigantic racketeering game, which is more like the local government. Rather than shake people down for protection money every week, they set up a passport office. A ship captain, businessman, whoever, would go to the local pirate's customs office, pay a certain amount of their income, and get a slip saying they were good to go, which they could then show the local pirate customs stations,

which did exist. These were clearly signed and marked pirate buildings with signs out front, and you could go to one in Macau or Hong Kong. exist. These were clearly sign and marked pirate buildings with signs out front and if you could go to one in Macau or Hong Kong. This kind of just like at the risk of sounding like I'm trending towards being a libertarian

it's just sort of they are more or less reproducing every single aspect of the bureaucratic state as regards sort of like the state guaranteeing an environment in which you're allowed to do business, but you have to pay to play. Like, this isn't really any different than how this stuff is done now. It's just that they happen to have sort of created it out of thin air,

you know, by virtue of just being large enough to have the resources to do this. And instead of it just being like this you know marauding uh multiple division sized element they actually instituted a system so that like you know it's not just every ship fighting every other ship to get as much fucking pirate booty as they can like they basically created exactly what they did arguably a more functional one than the chinese state at the time well yeah because i mean that's one of the things too, that's like this perpetual grievance that drives a lot of the support for the communists in the Chinese Civil War later on is just how unbelievably corrupt the government is in China and the degree to which like if you are a regular person, your life is regularly made worse by this corruption and by your dealings with the government. So if you can set up a literal pirate kleptocracy that's just one degree less fucking corrupt and rapacious than the actual government, people are like, oh, shit, cool. All right,

I guess we're the pirate state now. Yeah. I mean, they fully staffed administrative offices to handle all of this. And your passport could be renewed once per year. The pirates were such a legitimate part of the economy, one of their passport holders was the British East India Company. Previous to getting a pirate passport, the East India Company would find their opium ships being raided. company would find their opium ships being raided. Despite pretty much all of the pirates being constantly ripped out of their mind on opium, gunpowder, and wine, they would not raid an opium ship if they had the correct paperwork. This rule is so hard. I mean, it's just very, very funny that they've established a parallel state, a literal criminal parallel state that functions like an actual state and more likely than not

seems to obey its own laws more often than the notionally legitimate state does. Oh, don't worry, Nate. You still had to pay taxes. Your passport could be deducted from those taxes because you're paying taxes to the pirates. You know what this reminds me of? And I don't want to derail too much, but I can recall a very brief vignette of a guy coming to the government office. Because when I was in Afghanistan, I was in an outpost that was attached to an Afghan provincial headquarters. And a guy came and was complaining to the head of the Afghan National Police. And he was obviously a wealthy enough guy that he was able to get in the room. But he was just like, I've been working in Dubai for four years. I just came home to see my family. And he was obviously a wealthy enough guy that he was able to get in the room. But he was just like, I've been working in Dubai for four years. I just came home to see my family. And

I was stopped at three separate Taliban checkpoints on the way driving down from Kabul International Airport through Maidan Wardak and Ghazni into here. And at every single one of those, I just let them see my phone and stuff. And I clarified that I wasn't working for the government. They let me go. And then 10 minutes from here in your traffic circle, your soldiers who basically don't speak Pashto robbed me and took my phone and my jewelry and my coat and all my cash. And he flat out said, which side do you want me to support in this conflict? And interestingly enough, if the Pirate Confederation found there's a freelancing pirate gang that hit one of these passported ships they would all be killed um like the passport was like a protection charm like pirates knew not to fuck with these ships to include pirates that were not in the confederation because they're

like if we raid when the passported ships like zhang yi's fucking pipe hitters are gonna come burn our entire village down like They did not fuck around. This totally sounds like something out of fucking Star Trek, man. Like, just replace ships in the water with ships in space, and it's the same goddamn thing. I swear to God. But keep them pirate ships, because that's a cool aesthetic. Now, of course, people didn't always willingly submit themselves to the system.

After the pirates extended their influence into the Pearl River area, a village simply refused to pay when the Black Fleet sailed up the river to tell them, like, hey, this is how things work now. So in response, the Black Fleet went on a murderous rampage through the river region,

killing 10,000 people as a warning. And when another place refused, they cut the heads off the entire male population of the village and hung their heads from trees. So they were still very comfortable doing pirate shit. Revising my previous statements, you do not have to hand it to them. But again, they're still pretty much a government.

Yeah. One time, a pirate fleet of 500 ships went on an inland mission to collect protection money. Towns that had already paid their dues lined up along the river to salute and clap for them. And some that had guns fired celebratory gunshots in the air as the pirates went by. But on stopping at one village had not yet paid, the pirates opened negotiation by burning the village's storehouses along the river's edge as a threat. They got their way. A messenger then went to the village and demanded an annual payment of 10,000 Spanish dollars when the local village uh had refused the pirates countered by threatening to execute every person there so they settled on a fee of six thousand dollars a year they weren't above haggling yeah

i mean like you know six thousand is better than nothing i suppose and being murdered horribly yeah as the confederation was solidifying their power throughout the South, Zhang Yi the man died in 1807. Depending on who's telling the story or not, he fell overboard during a storm or was hit center mass with a goddamn cannonball. Who is gonna... Imagine what that would do to your body being hit center mass with a fucking 1800s, 1700s cannon.

You will just become red mess yeah you just vanish you do definitely go overboard but not in one piece pieces of you certainly hit the water um now who was going to take the confederation over was not exactly written in stone despite the fact she was also a pirate though more of a businesswoman than a fighter and the rest of the fleet commander saw uh jisao as an accessory, not a partner to the dead captain. So Zhang Yisao did what she always did, used her vast information network from the brothel business to get many of the pirate captains on her side. And when that wasn't enough, she used the information that she knew to turn people against other captains who she thought might want to take command. And then she did a power play and things get really fucking weird.

See, early in his pirate career, Zhang Yi, the man, had kidnapped a Tonka boy named Chengpo Sai, who was either a preteen or a young teen at the time. Over the years, the boy came to live with pirates, became a pirate himself, and was adopted officially by Zhang Yi the man and Zhang Yi Cao as their son. After nearly a decade of fighting, he had become intensely loyal to the Red Flag Fleet, its captain, and the captain's wife. So, Zhang Yi Cao put in command of the Red Flag Fleet when her husband died. Because it was the most powerful fleet, This solidified her position as the top

of the confederation. And they were fucking the entire time she was married to Zhang Yi. So this is kind of like a Matt Gates, his large adult adopted son situation. Yeah, I guess. And then, newly widowed,

the two got married. And I should point out here, this isn't like an, oh, it's a different era thing. Everybody thought this is weirder than hell. But they were so incredibly powerful. Nobody could say anything about it. And it made her unquestionably in charge of the fleet. She centralized authority onto herself, stripping away the previous freedoms that captains of the other fleets had. New pirates were forced to sign an eight-month-long contract in the Confederation. Again, more paperwork.

And upon signing the contract, they'd have to swear loyalty on the pirate rule of law and constitution rather than the individual captains. However, since Zhang had centralized all power of enforcing the pirate rule of law and constitution onto herself, they were effectively swearing loyalty directly to her. In short, for all intents and purposes, she had become an actual pirate queen with total unquestioned authority. I mean, smart way to do it. Yeah, this was fast. Yeah, this was fast. Like, and I think as well, like,

the, like, really playing the long game in, like, helping build the Confederates, you know, placing her boy husband as, like, the leader of the Red Fleet. Her son-husband, yeah. Like, you know, I think, like, in the grand scheme of things, like, does this start her downfall? Well, it's a rather steep rise

and uh just as fast fall honestly um but i think it's just because the confederation had run its course her authoritarianism streak stretched new crimes and punishments that she rolled out for instance disobeying an order order was punishable by immediate decapitation she worked a distribution of booty uh again breaking them was punishable by decapitation she worked a distribution of booty uh again breaking them was punishable by decapitation actually pretty much everything was punishable by decapitation um so in addition to being like a pirate fleet accountant there was also like professional pirate fleet executioners as well like pirate lawyers you know like there's pirate shocks on like a south china seas like you see your honor my client

did not split the booty what he did was he uh categorized it all into different categories and then distributed it among uh the pirates equally based on the value of the category he did not split it you know saul kill him saul goodman ass pirates. Though she did do one thing that was an arguable positive. She finally made rape for pirates illegal. Again, punishable by death. There really was no punishment other than getting your head cut off. Though if sex between a pirate and someone they took captive was consensual, she demanded they be married or both of them would be executed.

Okay, so there's a lot of people clocking in at the head chopping factory yeah and i mean there's a lot of weird sex rules uh like she wasn't a huge fan of sex outside of marriage which is weird because again she's a pirate queen so this is this is definitely the contemporary dutch influencing at the time ah but one kind of sex is perfectly fine no gay sex because it wasn't thought of yeah it wasn't thought of as sex according to the university of oxford center for global history pirates in the south china sea didn't think of good old butt fucking as sex but rather a team building exercise that they would do freely and in the open in front of others i mean if you know if uh sex work is the oldest profession

uh bum sex is the oldest hobby especially for people on ships yeah you know like look i support it i support it you know also they they would fuck in front of captives which leads to incredibly funny uh firsthand reports specifically from a guy named richard glasspool who's a british captive of the confederacy uh the pirate confederacy who noted that pirates would just constantly start fucking one another in front of him this is like this whole episode is just like the weirdest like 27 pages deep speed run of porn hub justub. Just imagine a British man from the 1800s writing his diary like, oh, oh no, they're

fucking in front of me again. Ew, I must not look, and he's like looking through his fingers directly at him. I've dropped both of my monocles out. No, it's just unseemly to be doing this outside of the context of boarding school. I do not like the propensity for pederasty, but you know, you've got to give them kudos for their dedication.

There's a time and a place for it, alright? Just understand that. The Confederation had become the local government, even signing contracts with gunpowder manufacturers, who also happened to be manufacturing gunpowder for the government. They had full sales contracts with local governors and magistrates because they are the only game in town. Their supply line had become so entrenched and indestructible that when the imperial government did try to curtail it somewhat, they arrested 500 people who were directly involved in the pirate distribution and supply and didn't even put a dent in it. At this point, the government decided the Confederation of Pirates were no longer pirates nor bandits.

They had become so powerful, they were a legitimate threat to the imperial government and therefore labeled in rebellion. And to be fair, they were certainly acting more like rebels than pirates. At one point, Zhang yi sao or a multi-day multi-fleet raid on several targets that looked an awful lot like an amphibious landing supported by naval gunfire and a pirate raid yeah like they've essentially at this stage set up a

parallel state that like you know and like the qing dynasty does last quite a lot longer than them but you could see, particularly on the coast, like, okay, we just have to cede territory to them. I vote that the pirates be put in charge of the Chinese government so the flag can be changed to just two pirates vigorously butt-fucking each other in front of a shocked British man. She ambushed the Imperial navy at every turn at one point she destroyed a brigadier general's fleet of 35 ships and killed them and another she sank a fleet of a hundred imperial navy ships

they attacked and killed the imperial commander-in-chief of chai kang in 1808 they had sank so many ships of the imperial navy that the government had to start renting out local ships to make up for the lack of government owned ones in a single year the chinese navy's fleet had been reduced to fewer than 100 ships for all of china by a fucking pirate fleet so there's some like version of like a south florida boat dealer in like this time he's just like rubbing his hands together it's like sailors in the imperial navy began to do anything they could do to get other terms of enlistment others sank their own ships or and then have a chance run in with the pirates and according to the portuguese navy when the chinese imperial navy did go out on out on the water and run into pirates, they'd fly up a white flag, hand them off supplies,

and then float away as a way to bribe them to leave them alone. Though, we are entering the twilight of the Pirate Queen's reign by 1809. First, the white flag fleet was destroyed by the Imperial Navy. Then, when Zheng Cao herself was in battle, the Black Fleet commander refused to help her and switched side to the Imperial Navy, earning a commission in the process. If that wasn't bad enough, they had gotten to the point that they were an international problem. So soon the Portuguese and British allied with the Chinese government to finally crush the Confederation once and for all. The government ordered all ports in the South closed, shutting off the pirate supply system and forcing them to rain inland more,

pissing off more and more people who now suddenly decided, you know what? Maybe the government isn't so bad. And the pirate money train was quickly running out. The pirate, the pirate child versus the state sales. This led to the battle of the tiger's mouth where the red fleet clashed against the Portuguese fleet.

Now here's the thing. I, I'm, I make the pirate fleet clashed against the portuguese fleet now here's the thing i i'm i make the pirate fleet sound incredibly powerful and they were regionally they had not fought an actual purpose built the naval ship yet the chinese fleet is much like their own uh junks may like you know retrofitted for war you know coastal junk specifically like they weren't gonna they didn't even have the ability to go out and open ocean and they were converted into military uh ships when when they fought the portuguese fleet this is the first time they came up against a real trained and supplied navy and it went about as well as you can imagine chung po sai commanded the Red Flag Fleet into battle,

and they were completely fucking ethered by the Portuguese Navy. The Portuguese Fleet barely had 10 ships, while Sai brought up to 700. By the end of the battle, Po Sai's fleet was entirely destroyed. I mean, this is like attacking a u.s navy destroyer with like paddle boats like it's not gonna work great you know um i mean a single speedboat off the coast of yemen might work but uh you know like in an open battle it's not gonna go great um with their backs against the wall the pirate queen and her son husband told the government hey

let's talk let's negotiate the government quickly granted them a general amnesty assuming they would take it and you know without their leaders the pirates who maybe didn't want to take the amnesty would end up just fighting one another like they always had. But most of the pirates immediately took the amnesty. So in 1810, after controlling southern China via a pirate reign of terror that killed concertedly hundreds of thousands of people for over a decade, Zhang Yisao simply

retired. She got that pension. She got that pension going. She's contributed to her Roth IRA, her S&P 500. She's good she she's contributed to her roth ira her s&p uh 500 you know she she's she's good she's gonna be living comfortably she has that passive income coming in yeah as crazy as it sounds it made a lot of sense for the government they were desperate to end this confederation and the pirates had become such an immovable force within southern politics economy

in society they had simply become too powerful, and it made sense to chuck out an amnesty and absorb the pirates into the government. And it made sense for the pirates to take the deal, as they could clearly see the writing on the wall. Most of the pirates ended up being part of the official navy, with Cheng Po Sai becoming a colonel. Others became captains, lie lieutenants and untold thousands became common sailors the government also took over all of the pirate administrative offices and tax system folding all the pirate administrators into the imperial government effectively the pirates just sold out hey everyone sells out in the end now this is a really weird part of chinese history

because in order to become a government bureaucrat in China, you had to pass an incredibly hard, extensive test that took years to study for, creating an own insular aristocracy. If you were not part of that group, and you happen to be a barely literate fisherman or sailor, you were never going to climb the social ladder. It just didn't happen. It was impossible. But the pirates broke the system and forced them to pull them into the government.

So soon all these Chinese aristocrats who had spent conservatively 10 fucking years studying for a test where they had to memorize like eight books of Confucianism now found their contemporary being like an an unwashed illiterate pirate fucking incredible also it's really interesting to know as well that like the delegation she led to negotiate with the government it was like her 17 women and children there was like no men present yeah yeah she didn't even bring her her adopted son husband yeah and as for our pirate

queen she went back to doing what she did best being a brothel and gambling den owner she also dealt a ton of opium um chung po sai died while at sea at the age of 39 and jang yi sao remarried and lived out her life peacefully and i think everybody around her just try not to bring up the fact that she was a mass-murdering pirate tyrant at one point. She died in 1844 at the age of 69. Nice. Right back where she started

in Guangdong. The end. I mean, like, look, you know, what age was she when she was doing all of this shit? Like, she retired in her 30s? In her 30s, and, like, just lived out the rest of her life. Like, this

was just, like, oh, you know. It's just, like, it's essentially dudes who were in, like, hardcore bands in the 80s that were, like, super influential for, like, six years, and then just went and become an accountant. Yeah, yeah. She controlled the South China Sea as a pirate queen. It was like, ah, I'm gonna cash in my IRA six years and then just went and become an accountant yeah yeah she controlled the south china sea as a pirate queen it was like i'm gonna cash in my ira and go open up my fuck shack again

bye and like everybody was and everybody knew who the fuck she was everybody like which i'm sure only drove business towards her establishment like like i'm gonna go get a hooker from the woman who like almost who scared the chinese emperor at sea like that is one hell of a marketing program you know yeah it's it's the black rifle coffee company of its day that makes them sound terrible no that's not true because they were they were cool with gay people okay so yeah that is true so like what's the equivalent then i think the east india, what's the equivalent then? I think the East India Trading Company is the equivalent of Black Rifle Coffee. Oh, yeah, true.

At least that is what Black Rifle Coffee wishes they could be. Instead, they're just assholes of the coffee company in fucking Utah or whatever. Now, fellas, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you would like to ask us a question from the Legion, donate to the show, ask us on our

discord or via patreon um load it into a pirate cannon and fire it through lars ulrich's front door uh and we will answer it on the show today's is a hit back on something we often say you guys complain about the places where you live an awful lot what is something you actually enjoy about it and i had i should say i think that's directed at nate i don't complain i don't complain about our media at all that this is fully a british hate situation but anyway what is what is something nice uh about where you where you live and you guys both live in london so i'll have to pick something different. I'll go first, because I have, like,

it's actually two things that are really easy. One, public transport absolutely rules here. Coming from Ireland, public transport kind of sucks. Yeah, leaving London is absorbently expensive, but the fact that the Tube

runs every two or three minutes buses are on time it's like yeah it takes you forever to get from one side of the city to the other but like it just works and the other thing is that like you know obviously through the funding through the funds gathered by an empire london has like incredible parks and incredible green spaces and it's something that i really love that like there's a park 10 minutes walk away from where i live and like loads of stuff is free like there's loads of stuff that you can go look at do for free that like if you were in like ireland or in dublin specifically you have to pay like joe you're going to experience it next week like you're going to have to pay for everything i would say for me me, I want to second the comment about green spaces, something I really appreciate.

I came from New York when I moved here. So I think public transit in London is by and large, much, much better. It's certainly more reliable. I think something that I really appreciate about London is that, I mean, I know that it's not necessarily the greatest in Europe compared to some continental European cities, but I ride my bike a lot here that it's not necessarily the greatest in Europe compared to some continental European cities, but I ride my bike a lot here and it's just, I feel far less like I'm going to get killed every time I get on my bike versus when I rode my bike in New York. And I think that it's been a pretty, very, very positive change for me in my life, finding a kind of exercise that I can do on a regular basis that just becomes part of like my normal routine, that it doesn't feel like work all the time. And so I think the fact that I've been able to live this whole time

without a car, you know, I commute on my bike to work, I can take the bus or the train if I need to get in on public transit. And I think just getting that outdoor time and having the fact that, you know, there is in some places you are riding on busy roads, but in a lot of places you're riding on like fully separated, segregated bike paths. It's great. It's wonderful. And that's something that they have not yet. I mean, there are a few places in America that do better, like Minneapolis is really good with it. But most places in America, if you ride a bike, like you'll either get killed or like there are broad swaths of the city you just simply can't get to because you aren't allowed to ride a bike on the interstate for obvious reasons. And so I think the sensation of being able to just sort of have all the city at my reach on my bike and all the kind of attendant

health benefits from that have been wonderful. And I really appreciate it. I think that, yeah, the UK, they really seem to treasure green space. And I mean, relative to American cities, at least the ease with which you can get around on bike is unbelievable. I think mine is pretty easy for me. It is incredibly safe here. I mean, even with the geopolitical situation we have and the two wars that have happened since I've lived here, you are much less likely to be the victim of a crime here than literally anywhere in the United States. It's so safe here that it probably took me a couple months when I'm walking home at night to stop looking over my shoulder because literally nothing's ever going to happen.

I mean, I'm not an idiot. Of course, crime occurs here. Crime exists everywhere, but it is absolutely the safest place I have ever lived bar none it's not even close um it it's kind of unsettling sometimes like i think i made the joke like when i went to london someone tried to steal my phone and i was like oh yeah crime occurs in other places like some someone will try to steal my shit and like i had like growing up in some pretty bad parts of the united states i had simply forgotten like so yeah i think i've said that before this shows how safe it is here and i encourage people to visit because it's it's kind of insane i can't say anything nice about infrastructure really because we don't have it but if you ride a bike here you will die uh i promise uh like Traffic is fucking chaos.

But when it comes to being the victim of a crime, it's virtually unheard of. I don't know anybody here who's been the victim of a random crime. It's wild. And people are incredibly nice, but people say that about everywhere generally. But that is our show. Gentlemen, plug your shows for

people who are unaware of them for some reason uh beneath the skin the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing you can find us on instagram you can find us on every streaming platform yeah check it out and i am the co-host of what a hell of a way to die show about why you shouldn't join the military and And I am the co-producer of this show and Kill James Bond, a very fun movie podcast. And of course, I am a co-host and producer

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