River gunboat

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The USS Panay, a United States Navy river gunboat which served on the Yangtze Patrol.

A river gunboat is a type of

US Navy's Yangtze Patrol. Stronger river warships with larger guns were river monitors
.

Chinese river gunboats

Imperial German Navy river gunboat SMS Otter c. 1909 during trials on the Weser

Various European powers, the USA, and Japan, maintained flotillas of these shallow draft gunboats patrolling Chinese rivers. These gunboats were enforcing those nations' treaty rights under the treaties that China had started to sign following her defeat during the first

Opium War with Britain
. The advantages of steam power and shallow drafts meant that the new European vessels initially vastly outclassed anything available to the Chinese.

Foreign powers had received concessions from China, like extraterritoriality for their citizens in China, and the gunboats policed these rights.

British

HMS Ladybird at Shanghai in the 1920s.

China Station and vessels of various classes were deployed and often moved to and from other major world rivers. The Navy had built a large number of gunboats for the Crimean war in the 1850s and several of these found their way to the China Station afterwards. As these boats were scrapped, they were replaced by a new type of boat which was purpose built for inshore and river service around the world, the Beacon- and later Frolic-class boats
.

The purpose built river vessels of the

Dragonfly-class boats
, three of which, Dragonfly, Grasshopper and Scorpion were involved in the fighting down the Malay Peninsula and Singapore.

United States

U.S. Navy craft were of varying age, design, size, and utility. The earliest craft made brief excursions upriver between 1861 and 1901 but were rarely assigned on permanent patrol. In 1901 two large gunboats,

Quiros
(sister ship to Villalobos) served until 1916 and 1923.

In 1914 two 204-ton, 50-man patrol craft of British design and built at

Luzon, 560 tons and 82 men, were "May–September" gunboats, able to patrol completely upriver only during high water months. (Luzon's sister ship, USS Mindanao
served on the China coast but not in the river patrol.) Except for Panay, sunk by Japanese aircraft in December 1937, the newer ships served in China until late 1941.

See also
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