What Was the Yangtze Patrol, and Who Were the River Rats?
US Navy Sailors Guarding the Hankow Bund 1926 (public domain) If you have read The Dragon Gate Conspiracy , you have already met a few of them: the laconic, sun-bronzed Sailors aboard the USS Patuxent . The book opens with Jack Gaines watching them banter in pidgin with Chinese hawkers from the rail as the gunboat noses upriver toward Hankow. Some of the Sailors, Jack Gaines notices, have grown the informal beards that mark a man who has been on the river a while. These are the River Rats, and their story is worth telling. The Mission The U.S. Navy’s Yangtze River Patrol, or “YangPat,” traced its formal origins to 1903, in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising. (However, American warships had plied the river since the aftermath of an incident in 1854). By the 1920s, China’s central government had effectively ceased to function as a reliable guarantor of foreign lives and commerce. The foreign powers, Britain, France, Japan, the United States, and others, each maintained river...
