This species is widely-distributed in the Mekong river system in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, Salween and Ayeyarwaddy rivers in southern China, Myanmar, and Thailand, plus various smaller basins in Vietnam and China. It has also been recorded from the islands of Hainan and Hong Kong.

Type locality is given as ‘China: sent from Hong Kong’.

At time of writing there exist 18 recognised members of the genus though only B. kweichowensis is well-known in the trade with B. szechuanensis unlikely to have been exported. According to Chen, Huang and Yang (2009) it can be distinguished from similar congeners by the following suite of characters: 1 branched and 17-20 simple pectoral-fin rays…