Quotes from David Cordingly

Their activities reached a peak in the early years of the nineteenth century, when a community of around forty thousand pirates with some four hundred junks dominated the coastal waters and attacked any merchant vessels which strayed into the area. From 1807 these pirates were led by a remarkable woman called Mrs. Cheng, a former prostitute from Canton.

I have brought you to the treasure house of the world. If you leave without it you may henceforth blame nobody but yourself.