Cheung Po Tsai

Overview

Cheung Po Tsai was the operational commander of the Red Flag Fleet, the largest of the six colour-coded squadrons within the Cantonese pirate confederation, from his elevation by Zheng Yi Sao in 1807 until the confederation’s dissolution in 1810. He was the adopted son of Zheng Yi, became Zheng Yi Sao’s lover after her husband’s death and her second husband after the amnesty, and is — together with her — one of the principal figures of the period in Cantonese cultural memory.

Origins

Cheung Po Tsai was born in 1783, the son of a Cantonese fisherman of the Tanka boat-people community on the coast at Xinhui, southwest of Guangzhou. He was captured by Zheng Yi’s pirates at age fifteen during a coastal raid; rather than being ransomed or sold he was adopted by Zheng Yi and his wife and raised within the pirate family, a not-uncommon arrangement in the confederation. By the time of Zheng Yi’s death in a typhoon off Vietnam in November 1807 Cheung Po Tsai was twenty-four and a senior captain in his own right.

Career

When Zheng Yi Sao consolidated control of the confederation after her husband’s death, she elevated Cheung Po Tsai to operational command of the Red Flag Fleet, the largest squadron with several hundred junks of various sizes. The arrangement worked: she handled the political and administrative leadership of the confederation as a whole, he commanded the principal striking force in the field. They were openly romantically involved through this period and married formally in 1810, shortly after the amnesty.

The Red Flag Fleet’s peak operations — the protection-rent system along the Cantonese coast, the engagements with the Qing imperial navy in 1808–1809, the inconclusive winter 1809 fighting with the Portuguese squadron from Macau — were all under Cheung Po Tsai’s tactical direction. He was an able commander; the confederation was never decisively defeated in battle.

The confederation’s end was political rather than military. A quarrel between the Red and Black squadrons in the winter of 1809–1810 gave the Qing government an opening. Zheng Yi Sao opened negotiations at Guangzhou in early 1810; Cheung Po Tsai surrendered with her in April. The terms allowed senior commanders to be commissioned into the Qing imperial navy, which Cheung Po Tsai accepted, taking the rank of colonel.

Fate

Cheung Po Tsai served as a Qing naval officer for the remaining twelve years of his life, rising to a regional command on the southern coast and pursuing his former colleagues who had not accepted the amnesty. He campaigned against a Taiwan-based pirate group in 1822 and died in office that year, aged thirty-nine, of causes not preserved in the surviving records.

Legacy

Cheung Po Tsai has a substantial afterlife in Cantonese popular culture: the small cave on Cheung Chau island in Hong Kong traditionally said to be his treasure cache is a tourist destination, and he features in numerous Cantonese and Hong Kong films and television dramas. The traditional cave-treasure attribution is not corroborated by any documentary source; the cave itself is a real and visited geological feature.

Associates & contemporaries

• Zheng Yi Sao — Adoptive mother, lover, and later second wife; overall head of the confederation under whom Cheung Po Tsai served as Red Fleet commander.