NOTE: Most of my xiangqi site has been shut down, so please don’t link to this. Some material has been archived at Xiangqi in English. When I wrote my little manual of Chinese Chess more than four decades ago, information on the game in English was very difficult to obtain; apart from H.J.R. Murray’s somewhat unreliable […]
Category Archives: Xiangqi
A Chinese Chess Ending with Three Hundred Variations (Shanghai, 1916) Games of skill played with checkers or counters, are very popular in China, and no one who has leisurely sauntered through the many-coloured ways of a Chinese town can have failed to notice this fact. Street urchins are often to be found outside somebody’s front-door […]
All forms of chess are thought to have a common ancestor, but the dating and placing of the prototypical game are contentious. Following the lead of the chess historian H.J.R. Murray (whose scholarship was perhaps wider than it was deep), it has frequently been asserted that chess originated in India as chaturanga around the middle […]