More on the Tanka People and Intermittent Piracy in Southern China
Greetings! Welcome back for your weekly Asian Studies fix!
The news on updates in this column are at the end. But for the moment, be aware that part of making this work is finding the right balance between giving free access to potential readers and charging money for my work. It’s been a year and while I am enjoying myself, this is taking a great deal of time, and whatever money I make is less than the money I spend on books and research. Therefore, in April, I will start making some pieces available only to paid subscribers. If this is a problem for you, please let me know. If I recently added you without asking, I believe I also gave you a few free months. Again, if this is a problem, reach out.
Some people suggest things like video or podcast versions. I recently learned that if one accesses these pieces using the Substack app or webpage, there is a way to listen to them being read aloud (I assume by AI) See here: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/7265753724692-How-do-I-listen-to-a-Substack-post Some substack writers have chats or video talks. I could do a podcast. Time and time vs reward considerations are the big issue.
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According to Wikipedia, “Zheng Yi Sao (c. 1775 – 1844), also known as Shi Yang, Shi Xianggu, Shek Yeung and Ching Shih, was a Chinese pirate leader active in the South China Sea from 1801[1] to 1810.[2] .” Although her early life and origins are uncertain, she likely was a Tanka. While it’s a little difficult to track the Chinese pirates of the time as they all have mulitple names and each of these names has multiple pronuncations and spelling depending on who is writing the name and what dialect they are trying to write the names in, she and her husband Zheng Yi, his older relative Zheng Qi, and his adopted son ( who she became romantically involved with after his death) , Zhang Baozi (aka Cheung Bao) were heads of a of a large network of pirates that controlled the area around the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th Century. Zhang Baozi was definitely Tanka. The Zheng family had been successful pirates for generations, with ancestors linked to Koxinga and his fleet, and were born on land. I plan a future column on these people and their lives and actions.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the Cantonese speaking people who spent their lives living in boats. During this period, these people were referred to as the “Tanka” or the “the Tanka people,” I will use that term here due to its simplicity and sake of its recognition, despite it having become a slur later and frowned upon in circles where people from this ethnic group are common. This was not my first piece on Chinese pirates and the problems of full time and intermittent piracy among the people of the South China Coast during the last few hundred years. 1
Which brings us to the Tanka. As mentioned last time, the Tanka generally lived on boats because they had no other choice. It was circumstances of poverty that prohibited them from moving to land. They lived close to the poverty line.
Most sources, consider them a distinct and separate ethnic group from the Cantonese (who are sometimes known as the Punti, especially in period sources) and the Hakka, who again, we wrote about extensively. 2
Although the Tanka spoke Cantonese, they spoke it with a distinct accent, some says they spoke their own dialect (the line between the two is fuzzy), and they had their own distinct cultural customs.
According to Qu Dajun ( 屈大均) 3 writing in the 17th Century, the Tanka had their own wedding customs. An unmarried and unpromised man would place a bowl of grass on the stern of his boat and women or girls seeking husbands would place a bowl of flowers at the front of their boat. When couples get married, they would sing folks songs to each other during the wedding. According to Qu, “the man takes the girl back to his boat when his songs triumph over hers.” Similarly, although they spoke Cantonese, sometimes they had their own slang to reflect their unique way of life. For instance, while it is standard in Chinese and many other East Asian cultures to use distinct terms for “older sisters” and “younger sisters” (or older and younger siblings of both sexes), the Tanka referred to the older sisters as “fish sisters” and the younger daughters as “cockle sisters,” named after a kind of clam or seafood. This was done because fish are bigger than cockles just as older sisters tend to be bigger than their younger sisters. 4
Qu explains that the main source of income and sustenance for these people was fishing. They would often catch fish with spears and knives while swimming and diving, something that obviously takes a great deal of skill, talent, and bravery. But they would also unite in cooperative actions such as large numbers of men (Qu says “scores”) casting and spreading a giant net in the ocean. It was dangerous work and not only did swimmers get killed in various ways while hunting fish with spears and knives, but they also occasionally got tangled in the nets and drowned. These people ate a lot of raw fish, and they all could swim. It was a dangerous life that toughened both men and women.
As stated, they were not alone in this lifestyle. There was at least one other group, referred to as the Hoklo, who also lived on boats practicing a similar lifestyle. The Hoklo spoke a different dialect of Chinese from the Tanka. Instead of Cantonese, they spoke Hokkien, also known as Fukinese or Southern Min, different dialect of Chinese. (FYI, modern Taiwanese is a version of Hokkien and this dialect is commonly spoken in many overseas and South East Asian Chinese communities.) In fact, when one starts doing research on “the Hoklo” one soon discovers that most of what one finds focuses on the people who spoke this type of Chinese dialect with very little of what you find even mentioning the waterborne lifestyle that we are describing here. Nevertheless, when discussing piracy in China during the period of about the 15th to early 20th Centuries, occasionally one finds references to “Hoklo people” who live on boats and had a similar lifestyle.
They also had their own styles of clothing.
They also interestingly enough, painted big eyes on their boats, something that the Tanka people reportedly never did. Although the two groups did intermarry, they were distinctly different ethnic groups and saw each other as such. 5
Lifestyle
During the seventeenth century, there seem to be no actual numbers on the number of people in the Guangzhou, South China coast area who lived this way but there were many. One official wrote of “incalculable numbers” of such people. And while not all fisherman lived on their boats, many being the more typical land-dwelling sort of fishermen most of us are familiar with, the Tanka and the Hoklo were a major part of the fishing activity in the region.
But fishing was an uncertain way to make a living and there were both natural threats such as typhoons and storms that could sink boats, 6 as well as human threats from pirates who preyed upon the fishermen and people who lived in boats. As the nearby authorities had little interest in or ability to control or intervene in offshore activities and events these boat-dwelling fishermen banded together into large fleets in response to the human threats.
However, while I feel strongly that most people are basically good, they tend to be much more inclined to be good, polite, caring, and helpful when they are properly fed and not in danger of starving or watching their own children starve. When that happens, people tend to get desperate and dangerous. And when you have a big floating slum on the brink of starvation with many or most of the neighbors lacking proper sustenance, it’s not going to be long before someone says “let’s just take all our boats, sail somewhere far away, and take what we need from whoever we find?’
Size of Chinese Pirate Fleets
And thus it was that these large fleets of Tanka and Hoklo periodically became the nucleus for a large fleet of pirates.
To quote Ng’s translation of Gu:
“Guangdong has many brigands and its seas swarm with pirates, most of whom are Tanka. Their boats ply the waters at will in larger or smaller numbers. Sometimes a few nets, sometimes over ten nets form one fleet and these fleets have boats going out with them for the salting of fish. Whenever an opportunity presents itself they take to piracy and prey on merchant ships. When the harvests are being reaped they rush into the fields and cut down the grain and farmers who wish to save their crops have to offer them money to go back to sea. That is how vicious they are.” 7
Therefore, if one should wonder why and how it came to be that in Chinese history we regularly read of “pirate fleets” with huge numbers of ships, while by comparison in the Caribbean and North America the pirates had much, much smaller numbers of ships, then it is explainable.
To illustrate, there was a famous 17th Century pirate often known as “Koxinga” but known in Mandarin as “Guóxìngyé” ( 國姓爺 ) (Hokkien: Kok-sèng-iâ ,and to make it more confusing he had an offical name with title given by the Ming Government and a Japanese name as his mother was Japanese and he born there. With Asian and Chinese history of the time, it is not uncommon to find people with multiple names and then multiple pronunciations of each of these names depending on what dialect is being used. It can get very confusing.) He commanded a fleet of ships and boats that ranged in size widely but reportedly included “hundreds of ships” and thousands of men. 8 9 His most famous feat, as many know, was to capture the Dutch settlement in Taiwan and turn it over to Ming loyalists who were trying to restore the Ming throne after the founding of the Qing Dynasty. Interestingly he was considering taking his fleet to the Phillipines and trying to drive out the Spanish when he died, ending the possibility of such an expedition.
As mentioned above, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th Century, the south China coast was dominated by massive fleets of pirates controlled by the Zheng family including Zheng Yi and Zheng Qi and their associates Zheng Yi Sao and Cheung Bo (both of whom were likely or definitely Tanka). Their fleets also included hundreds of vessels, many Tanka vessels among them, and thousands of people engaged in piracy, many of them Tanka. 10
In conclusion, Chinese pirates of the time operated in large fleets often with hundreds of vessels. They would not just raid shipping and coastal settlements, but they would also force vessels and coastal settlements to pay them protection money to be left alone and allowed to conduct their business in the region. One major reason these fleets were so large is that there were huge numbers of impoverished people living on boats and ships in the region.
For more reading consider:
There’s a lot out there.
First, this is an online article that I stumbled across in which someone describes his life as a Tanka in the Hainan Island area today. I am not familiar with the source but it is well written and convincingly describes the life of impoverished Chinese people who live on boats.
This is available for free online through Project Gutenberg. I admit I have not read it but it is considered a classic source on the subject.
News and Updates on this Publication
Quick looking for a favor time. This publication has been going for over a year now. I’ve never missed a weekly Sunday publication. Changes are being made, and I learned long ago, outside verification and feedback is a good thing. So here’s what I am hoping from you, my readers. Two things. The first is attention, the second is money. If you can’t give both, please consider giving one. Giving feedback is free.
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Footnotes
Previous pieces that focus on Chinese Piracy
https://peterhuston.substack.com/p/sometimes-piracy-makes-good-economic?r=as7cl
https://peterhuston.substack.com/p/on-again-off-again-piracy-in-17th?r=as7cl
Contain references to piracy
https://peterhuston.substack.com/p/readings-from-an-early-chinese-gazetteer?r=as7cl
https://peterhuston.substack.com/p/chinese-dragon-sightings-in-the-historical?r=as7cl
https://peterhuston.substack.com/p/the-hakka-chinese-hong-kong-connection
In fact, and I hope I am not getting ahead of myself, this whole “thing” began when I realized that some of the early so-called California gold rush “tong wars” were not tong wars but instead were conflicts along ethnic lines between the Cantonese (Punti) Chinese miners and the Hakka Chinese miners and had been organized by the Chinese “companies” which were important organizations (that still exist by the way) but definitely not “tongs.” And a lot of the reason they came to the USA separately is that they were living largely in separate locations on the south China coast when the California gold rush happened. And why did this happen? Well, it was largely in response to something called “the great separation” which happened in the 17th Century in response to the problem of widespread Chinese piracy, often but not always, tied in with the problems of the Tanka people having nowhere to live in the 17th Century and then responding to poverty by robbing the neighors from their boats.
Cantonese Wikipedia - 屈大均 This wikipedia page is not available in English but we live in an age where many browsers will give a quick, crude, yet useful translation.
Page 33, Ng, Peter Y.L. 1983. “New Peace County, a Chinese Gazeteer of the Hong Kong Region.” Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
(Hokkien or Fukinese, two term for the same variety of Chinese that originated in the Southeastern Chinese province of Fujian, sometimes historically called “Amoy.” As this is the area of China where the ancestors of most Taiwanese came from, and for this reason Taiwanese
According to this source, a children’s introduction to Hong Kong and its ethnic groups published by the South China Morning Post, as late as 1962, a massive typhoon hit Hong Kong and displaced large numbers f boat dwelling Hoklo and Tanka people. https://www.scmp.com/yp/discover/lifestyle/features/article/3073367/hks-indigenous-people-and-other-tribes-helped-create
Page 46. Ng, Peter Y.L. ibid
translated from Qu, 廣東新語 ( “Guangdong Xinyu” or “Guandong new language.”) For more see: Cantonese Wikipedia - 廣東新語
Multiple sources say 25,000 but I would question where this number comes from. I have seen a lot of references to pirates commanding “25,000” men in situations where I cannot imagine anyone counted them and suspect in this context “25,000 pirates” really means “a huge number of pirates, more than anyone could count at the time.”
This vague number is tossed out in multiple places, but you can go here if you need an actual source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Zeelandia