Historical Accuracy
- From the First Opium War to the founding of the People's Republic of China, Western gunboats patrolled the Yangtze River to enforce trading privileges and extraterritorial rights that imperial powers acquired through unequal treaties. The gunboats enabled Western powers to assert influence over political developments in China. In the Panay incident of 1937, an American gunboat on the Yangtze River was shelled by invading Japanese forces. In the Yangtze Incident of 1949, several small Royal Navy ships were shelled by artillery batteries of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. The attack on the gunboat USS Panay is often cited as the inspiration for some elements in McKenna's plot. McKenna served in the China River Patrol in 1936.
- Despite its naval designation as a "river gunboat", the San Pablo of the book and film has very little artillery on deck: a 3-inch/23-caliber gun forward, a 1-pounder rapid fire gun astern and two Lewis machine guns (six in the novel). The sailors' small arms are M1903 Springfield rifles, bayonets, BARs and .45 caliber M1911 pistols carried by the officers and Chief Petty Officers who also carry swords and cutlasses. The book mentions the use of riot guns by the crew and a box of hand grenades but they do not appear in the film.
- The plot element of the killing of missionary Jameson at China Light Mission may have been inspired by the 1934 killing of American Christian missionaries John and Betty Stam and by the killing of the "China Martyrs of 1900".
Read more about this topic: The Sand Pebbles (film)
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or accuracy:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“In everything from athletic ability to popularity to looks, brains, and clothes, children rank themselves against others. At this age [7 and 8], children can tell you with amazing accuracy who has the coolest clothes, who tells the biggest lies, who is the best reader, who runs the fastest, and who is the most popular boy in the third grade.”
—Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)