I've recently been reading up on famous pirates during the Age of Sail. Guys like Blackbeard and Henry Morgan. Just started to wonder if there were pirates like them in Southeast Asia. The closest one I found was Madame Cheng. Are there any others that have been written about?
/u/mayhemix
There were definitely famous pirates in SE Asia during that period. It saw the rise and fall of regional powers, the rise of trade as European explorers started to come, and all that means great opportunity for great pirates enterprisers. The challenge of piracy was sufficiently significant to have lead into severe restriction on maritime trade, revocation of trade privileges, and outright war.
One example is Chen Zuyi, who took advantage of Ming insecurities in maritime trade. The Ming prohibited overseas trade and thus, Chinese merchants who defied this prohibition was forced to settle overseas. To some extent, the prohibition encouraged piracy, as maritime regions such as Canton and Fujian were highly invested and dependent on maritime activities. Chen Zuyi was one of these merchants-turned-pirates. He settled in the Malacca straits, his fleet growing to be quite large and preying on ships. During his first voyage, Zheng He confronted Chen's fleet in a major battle in 1407. Chen lost and was beheaded.
In the early 1500s, the Spanish controlled Manila in the Philippines, even if their numbers were always small and they had to rely on ethnic Chinese and Japanese merchants to run their trade. The Spanish ran a very profitable trade whereby silver from the Americas were used to buy high-value items such as silk, porcelain, and spices. Seeing this wealth, a Chinese merchant-pirate Lim Feng, who had operated in the South China Sea Hokkien Sea attacked Manila with 62 war junks. Unfortunately for him, the defense was stiffer than expected and his attack failed. He decided to settle elsewhere in the Philippines and preyed on shipping to and from Manila. The Spanish couldn't tolerate this, so they formed an expeditionary force with native allies to fight Lim Feng. There is a rather well known history of Lim Feng, known in the Philippines as Limafong.
Finally, Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) was a Ming loyalist who continued resistance against the Qing even as the Ming dynasty collapsed. He set up a maritime power base around Fujian and Taiwan that lasted to the 1680s. To the Ming he was a loyalist, to the Qing he was a rebel and pirate. Koxinga also fought against the Dutch forces on Formosa and succeeded in defeating them -- a severe blow to the Dutch trade route connecting Batavia to Dejima island in Japan! Parts of this is covered in Andrade's The Lost Colony.
Cheers!