Ching Shih 鄭氏 was a pirate. She was ruthless and blood thirsty and did a lot of things that we as a modern society judge heavily as amoral. But she was also something truly exceptional for her time. A successful business woman. By today’s standards, she would have been a fortune 500 CEO that made Bezos, Buffet, Musk, and Ma all look like tiny fish in her real-life shark tank.
This is the story of a woman who started with nothing except her intelligence and work ethic and built the most successful floating empire in the history of the world.
Shih was born in Guangdong, China around 1775. Nothing is known about her family and she started working in a disreputable dock house around the same time most girls today would be learning how to use photo filters on their first phone. But young Shih was smart, savvy, and she developed a small side business trading in information. This brought her to the attention of a young pirate captain named Zheng Yi. He had a force of 200 ships and when he proposed. Shih insisted on a legal arrangement where she would be a 50% owner in his enterprise. She got a pre-nup and she made it work in her favor. This was unheard of anywhere in the world at the time and that alone would have been notable, but she didn’t stop there.
Over the next few years Shih would help her new husband turn those 200 ships into a 600-mast juggernaut called the Red Flag Fleet. Things were developing nicely as Shih helped form a coalition of captains loyal to her spouse… until he passed away. Fearing a hostile takeover and loss of everything she had worked for Shih consolidated power. She not only ensured the loyalty of the captains but also of the crews and all the townships that serviced her flotilla by creating a series of honor codes that benefited everyone who worked for her. While her methods of acquiring wealth and enforcing order were incredibly bloodthirsty and inhumane, her sense of loyalty to her workers and support staff were remarkably egalitarian and forward-thinking in her time.
All villages that provided services to her ships were protected from looting and theft. This not only gave the villagers stability and created industries along the coast but offered them protection from other pirate groups. Any women kidnapped during a raid had to either be released or ransomed back to their families unharmed. In addition, all loot taken had to be accounted for and was dispersed equitably among the crew by a purser. Breaking any of these codes would result in some pretty awful penalties.
At the height of her power, the fleet had grown to 1,800 ships and 80,000 people worked for her organization. To put that in a modern perspective in 2020 Nike had 1,096 retail stores and about 75,000 employees worldwide. She was literally bigger than Nike and she didn’t have an Instagram account to fuel her expansion!
Shih was pardoned by the Qing Imperial Government in 1810 and retired with her family to Macau where she invested in a gambling house, the salt trade, and acted as an advisor to the Chinese official Lin Zexu.
She started life with nothing and died at the age of 69 as one of the wealthiest people to have ever lived.
Keep reading for tomorrow’s interview and profile of the modern Beijing Business woman behind Cheers Wine.
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Photo: hisoryofyesterday.com
