Xiang qi / Chinese Chess

The Game of Xiang-Qi explained...

Xiangqi or Shiang-Chee (which helps with the pronunciation of the original name) is known to the Chinese as the “Elephant Game”, and dates back more than 2000 years.

In 1975, Mao’s Red Chinese government, deciding that Xiangqi was a ‘good thing’, published 487,000 copies of the official rules. It thus joined Weiqi (Go) and Western Chess in a triumvirate of board games blessed with government patronage in China.

Of these three games receiving Government support in China, it is Xiangqi that remains, as it has been for centuries, the game that most attracts popular support. Indeed, the Chinese outside the mainland, left to their own devices, have been running tournaments and international matches for decades, and have produced an immense amount of literature.

Western players have found it to be a first-rate game too, but unlike other mind games it suffers here from having no presiding body for the West and from a lack of literature in English. These handicaps should not be allowed to mask the inherent excellence of the game, especially for those who enjoy fast-moving and broad-ranging tactical fights where a good technique is important. Chinese Chess is known as the kung fu of board games largely because it results in a wide-open, quick moving and aggressive contest.

Chinese Chess is not merely a regional game, it is a truly international one. The reason is that the Chinese are an international people, wherever you go in the world you will always be able to find at least one Chinese person and that Chinese person will almost always know how to play Xiangqi.

There is simply no such thing as a Chinese man who does not know how to play Xiangqi. The game is embedded in the Chinese culture, therefore, there are more than half a billion (excluding the Chinese children) in the world who know how to play Chinese Chess. This statistic makes Xiangqi easily the most popular game of any kind in the entire world.

XiangQi is another of the games in the Chess family where the names of pieces have been translated into English to be comparable with Western Chess, although Chinese Chess does have an extra piece, the Cannon. Sets generally consists of discs with Chinese characters defining their names, but there are sets that have three dimensional versions showing the pieces as figures representing their Western names.

Traditional XiangQi boards can be of paper or some similar foldable material but again as with the peices more ordnate versions of boards are available normally folding and doubling as case for the pieces.

Books on the subject are slightly less prevalent than books for other mind games, but there are a few which are ideal for beginners.