 The book was initially serialized in the "Saturday Evening Post", and in January 1963 it was published by Harper & Row.In 1966 it was used as the storyline for a movie of the same name starring Steve McQueen.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 over from the Spanish–American War.