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Facts About These Notorious Law Breakers and Their Criminal History

Khalid Elhassan May 20, 2020 34 min

Al Capone - Bugsy Siegel — 1930s mobsters. Eugene Cannevari Collection

12. History’s Most Successful Pirate

Ching Shih, also known as Madame Ching (1775 – 1844), was a Chinese pirate who terrorized the South China in the early nineteenth century. She was arguably history’s most successful pirate, commanding tens of thousands of outlaws. Despite challenging the British Empire, the Portuguese Empire, as well as the Chinese Qing Dynasty, she survived to retire from piracy and into a peaceful life.

She was a former prostitute who married a powerful pirate named Cheng, and participated fully in his piratical activities. Upon his death, she inherited his outlaw realm, and became known as Ching Shih, Chinese for “Cheng’s Widow”. However, she was not just a widow who lucked into a huge inheritance: her own legacy as a pirate far exceeded that of her deceased husband.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.