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Kriegspiel is September's Recognized Chess Variant of the month. |
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The Mao is quite well known as the 'knight' in Xiangqi (aka Chinese Chess), as well as Korean Chess. Its name is Chinese for horse. It has some popularity as a problem piece, and you can see some examples at the Retrograde Analysis Corner, and on Torsten Linss' problem page.
In Fergus Duniho's Cavalier Chess and Grand Cavalier Chess, this piece is called a Cavalier and is used in place of Pawns.
The Mao is similar to the chess Knight - it ends up the same distance away, but it can not jump over intervening pieces like the chess Knight. Rather, the Mao is considered to move first one space orthogonally, and then one space diagonally (away from the starting square) to its destination. The intermediate square must be empty.
Note that this makes it possible for the mao to pin pieces, and it is possible for a Mao to attack an opposing Mao without that Mao attacking back.
In the diagram below, the White mao on d5 can move to all the squares marked with a black circle. It can also capture the Black mao, even though the Black mao can not capture the White one. Also note that the Black king is not in check, but that the Black rook is pinned.
To reach its destination, a Mao must have an unoccupied pass-through space. This is a space that must be stepped through for a piece to continue moving. Riders and steppers have pass-through spaces, though leapers do not. When a Mao moves, it first makes one step orthogonally, then makes a second step diagonally outward. Its first step takes it to a pass-through space. If this space is occupied, it cannot make any move in that direction. Having this pass-through space is what distinguishes the Mao from the Knight. The Knight leaps to the same spaces a Mao may step to, whether or not any spaces in between are occupied. For a rider, such as a Rook, each space in its path is a pass-through space to the next space. If any space in its path is occupied, it cannot move further.
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The above was authored by: Fergus Duniho and Ben Good.
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Created on: January 15, 1999. Last modified on: February 07, 2003.
| Date | Name | Rating | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
Steven Marche  | Good | regardless of any author's spelling of a very simple Chinese Character, the standard Romanization of the horse character is 'ma'. Mao is simply another sound and simply is wrong. Unfortunately, problemists and game afficionados of the past were not linguists, but fortunately there are those of us who are in these modern times. Ma is Ma. Not Mao, or Mao Ze Dong's surname, which means hair or fur, btw. | |
| Charles Gilman | None | Ma has many Chinese meanings depending on inflection. Inflected one way it means horse, inflected another way mother. Thereforte the confusion with the English 'ma' is entirely appropriate, especially as the English 'mare' means a female horse. There is little connection with the Pao, except that both pieces are used in Xiang Qi, and still less with the Vao. They differ from pieces used from India westwards in entirely different ways. Two small points: were 'Dawsons' books' written by one writer called Dawsons or several called Dawson? And why is cat the 'opposite of dog' when the two beasts have far more in common with each other than with a horse? | |
Fergus Duniho  | None | T. R. Dawson was using the name Mao before the communist revolution in China that made Chairman Mao known to the world. Dawson was not using Pinyin, and for all I know, the Mao spelling was correct in the system of transliteration he was using. But when I put 'ma' in a Chinese Romanization Converter on the web, I did not find the 'mao' spelling for it in any system. Odds are that Dawson was very careless about using Chinese names. He made up the name Vao to rhyme with Pao, and he may have wanted to carry on the rhyming gimmick with Mao. To a westerner who doesn't know any better, the Mao spelling would suggest a closer relation with the name Pao for the Cannon. It would also distinguish it from the English word 'Ma,' which means mother. | |
| elenex | Excellent | the diagram really helps to show the movements of the 'cavalier', which is hard to describe with words. 'ma' is in fact teh correct term, in both mandarin and cantonese. 'mao' means cat (as in opposite of dog) in both dialects... | |
| Ben Good | None | whether it's originally correct or not, the term mao is standard among problemists and has been for a long time, possibly decades - my copies of Dickens' and Dawsons' books are packed away, so I can't look up if they refer to it or not, maybe somebody else can for me. anyway, the point is, even if there was some translation error way-back-when, that's the name of the piece in english now, and it's extremely unlikely that it will change. it was certainly not an error by the author. |
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Last modified: Sunday, August 21, 2005
