Miscellany
Zheng Yi Sao, a Cantonese prostitute, married a pirate captain in 1801 and helped him build up his sea empire, so that by 1805 it consisted of four hundred junk ships operated by forty to sixty thousand pirates. In 1810 the Chinese government, rather than continue to suffer losses, offered the pirates amnesty if they were to retire. Zheng Yi Sao accepted and, according to one historian, led the remainder of her life peacefully, “so far as is consistent with the keeping of an infamous gambling house.”
Miscellany
In Britain in 60, Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, led a revolt against the occupying Romans. According to the historian Tacitus, her forces killed seventy thousand people, sacking and burning the cities later known as St. Albans, Colchester, and London. “We must conquer in the line of battle or fall,” she announced before her final charge. “That is the fate of this woman; let men live on as slaves if they wish.”
Miscellany
“As a young man, he was totally asexual,” Luis Buñuel recalled of Salvador Dalí, elaborating in a parenthetical comment, “Of course, he’s seduced many, particularly American heiresses; but those seductions usually entailed stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the women’s shoulders, and, without a word, showing them to the door.”
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