Ching Shih

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a harbour, a gong, a great many ships)
The South China Sea, eighteen-oh-something. The largest pirate fleet in history.

[Verse 1]
She was working in a floating brothel in Canton when he found her,
Zheng Yi, a pirate commander, who married her in eighteen-oh-one,
and she agreed on terms — an equal share of the plunder
and equal say in the running of the fleet, in writing, up front,
which is a remarkable negotiating position for a woman
in that place, in that year, and she got it.

[Chorus]
And when he died she did not inherit the fleet — she TOOK it,
locked up the succession, secured the captains, and ran it:
eighteen hundred ships. Eighty thousand men.
More than most navies. More than the Chinese navy could beat.
Ching Shih. The largest pirate fleet that has ever existed,
commanded by a woman, and nobody sensible argued.

[Verse 2]
And she ran it on a written code, which is the part I love —
actual articles, enforced: all plunder registered before division,
twenty per cent to the taker, the rest to the collective fund,
and — this is the clause that gets quoted — the rape of a female captive
was punishable by death. Consensual relations required marriage
and fidelity thereafter, also on pain of death. It was a legal system.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
The Chinese navy could not beat her. The Portuguese could not.
The British could not. So in eighteen-ten they offered amnesty,
and she walked into the negotiation herself, unarmed, with the women,
and got: a pardon for nearly all her men, the right to keep the plunder,
and a title for her second husband, and she retired at thirty-five
and ran a gambling house in Canton until she died in bed at sixty-eight.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the harbour again)
She kept the money.
That's the ending. She kept all of the money.