The Ever-Evolving Legacy of China’s Pirate Queen

The life and accomplishments of the pirate Sek Yeung, better known as “Ching-Yi Sao” or “Zheng Yi Sao,” were long downplayed in China in favor of her male peers. That may finally be changing.

By Xueting Christine Ni

Sek appears in Western literature as early as 1935, as “The Widow Ching” in Jorge Luis Borges’ “A Universal History of Infamy.” More recently, Sek’s story has inspired Anglophone female writers like Erika Owen, Laura Sook Duncombe, British East-Asian journalist and broadcaster Zing Tsjeng, and historical fiction author D.W. Plato, as well as children’s authors like J.L. Bleakley. When Disney needed a Chinese pirate to attend a council of pirate captains in 2007’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” Sek’s fame made her an obvious choice, though the film’s depiction of her as a heavily made-up brothel madam attending a meeting held before she was even born was less than flattering.

Outside of the Western cultural mainstream, Sek’s nonconformity makes her a rich source of material for creatives who themselves exist outside traditional norms. Take the new British production “Asian Pirate Musical,” for example. Produced by London’s Papergang Theatre, the show intertwines the lives of Sek Yeung, 14th-century diplomat, admiral, and eunuch Zheng He, and other queer survivors and revolutionaries past, present, and future.

On stage, Sek turns her nose up at the title by which she is best known: “‘First Wife of Pirate Cheng’? I cannot believe that is the name that stuck...”

“This is an indulgent spot of historical fiction and our creative choice, a demonstration of her independence and capability beyond being forever known as the wife of a pirate husband,” one of the show’s writers, Nemo Martin, told me.

“It is also a response to large-scale productions such as ‘Miss Saigon,’ ‘The King and I,’ and ‘Madame Butterfly’ — Western stage shows written by white men attempting to depict a fantastical and ‘oriental’ Asia,” Martin added. “In a British ESEA (East and Southeast Asia) musical designed by a diverse collective and featuring an ensemble cast of characters from various parts of ESEA, we loudly declare that ‘Asian’ as a lived experience is not homogenous or monolithic, then unite once again under the banner of a broader, celebratory solidarity we call ‘Asian Pirate Musical.’”

Covers of Chinese novels about Sek Yeung. Courtesy of the author

Meanwhile, China’s feminist awakening is finally leading the country’s storytellers to rediscover and re-examine Sek. In 2020, Chinese audiences at last got a TV series devoted to Sek’s life, one in which she is depicted not as a passive gentlewoman, but as a folk hero who rallies the pirates to protect the poor and weak and helps to quash the opium trade.

In the literary world, the renowned novelist and screenwriter Jiang Shengnan has spotlighted Sek in her series of short novels exploring influential women in history, “Considering the World.” And online, female web novelists like Xiaoyue and Xiaqi Suxin have been active in re-imagining Sek’s story, with her life being the central focus of their works, seemingly for the first time in Chinese literary history. The latter’s “The Legend of Pirate Zheng Yi Sao,” for example, fits squarely into the genre known in Chinese as nüzun, which focuses on matriarchal power dynamics.

This weekend, “Doctor Who” fans will finally get to see the BBC’s take on Sek’s life. It’s the first episode of “Doctor Who” to be set in China since the show’s first season all the way back in 1964, and the episode’s director, Haolu Wang, is the show’s first of East Asian descent. Whether in history or legend, Sek Yeung has always been a heroic figure. I hope “Doctor Who” does Sek justice, and that her portrayal reminds the show’s growing Chinese fandom just how great our heroes are, whatever side of the law they may be on.

Xueting Christine Ni is a translator and Chinese culture writer based in London. She is the author of “Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction.”

Editors: Wu Haiyun and Kilian O’Donnell.

(Header image: A still from “Doctor Who: Legend of the Sea Devils.” From Douban)