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File: This is BEATRIFUL Sessions. Every beat, beautiful.

Host: The Widow Zheng. SizzleC, ten songs on a Chinese pirate. Who was she, for anyone who has only heard the name?

Sizzle: The most successful pirate who ever lived, if you count ships and men instead of flags and parrots. A woman from Guangdong, on the south coast of China. The Chinese sources give her the name Shi Yang, born around seventeen seventy-five. In eighteen oh one she married a pirate called Zheng Yi. In eighteen oh seven he drowned, and she took over the whole confederation. At its height the accounts put it at hundreds of junks and tens of thousands of men. The Qing navy could not beat her, the Portuguese could not beat her, so in eighteen ten the Emperor pardoned her instead. She kept her money, married her husband's adopted son, opened a gambling house, and died in her bed in eighteen forty-four. Nobody in the Caribbean ever came close.

Host: Three names on the cover of this story. Ching Shih, Zheng Yi Sao, Shi Yang. Which one is hers?

Sizzle: The last one. Ching Shih just means Missus Zheng. Zheng Yi Sao means the wife of Zheng Yi. Both of those are the husband's name with a label on it. Shi Yang is the one the sources give her as her own, and even that is thin. The series is called The Widow Zheng because that is how history filed her. The ten songs are her arguing with the filing.

Host: And the sound. Why deep house and tech house for the Pearl River?

Sizzle: Same device as the other albums. Every song opens in the sound of her world. Guzheng, erhu, Cantonese opera gongs, the water. It gets about fifty seconds. Then it hard-switches into house, and the song stops being a costume drama. She ran a floating city on a ledger, and a ledger has a tempo.

Host: Before we start. What are you working from?

Sizzle: Three things, mostly. A Chinese account written about twenty years after she retired, by a man named Yuan Yonglun. The memoir of Richard Glasspoole, an English officer her fleet held for ransom in eighteen oh nine, who wrote down everything he saw. And the Qing government's own records, which the historian Dian Murray pulled together in a book called Pirates of the South China Coast. Where the songs go past those three, I will say so. There is a fair bit of that.

1 · Flower Boat (Pearl River, 1801)

Sizzle: Canton, eighteen oh one. A young woman on the lantern boats of the Pearl River, counting the men who pay and the men who owe. It opens on a solo guzheng and the water, and then it drops into deep house. The hook is one line. Remember the name.

[song 01 — 01-flower-boat-pearl-river-1801-take1-ext1.mp3]

Host: A flower boat is a floating brothel. You open the whole album with her as a prostitute. Is that in the record?

Sizzle: It is in nearly every modern retelling, and it is barely in the record. The Chinese sources from her own century do not say it. It shows up later, and it stuck, because it makes a better story. That is why the song opens with: they say I worked a flower boat, they say a lot of me. She says it, she does not confirm it. The part I will stand behind is what the song is actually about. Wherever she came from, she could read a room and count money, and that is what the next nine songs run on.

2 · Zheng Yi (The Ring and the Ledger)

Sizzle: Eighteen oh one again. Zheng Yi, commander of the Red Flag Fleet, walks in and asks for a wife. She asks for the books. Erhu and opera gongs on the way in, then a rolling tech house drop with his name shouted over it.

[song 02 — 02-zheng-yi-the-ring-and-the-ledger-take2.mp3]

Host: She negotiates a share of the business as a condition of marriage. Where does that come from?

Sizzle: That is the legend, and I kept it as the legend. There is a popular version where she demands half of everything before she says yes. No contemporary source has her saying it. What is attested is the marriage in eighteen oh one and the first son, Zheng Yingshi, in eighteen oh three, and the fact that within a few years she clearly was running the money side. So the song puts the deal in her mouth at the wedding. The record only shows you the result.

Host: Two hundred junks. Is that his fleet or the album's?

Sizzle: The Red Flag was the biggest of the fleets, and a couple of hundred junks is the kind of number the Qing reports give for it. But every number on this coast was counted by someone who was either frightened or asking for a bigger budget. Treat the counts on this album as the order of magnitude, not the inventory.

3 · Six Flags (One Red)

Sizzle: Eighteen oh five. Six pirate fleets on the Guangdong coast sign one agreement. Red, black, white, blue, yellow, green. And a fisherman's boy named Zhang Bao is growing up on the red deck. Dizi flute and ship's drums, then dark tech house with big low end.

[song 03 — 03-six-flags-one-red-take1.mp3]

Host: A pirate treaty. That sounds like something you made up.

Sizzle: It is the one thing in this song nobody made up. The confederation agreement of eighteen oh five survives. It names the fleets, it sets rules about not poaching each other's prizes, it is a real document in the Qing archive, and Murray prints the terms. The flag colours are real. Guo Podai on the black and Liang Bao on the white are real commanders. The forty thousand is the high end of the estimates. Call it tens of thousands and nobody can argue with you.

Host: And the boy. Zhang Bao, fifteen, captured and adopted.

Sizzle: Captured at fifteen from a fishing family in Xinhui, by Zheng Yi. The Chinese sources say Zheng Yi took him as a favourite and then adopted him, and favourite is not a polite word there, it means what it sounds like. The song says adopted, not bought, which is the album being kinder than Yuan Yonglun was. Keep an eye on that one. He turns up in song five with a fleet.

4 · Sixteenth of November (The Gale)

Sizzle: The sixteenth of November, eighteen oh seven. A gale off the coast, and Zheng Yi goes over the side. She is thirty-two, with a four-year-old and a baby, and six captains who want a meeting. A lone erhu over wind and sea, then slow hypnotic deep house. This is the funeral where somebody is already counting.

[song 04 — 04-sixteenth-of-november-the-gale-take2.mp3]

Host: Did he drown, or is that the album tidying up a murder?

Sizzle: The sources say he died at sea in a storm in November eighteen oh seven. There is a second tradition that he was killed fighting in Vietnam, where the fleet had been working for the Tay Son rebels a few years before. The album takes the storm, because that is what the Chinese account says and because it is the version where nobody gets the credit, which is the point of the song. The sea took the man. The sea does not get the fleet.

Host: I stood on the stern and I did not cry. That is not a line from a document.

Sizzle: No. That is me. Nobody wrote down what she did on that deck. What they wrote down is what happened next, which is that within weeks the widow, not any of the captains, was giving the orders. You work backwards from that. Whoever she was that night, she was not falling apart.

5 · The Widow Takes the Helm (Zhang Bao)

Sizzle: December, eighteen oh seven. A cabin full of captains who came to pick a leader. She puts Zhang Bao, twenty-four, in command of the Red Flag Fleet and keeps the money and the final word. Opera gongs and wood block, then peak-time tech house with an acid bassline. The room goes quiet and stays quiet.

[song 05 — 05-the-widow-takes-the-helm-zhang-bao-take1.mp3]

Host: How does a widow with two small children end up on top of a pirate confederation in a few weeks?

Sizzle: The honest answer is that we do not have the minutes of the meeting. What we have is the outcome. Murray's reading is that she worked the family connections first, Zheng Yi's relatives, and then the captains who owed the Red Flag money, and that putting Zhang Bao up front gave the men a fighter to look at while she held the purse. The song plays it as a very quiet poker game. That is a reconstruction. A good one, I think, but a reconstruction.

Host: The men call him Cheung Po Tsai. Same person?

Sizzle: Same person. Zhang Bao is the Mandarin reading, Cheung Po Tsai is the Cantonese, and that is the name you will find on a cave in Hong Kong that tourists get told was his. The song uses both because the fleet spoke Cantonese and the paperwork was written in Mandarin, and she lived between the two. And yes, the sources say he went from the husband's favourite to the widow's lover, and in song nine he becomes her husband. The album does not blush about that, because nobody at the time did either.

6 · The Common Fund (Three Rules)

Sizzle: Volume two opens on the rules. Desert the fleet and you lose your ears. One fifth of a prize to the junk that took it, four fifths to the common fund, steal from the fund and you die. And no hand on a woman captive. Chinese war drums and opera cymbals in a march, then hard tech house with a distorted kick. A budget meeting with executions.

[song 06 — 06-the-common-fund-three-rules-take2.mp3]

Host: The famous pirate code. Historians attribute it to Zhang Bao, not to her. Your song gives it to her.

Sizzle: Correct, and the song says so in the bridge. They will say Zhang Bao wrote it, let them, he can have the pen. The code comes to us from Glasspoole, who lived under it for three months, and from the Chinese account, and both of them put it under Zhang Bao's name. The rules in the song are the rules they report. Ears for desertion, death for theft from the fund, death for rape of a captive. The split of one fifth and four fifths is in Glasspoole. What the song claims, and what I believe but cannot prove, is that the treasurer of a forty-thousand-man fleet had a hand in the rule about the treasury.

Host: A pirate fleet with a payroll.

Sizzle: That is the part people miss. The Qing navy was late paying its sailors. She was not. Glasspoole is quite clear that the fleet was organised, provisioned, and paid, and that the villages along the coast sold to it willingly because it paid. Nobody's rich alone. That is the song.

7 · Fifty Dollars a Pass (Salt)

Sizzle: Eighteen oh eight and eighteen oh nine. The fleet sells safe-conduct passes to the salt junks and sinks the squadrons the Emperor sends against it. Three admirals in a row. Guzheng over abacus clicks, then groovy deep house with a bouncing bassline. A tax office that floats.

[song 07 — 07-fifty-dollars-a-pass-salt-take2.mp3]

Host: Fifty silver dollars for a hundred pao of salt. That is a very specific number for a pirate.

Sizzle: It is Murray's number, from the Qing records of the protection racket, and the racket is the best-documented thing she did. The salt trade was an imperial monopoly, the salt came down the coast in convoys, and the convoys bought passes from the fleet because it was cheaper than losing the cargo. Merchants in Canton bought them too. Some officials bought them. That is in the complaints the officials made about each other.

Host: And the three admirals.

Sizzle: Lin Guoliang, Lin Fa, Sun Quanmou. Three Qing commanders, three defeats, eighteen oh eight into eighteen oh nine, at the places the song names. The thirty-five ships for Lin Guoliang is a reported figure, so the usual caution. What is not in doubt is that the Emperor's navy lost every time it came out, and that the court knew it. That is why there is a pardon in two songs' time instead of a hanging.

8 · Boca do Tigre (Forty-Three Fireships)

Sizzle: Autumn, eighteen oh nine, into January, eighteen ten. The fleet ransoms an Englishman, fights the Portuguese out of Macau at the Tiger's Mouth, and when the Qing send fireships down on the tide, the pirates put the flames out and keep the wood. Dizi and war drums under storm and cannon, then relentless peak-time tech house with siren stabs.

[song 08 — 08-boca-do-tigre-forty-three-fireships-take1-ext1.mp3]

Host: Richard Glasspoole. Your source gets kidnapped inside his own song.

Sizzle: He does, and he is the reason we know what any of it looked like. Fourth officer of an East India Company ship, taken in September eighteen oh nine, held eleven weeks, ransomed in December for about seven thousand six hundred Spanish dollars plus goods, and he published the account. The nine-hour fight with the Portuguese and the fireships that the pirates towed aside and stripped for timber are his. He was on deck for them.

Host: Forty-three fireships on the twenty-eighth of January. Is that his count and his date?

Sizzle: The fireships are attested. The count and the night are the album's choices, and the accounts do not all agree on either, so take forty-three as a song number. The Portuguese side is real too. Six ships out of Macau under a commander named Alcoforado, and a Qing viceroy, Bai Ling, running the blockade. The frigate called Unconquerable is the album's flourish, not a name I can give you a document for. And Guo Podai taking the pardon two weeks early with the Black Flag is true, and it is the beginning of the end, because once one fleet takes the deal, the rest start doing arithmetic.

9 · Twenty-Four Ships (The Pardon)

Sizzle: April, eighteen ten. She sits down with the Viceroy of the Two Guangs, Bai Ling, with a Portuguese magistrate from Macau between the chairs, and she negotiates the surrender of the whole fleet. Keeps her ships, keeps her money, marries Zhang Bao on paper. Slow Cantonese opera and erhu, then warm melodic deep house with piano and harmonies. The best deal a pirate ever signed.

[song 09 — 09-twenty-four-ships-the-pardon-take2.mp3]

Host: Seventeen thousand three hundred and eighteen men. Two hundred and twenty-six ships. Twenty-four kept. Those are the song's numbers. Are they the record's?

Sizzle: They are numbers from the record, but the record has more than one set. The Qing reports give totals for the men, the junks, the cannon handed over, and they do not all match each other, and the twenty-four she kept turns up in some accounts and not in others. The date, the twentieth of April, is one of the dates given. So the song picked a consistent set and sang it. The shape is solid. Thousands of men pardoned, most of the ships handed in, a small squadron kept for her and Zhang Bao, and he gets an officer's rank in the navy that could not catch him.

Host: A hundred and twenty-six got the sword. The album does not skip that.

Sizzle: No. Not everyone walked out. A hundred and twenty-six executed and a couple of hundred banished is what the reports say, and the song puts it in her mouth with the line, not every line was mine. She negotiated for herself and her people, and the men on that list were not her people. That is what a good deal looks like from underneath.

10 · House Rules (Nanhai, 1844)

Sizzle: The last one covers thirty years. Zhang Bao dies a naval colonel in eighteen twenty-two. She takes their son home to Guangdong, runs a gambling house in Canton, sues an official in eighteen forty and loses, and dies at sixty-nine in eighteen forty-four. Solo guzheng with dice and mahjong tiles, then a warm melodic house closer. The house wins, and it is her house.

[song 10 — 10-house-rules-nanhai-1844-take2.mp3]

Host: A pirate queen running a casino. That has to be invented.

Sizzle: It is one of the better documented parts of her life, because it generated paperwork. After Zhang Bao died at Penghu, she went back to Guangdong with their son Zhang Yulin and ran a gambling house. In eighteen forty she brought a case against an official over twenty-eight thousand taels of silver, and the man who threw it out was Lin Zexu, the same commissioner who had destroyed the British opium the year before and set off the Opium War. Those are court records. She died in eighteen forty-four, aged sixty-nine. In bed.

Host: Zhang Bao died at thirty-nine, the song says.

Sizzle: The song says thirty-nine. His birth year is not certain, and the common dates make him younger than that, mid-thirties. The album picked a number. The year, eighteen twenty-two, and the posting at Penghu are the record. The last verse lists her career, four hundred junks, six flags, the Qing and Portugal and a gambling house, and ends with Shi Yang from Xinhui, settle up, goodnight. That is her own name, finally, on the last line of the last song. It took ten songs to get there.

Close

Host: Ten songs. Where do you leave her? Most successful pirate ever, or a woman who ran a protection racket on a very large scale?

Sizzle: Both, and the album does not pretend the second one is a compliment. She sold passes to salt merchants and sank the navy that objected, and villages along that coast paid her because the alternative was worse. She also kept tens of thousands of men fed and paid, wrote rules that protected the women they captured, and walked away from all of it with a pardon and her money. The Caribbean pirates mostly died at the end of a rope. She died at a card table. If you want a moral, bring your own. I brought the band.

Host: The Widow Zheng.

File: This has been BEATRIFUL Sessions. Every beat, beautiful. Find it all at beatriful dot com.