McKenna himself served aboard a river gunboat on the Yangtze Patrol, but about ten years following the events in his novel and of more modern construction (San Pablo was an ancient gunboat seized from the Spanish in 1898).
The USS San Pablo described in Richard McKenna's The Sand Pebbles is an example of this class of vessel, serving on the US Navy's Yangtze Patrol.
:"The Secret Place" is also the title of the Nebula Award-winning short story by Richard McKenna
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The Sand Pebbles is a 1962 novel by American author Richard McKenna about a Yangtze River gunboat and its crew in 1926.
Richard McKenna served aboard a Yangtze River gunboat in 1936 but set the novel a decade earlier, during the Nationalist Northern Expedition of 1925–1927, aboard the fictional USS San Pablo, a gunboat left from the Spanish–American War.