This was a personal project for fun.

I chose to design a poster around Ching Shih, the most notorious and feared pirate of her day. She was born in 1775 and little is known about her life before piracy or where exactly in China she was born. What is known is that she started out as a prostitute in a floating brothel. She was able to escape and married a pirate by the name of Zheng Yi. Together they were clever enough to unite the competing Cantonese pirate fleets and establish themselves as leaders. This new united fleet was the most formidable in all of China.

In 1807, Zheng Yi died leaving Ching Shih a widow. Shih saw the opportunity and maneuvered her way into her late husband’s place and became captain, successfully leading over 1,500 ships and over 50,000 pirates. With Ching Shih’s leadership, the pirate fleet ransacked towns, markets, and villages up and down the coast from Macau to Canton. She even leveraged a blood tax on the townspeople that they were forced to pay unless they wished to bring on a swift reign of terror, usually entailing some sort of gruesome death. Even the Imperial Government was no match for the fleet, losing at least 63 ships. 

After an exciting career in piracy, Ching Shih finally decided that it was time to end her pirating days when the Imperial Government enlisted the aid of British and Portuguese warships. Shih was able to negotiate amnesty with the Chinese Government and was pardoned for all of her crimes; Chih also was allowed to legally keep all of the loot she’d acquired over the years. She even negotiated the lives and safety of nearly everyone in her fleet.

After quitting piracy, the quiet life still didn’t quite suit Ching Shih. Her misdeeds continued on land through a successful underground gambling business and likely smuggler ring, until her death at 69 years old.

I represented Ching Shih via the use of a simplified color palette — raining bloody script tells the tales of her misdeeds. I cut across the red script by the black silhouette of her ship, signaling impending doom.