Chinese Chess History

Origin of Chinese Chess

Where did the widespread game of Chinese Chess originate ? Many common people think that the first variants of the game known now as International Chess was created in India in the sixth century. These variants, which included Xiangqi, a Chinese Chess variant that is a popular choice of board game native to China, and Shogi, a Japanese Chess variant that is also often recognized as the “Game of Generals” (Yutopian Online 2000). This idea was in fact proven to be false due to new research conducted on this topic. Xiangqi and Backgammon ; two very popular chess game variants, have both been discovered to have been evolved from the original and ancient Chinese board game known as Liubo, which was invented approximately

The minor difference between the modern Xiangqi game and the ancient game of Liubo is that in Xiangqi, rolling a dice does not help determine the moves that are up to play next. Backgammon, on the other hand, also incorporates the dice-rolling technique to predetermine the moves. Using this information, researchers discovered that the well-known game of Xiangqi was invented much earlier than both the variants of Shogi and the widespread “International Chess” game (Yutopian Online 2000). Xiangqi, which literally translates to “ Elephant-Game”, or “The Game of The Elephant”, can be broken down into “xiang”, which translates to “elephant”, and “qi” being “chess”. The game has acquired this name because of two reasons: the game pieces used while playing Liubo of the general and pawns were made out of ivory, a substance found in elephant tusks, and because the Chinese were known to use elephants as transportation and aid in the military. This information was taken from when Huangdi, who was also referred to as the “Yellow Emperor”, had used numerous amounts of elephants to help him in the army about 4000 years ago, and from records of elephants used in combats back in the Han

Because of this legend, Xiangqi has also been given the name “ Joy Inside a Mandarin” (Yutopian Online 2000). As time went by, soon came the Bei Zhou Dynasty. During this period of time, an emperor named Wu Di improvised on and summarized the game Xiang Xi, which he recorded in an article that he wrote called “Xiang Jin” (Yutopian Online 2000). This emperor tried to share his new idea and way of playing the game with all of his officials later in his time, but unfortunately most of the records of his improvised game have been lost within the next couple of centuries. The only information that was saved about the new game was that it was played on an eight by eight play board consisting of a square grid and had two layers. The outside layer of the board was also divided into two layers that had North, East, South, West, North-East, North-West, South- East, and South-West on the outer part of it and a Ba Gua on the inside that matched it perfectly. The second layer, or the inner layer, was made up of twelve different squares that each represented the months.The game pieces of Xiang Xi were known as horses, and represented earth, wood, water, fire, and gold. The other pieces that were included in the game were known as dragons and consisted