The Pirate Queen: how filmmaker Maja Bodenstein reclaimed her Chinese roots with an Emmy-nominated video game about Ching Shih
- Set over one fictionalised night in 1807, The Pirate Queen tells the tale of Canton’s notorious Ching Shih – with A-lister Lucy Liu at the helm
Ching Shih was notoriously difficult to impress. History’s most powerful and swag-laden pirate, Canton native, scourge of the Chinese, British and Portuguese fleets, with roughly 1,800 ships and 80,000 crew at her command, she was also an implacable disciplinarian and enforcer of women’s rights who executed all manner of rule breakers.
But she would no doubt approve of Maja Bodenstein. The film and television writer has returned Ching to the South China Sea of the Qing dynasty – reincarnating her as the unmistakable Lucy Liu, not on the big screen, but in video game The Pirate Queen, nominated for a 2024 Emmy Award.
All the more remarkable given that it was Bodenstein’s first tilt at writing for the genre.
“I was invited to be on the game project very early on,” she says, on a Zoom call from her London home. “The designers were looking for a writer of Chinese or East Asian heritage who could really shape the story.”
At this point, Eloise Singer, founder of Singer Studios, entered the picture as the second component of what would become the female triumvirate steering the game.
“Eloise is the game’s director and comes from a film-producing background,” says Bodenstein. “We started by making a demo, just one level of the game. That went to the [London-based] Raindance Film Festival and won the Discovery Award for best debut at Raindance Immersive 2021.
“With that we got funding from Meta to do a full game version, came up with more levels and wanted to make a really exciting story about Ching.” And that launch saw its writer navigating home waters. “Ching being active in the South China Sea, to me that was a massive draw, because I knew that story,” reveals Bodenstein, whose father is German and whose mother hails from Beijing.
