The West River churned brown and sluggish beneath a June sun as HMS Moth crept upstream toward Zhaoqing, her shallow draft barely clearing the sandbars that had claimed lesser vessels.

The Guns of Zhaoqing: When ANZAC Gunboats Struck the Chinese Warlords

A forgotten river battle that nearly sparked an international incident in 1925

Australian and British gunboats fought a 90-minute artillery duel with Chinese Nationalist forces to rescue trapped merchants in 1925.

The West River churned brown and sluggish beneath a June sun as HMS Moth crept upstream toward Zhaoqing, her shallow draft barely clearing the sandbars that had claimed lesser vessels. Lieutenant Commander Frederick Darley scanned the terraced banks through binoculars, watching for the telltale glint of artillery pieces among the ancient pagodas. It was June 16, 1925, and the Nationalist forces controlling this stretch of Guangdong Province had made their intentions clear: no foreign warship would pass.

The Wanshan Incident—as it would become known in naval dispatches—began as a rescue mission. British and Australian merchants had been trapped in the interior as civil war consumed southern China. General Chen Jiongming's forces, locked in a vicious struggle with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, had blockaded the river, holding foreign nationals as bargaining chips in their desperate campaign.

Moth was no battleship—she displaced barely 645 tons—but her six-inch guns made her a leviathan on these narrow waters. Alongside her steamed HMAS Marblehead, carrying a contingent of Australian naval personnel who had never expected their posting to the China Station would involve actual com…

💡 The Chinese artillery commander who fired on HMS Moth had graduated from Virginia Military Institute and could recite Tennyson from memory—he'd learned English poetry in the same classrooms as future American generals.