Xiangqi rules: how to play Chinese chess

The board: river, palace and points

Xiangqi — 象棋, Chinese chess — is played by more people than any other chess variant on earth. It shares an ancestor with Western chess, but three features make it a different game entirely: pieces sit on the intersections, a river crosses the middle, and each general is locked inside a nine-point palace.

• Board: nine files by ten ranks of lines. Pieces stand on the 90 intersections.
• River (楚河漢界): the gap across the centre. It limits elephants and transforms soldiers.
• Palace: the 3×3 square with diagonals at each end. The general and advisors never leave it.
• Red moves first.

The river is not an obstacle for most pieces — chariots, horses and cannons cross it freely. It matters for exactly two: the elephant, which may never cross, and the soldier, which gains the ability to move sideways once it does.

The seven pieces and how they move

Each side has sixteen pieces of seven kinds. Red and Black use different characters for the same piece — a courtesy of the game, not a difference in power.

Two pieces behave unlike anything in Western chess, and they define Xiangqi: the cannon and the horse.

The cannon: the piece that makes Xiangqi different

The cannon moves exactly like a chariot — any distance along a rank or file — but it captures only by jumping over exactly one piece. That piece is called the screen or platform, and it may belong to either player.

Consequences that shape every game:

• A cannon is strongest early, while the board is crowded with screens, and weakest in the endgame when there is nothing to jump over.
• You can defend against a cannon by removing the screen — an idea with no equivalent in Western chess.
• Adding a piece between the cannon and its target can create a threat as easily as block one. Count the pieces on the line, not the distance.

The horse's hobbled leg and the elephant's eye

The horse moves one point orthogonally and then one diagonally outward — the same destination as a Western knight — but it does not jump. A piece sitting on the orthogonal first step blocks that direction completely. Chinese players call it hobbling the horse's leg (蹩馬腿).

The elephant moves exactly two points diagonally and is blocked if the midpoint — the elephant's eye (象眼) — is occupied. It also may never cross the river, so each elephant can only ever reach seven points on its own half. Elephants are pure defenders.

The flying general rule

The two generals may never face each other along an open file with no piece in between. If they would, the move is illegal — and if you can clear the file yourself, the rule becomes a weapon: your general effectively attacks straight up the board like a chariot.

Beginners meet this rule as a restriction. Strong players use it as a tactic: endgame mates in Xiangqi very often finish with the winning side's general staring down the file to take away an escape square.

Check, checkmate, stalemate and repetition

Check (將軍) and checkmate work as in Western chess: you must answer a check, and a player who cannot is mated and loses.

Two rules differ, and both matter:

• Stalemate is a loss. A player with no legal move loses, whether or not they are in check. There is no stalemate draw to rescue you.
• Perpetual check is forbidden. A player who checks repeatedly to force a repetition must vary — and loses if they do not. The same principle applies to perpetual chasing of an unprotected piece.

The repetition rules are the most complicated corner of Xiangqi law, and different federations word them differently. The practical version used almost everywhere, including on this site: if you are the one forcing the repetition with checks, you must stop or lose.

Draws

Games are drawn by agreement, by a repetition that neither side is forcing, when 60 moves pass with no capture, or when neither side has enough material to mate.

Reading Xiangqi notation

Xiangqi notation counts files from each player's own right, which feels odd for one move and natural after ten. A move has four characters or symbols:

1. The piece (C = cannon, H = horse, R = chariot, S = soldier, G = general, A = advisor, E = elephant).
2. The file it starts on, counted from that player's right.
3. A direction: + forward, - backward, . along the rank.
4. The destination file, or the number of points moved for straight-line moves.

So the most common opening move in the game — the central cannon — is written C2.5: the cannon on file 2 moves along to file 5. English books also write it as "cannon to centre".

Common questions