I Sailed With Chinese Pirates
by Aleko Lilius

The Pearl River Delta in the 1920s was a lawless place, with bands of pirates hijacking ships, kidnapping villagers, and extorting money from fishing fleets – when they weren’t hiding out in opium dens and gambling houses in Macau. In those days, when “adventurer” was still considered a profession, Finnish-American Aleko Lilius described his dramatic journey aboard a heavily armed pirate junk and his imprisonment in a Hong Kong jail.