historical pictures Archives - China Underground

China’s southeast coast during the nineteenth century has been plagued by pirates and warlords.

Part of our China History Archive

In the 1840s and 1850s, United States Navy and Royal Navy forces campaigned together against Chinese pirates. Several notable battles were fought though pirate junks continued operating off China for years more. However, some British and American individual citizens also volunteered to serve with Chinese pirates to fight against European forces. The British offered rewards for the capture of westerners serving with Chinese pirates.

The Pirate Chieftains

The two most notorious pirate commanders of the era were Shap Ng-tsai (十五仔) and Chui A-poo (also recorded as Xú Yàbǎo, 徐亚保). Shap Ng-tsai, whose real name was Chin Chay-mee, commanded a fleet of around 70 junks based at Tien-pai, roughly 180 miles west of Hong Kong, and extracted protection money from coastal villages and traders under threat of attack. Chui A-poo, his lieutenant, commanded a separate fleet of more than 50 junks operating out of Bias Bay, east of Hong Kong.

In the spring of 1849, Shap Ng-tsai’s forces were blamed for sinking an American ship and three British merchant vessels carrying opium, and Chui A-poo’s men killed two British officers that February. The killings and the losses to shipping prompted a coordinated response.

The Battle of Tonkin River

In September 1849, a Royal Navy squadron destroyed Chui A-poo’s fleet at Bias Bay. The following month, three British warships under Captain John Charles Dalrymple Hay, joined by eight junks from China’s Imperial Navy, pursued Shap Ng-tsai’s fleet of 64 junks to the Tonkin River, in the waters off Haiphong, Vietnam. After a three-day battle between 18 and 22 October 1849, the combined force destroyed or captured 58 pirate junks carrying an estimated 1,200 cannons and 3,000 crewmen, killing or capturing 1,845 of Shap Ng-tsai’s men. Shap Ng-tsai himself escaped with six smaller junks and around 400 men, and later surrendered to the Qing government in exchange for a military commission.

During the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion, piratical junks were again destroyed in large numbers by British naval forces but ultimately it wasn’t until the 1860s and 1870s that fleets of pirate junks ceased to exist.