Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes reveals China's history and culture through the eyes of ordinary men and women using an interdisciplinary perspective that incorporates history, anthropology, folk studies, and literature to examine the sociocultural and symbolic worlds of gangsters, sorcerers, and prostitutes in late imperial and modern China.
In the waters around China, the "golden age of piracy" stretched for nearly three centuries from the mid-sixteenth to early-nineteenth centuries. Over those years, there was an unprecedented advance in Chinese piracy unsurpassed in size and scope anywhere else in the world. This book uses primary source documents to uncover the history of "dwarf bandits," "sea rebels," and "ocean bandits."