Oops, turns out piracy is pretty much always a term like terrorist that gets slapped on whatever we don’t like despite being a general reaction to the status quo. And nothing’s really changed.

And when african pirates were captured by the British they were forced into the slave trade.

Horrible Histories taught me about pirates https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwn5K89dE5c

They were generally democratic, disciplined, communal - they even had pensions! If you wanted out of the pirate life, you would be taken to a destination of your choice (anywhere in the world) and given a lump sum to help you with your new life.

interesting

Honor among thieves.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU YES i’ve spent like two years studying piracy (back when i had time to devote to reading and research) and yes pirates are actually all very interesting and democratic and great

Reblogging since someone recently sent me an ask on this topic (although now it appears to be lost somewhere in my inbox).

The thing that annoys me the most about conversations on piracy is the Eurocentrism. African pirates feature as ‘side characters’ on white western ships and that’s about it. This TOTALLY ignores the many other pirate communities out there. Like, why are there no documentaries, movies and novels about Chinese pirates? They outnumbered pirate ships of European origin by a large margin and were very succesful. They formed massive fleets and regularily kicked ass against European naval fleets.

Chinese ‘Pirate kings’ often had a fleet of over 200 ships and the Japanese-Chinese pirate king Cheng Chih-Lung had over a thousand. He fought wars against rival pirate kings and often saw the European fleets as minor nuances. After 1635 you couldn’t sail the Taiwan Strait without a permit issued by Cheng Chih-Lung. He then went on to become a navy commander of the Ming dynasty. He kicked the Dutch VOC out of Taiwan and might have become king of Taiwan if he hadn’t died shortly after.

How is he not the most famous pirate in the history of piracy? Oh yeah.. wait.. he wasn’t white.

Actually, the most successful pirate in history was Ching Shih, a Chinese woman who commanded over 300 junks manned by 20,000 to 40,000 pirates.

It also looks like they’re going to make a TV Series based on her life Starring Maggie Q:

Xiang Fei Altered Copy: Mind=Blown

rainbowrosefae submitted to medievalpoc:

[mod note]

WHOA.

The alt text for the first image here is : 香妃戎装像 — 郎世宁, which, according to google translate, says “Xiang Fei military uniform like - Castiglione”. The other one has just “香 妃”, “Xiang Fei”

I have never seen that copy. Wow. Wow.

Ancient Tattoos

For more details on each specimen: Archaeology.org

Women in Ancient China

Women’s roles in  family and society

Ancient Chinese women were subordinate to men for most of their lives. First she would obey her father, and after marriage she answered to her husband. According to K’ung Fu-tze, also known as Confucius, a woman’s duty was to look after her husband, sons and the other men in her life. As such, her greatest duty was to have a son. That didn’t mean that she shouldn’t respected: her role as mother and mother-in-law was very important and she should be honoured by her offspring. In their old age, women were often respected by their families as the oldest living member, especially if they survived their husbands.

Marriage was an arranged affair that was set up in such a way that both families would profit from the union. The bride’s family would provide her with a dowry. Because of this, the father of the bride always had the last say in who his daughter married; the girl in question wouldn’t have any input in this, regardless of whether she was a noble or a peasant girl.

Women could be sold by their male relatives for a variety of reasons, though this usually happened in the lower classes. If there had been a bad harvest, a peasant could sell his daughter to get the rest of the family through the winter. It was also possible for a father to sell his youngest daughter after marrying off her other sisters; multiple dowries could, in the case of the working class, get rather expensive or unaffordable. The women sold this way would usually end up in brothels.

Education and occupation

Because of the subservience of women, education was mostly out of the question. Daughters of nobles could be literate, but this was, especially in early Imperial China, more an exception than a rule. Their occupations were centred around home and hearth: from cooking and cleaning to nurturing the children. Weaving, spinning and sewing were common, home-based occupations for women of the working class. Their husbands would sell the products as additional income for the household. Some farmer’s wives helped their spouses on the fields.

There were of course, less savoury professions such as prostitution. The bulk of these girls were your regular, run-of-the-mill prostitutes who had to give their bodies to whoever paid the price. Talented girls could end up becoming a courtesan, a Yiji. As a Yiji, the woman would not often engage in sex trade, but was instead a songstress, poetess, dancer and companion in one. Rich and influential men often had favourite courtesans, and sometimes such a man would buy the lady in question free and take her as concubine or even a wife (in ancient China, men of standing were allowed to have more wives).

Women’s dress and makeup

The prevalent mode of clothing for millennia was the Hanfu, or silk robe, in use for both men and women alike, but with some difference in composition of garments for each gender. Each dynasty would develop its own style of Hanfu. For women, a Hanfu was made up out of a qun or qang, a skirt; yi, an open cross-collar garment; ru, an open cross-collar shirt; and the shan, an open cross-collar jacket that was worn over the yi. There were women-specific styles as well, such as the quju version of the shenyi, which was a mode of dress in use mostly in the pre-Shang periods (before the second millennium B.C.). The quju had wider sleeves than the male zhiju, a longer, pointed lapel, and had a curved hem.

The Hanfus of the upper class could be as elaborate as their rank in society allowed, with ornaments of jade or precious metal hanging from the sashes of the garment. Working class women wore less elaborate versions of the Hanfu, or, if they were doing manual labour, might have preferred loose trousers and simple open cross-collar jackets. These women aren’t likely to have worn makeup, though it’s not possible to say for certain. The makeup trends that were in vogue among daughters and wives of the nobility were mostly focussed on the eyebrows: there are quite a few legends wherein the Emperor or another man of high standing falls in love with a lady because of her elegant eyebrows.

Apart from painstakingly painting their eyebrows in blueish black (a practice that had many different styles, each with its own name), Chinese women applied foundation for a smooth, pale look and reddened their lips and their cheeks. Dimples were enhanced or painted on, and often a flower ornament was painted on the forehead, between the eyebrows. Legend goes that a princess once fell asleep under a cherry tree, and when she woke up a blossom had fallen on her forehead. The princess and the ladies of the court were so taken by this, that they started painting the flower patterns on their skin.

That most infamous beauty practice of China, foot binding or chanzu, had not yet gained widespread use in antiquity. The exact origins are unknown, but it is thought that it originated with the dancers of the early Song dynasty, around 960 A.D. 

From TIME.com’s series: (WARNING: Graphic content.)

The Nanjing Massacre: Scenes from a Hideous Slaughter 75 Years Ago

75 years ago, on Dec. 13, 1937, Japanese troops captured the city of Nanjing, then the capital of the Chinese republic led by Chiang Kai-shek and went on a six-week campaign of carnage and slaughter that would be forever remembered as the “Rape of Nanjing.” Reports document widespread rape and the indiscriminate killing of civilians; some death tolls estimate over a quarter of a million people were killed. The incident, though, still rankles Sino-Japanese relations. Japanese nationalists contend that the death tolls are inflated and the majority killed were resisting Japanese occupation. To this day, pages in Japanese school history textbooks can incite heated protests on the streets in China. Then and now, the Nanjing massacre remains one of the darkest events of the last century. — Ishaan Tharoor

The Trebuchet

Paul E. Chevedden, Les Eigenbrod, Vernard Foley and Werner Soedel

Scientific American, July (1995)

Abstract

Centuries before the development of effective cannons, huge artillery pieces were demolishing castle walls with projectiles the weight of an upright piano. The trebuchet, invented in China between the fifth and third centuries B.C.E., reached the Mediterranean by the sixth century C.E. It displaced other forms of artillery and held its own until well after the coming of gunpowder. The trebuchet was instrumental in the rapid expansion of both the Islamic and the Mongol empires. It also played a part in the transmission of the Black Death, the epidemic of plague that swept Eurasia and North Africa during the 14th century. Along the way it seems to have influenced both the development of clockwork and theoretical analyses of motion. The trebuchet succeeded the catapult, which in turn was a mechanization of the bow [see “Ancient Catapults,” by Werner Soedel and Vernard Foley; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, March 1979]. Catapults drew their energy from the elastic deformation of twisted ropes or sinews, whereas trebuchets relied on gravity or direct human power, which proved vastly more effective.

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Archaeologists think a hidden imperial tomb may be too full of deadly traps to enter

According to Hollywood, part of archaeology is breaking into ancient tombs and dealing with deadly traps, poison gas and the undead. In real life, it’s far less dangerous. In fact, despite rumors, there hasn’t been a single ancient deadly trap-filled ancient tomb discovered anywhere in the world… until now. Work on excavating an ancient Chinese imperial tomb has stopped because archaeologists are afraid it’s full of traps and poison gas.

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