The history of Xiangqi, Chinese chess

Where Xiangqi comes from

Xiangqi belongs to the great chess family that begins with chaturanga in sixth-century India, spreads to Sassanid Persia, and from there travels in every direction — west to become European chess, east along the Silk Road to become Xiangqi, and onward to Korea's janggi and Japan's shogi.

The earliest surviving description of the rules appears in the Xuanguai lu (玄怪錄), a collection of strange tales written by Niu Sengru in the eighth century, in which a dreamer watches a battle fought by chariots, horses and generals. The game described is recognisably an ancestor, not the modern game.

By the early twelfth century, in the Southern Song, Xiangqi had reached essentially its present form: the 9×10 board with river and palaces, and the full set of seven piece types.

The cannon: a piece you can date

Most of chess history is guesswork. The cannon is an exception, because it is a piece that could not have existed before the technology it represents.

China was among the earliest users of gunpowder weapons, and the 炮 character originally denoted a stone-throwing catapult before it came to mean a gunpowder cannon — which is why some sets write the Black cannon as 砲 (stone radical) and the Red one as 炮 (fire radical). The piece appears in Chinese chess around the tenth and eleventh centuries and appears in no other branch of the chess family at that time.

So the cannon dates the modern game. Whatever came before, Xiangqi as we play it is a game of the gunpowder era, and its most distinctive mechanic — capture by jumping over a screen — is a piece of military imagery made into a rule.

Chu and Han: the river across the board

The gap across the middle of the board is usually inscribed 楚河漢界 — "the Chu river, the Han border". It refers to the Chu–Han contention of 206–202 BCE, the civil war between Xiang Yu of Chu and Liu Bang of Han that ended with the founding of the Han dynasty, and specifically to the truce that divided China along the Hong Canal.

This is commemoration, not chronology: the inscription is far younger than the war and does not mean the game is that old. What it tells you is how Xiangqi was understood — as a re-enactment of a famous stalemate between two evenly matched commanders, with the river as the line neither could hold.

The same historical framing explains the palace. A general who cannot leave his command post, flanked by advisors who never step outside it, is a piece of political imagery: the commander is the thing being defended, and the state falls with him.

The classical manuals

Xiangqi has a written tradition that rivals chess literature. Two Ming-dynasty collections are still studied:

• Ju Zhong Mi (橘中秘, "Secrets inside the orange"), a seventeenth-century manual of openings and tactical problems whose analysis of the central cannon opening is still quoted.
• Mei Hua Pu (梅花譜, "Plum blossom manual"), whose answer to the central cannon — the screen-horse defence — reshaped opening theory and remains one of the main defences today.

Alongside them sits a huge body of endgame compositions (殘局), problems with a handful of pieces and a forced result. Street players in China have traditionally set them up on a cloth board and invited passers-by to try to win a "hopeless" position for money, which is one of the reasons Xiangqi endgame technique is so highly developed.

The modern game

China recognised Xiangqi as an official sport in 1956 and built a national championship structure around it. The Asian Xiangqi Federation followed in 1978 and the World Xiangqi Federation in 1993, which runs a world championship in which Chinese players remain dominant while Vietnam — where the game is cờ tướng — is consistently the strongest challenger.

Estimates of the player base run into the hundreds of millions across China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Chinese communities worldwide. By any reasonable count, Xiangqi is one of the two or three most played board games on earth.

Computers

Xiangqi engines followed the chess trajectory with a delay: strong programs appeared in the 1990s, and by the 2010s the best engines had overtaken the best humans. The game's branching factor is comparable to chess, but its endgames are far more tactical because stalemate is a loss and because cannons need screens — which makes engine endgame play look startling to human eyes.

The cousins: janggi, shogi and Western chess

Korean janggi is Xiangqi's closest relative: the same board, a palace, cannons that jump — but the elephant moves differently, there is no river restriction, and a player may pass. Japanese shogi took the family in another direction with dropped captured pieces. Western chess took the queen and the bishop and produced a faster, more open game.

Playing two of them makes both better. The Xiangqi habit of counting screens and blocks sharpens your eye for lines; the Western habit of thinking about pawn structure has no equivalent here, and its absence is exactly what makes Xiangqi so sharp from move one.

Common questions