Chinese Chess, or xiangqi, is perhaps the most popular board game in the world, played by millions of people in China, other parts of Asia, and wherever Chinese have settled. In recent years it has started to become better known among non-Chinese. Westernized sets of boards and pieces sometimes show up in specialty games shops, and there have been several computer versions. But this wonderful game is still not as well known as it deserves to be.
For sheer fun, it’s hard to think of a two-player board game that matches Chinese chess. It exercises the brain in much the same way as Western (international) chess, but it is much faster moving. The movement of the pieces tends to be more fluid, the positions more open. It might be said that Chinese chess is more a tactical game than a strategic one. In a sense, it is all "middle game." There is no careful buildup of pawn structures, the major pieces come into play immediately, and drawn-out endgames are rare. Although the openings have been classified, my sense (as a pure amateur) is that it is possible to become a good player without a lot of rote learning.
Chess spread westward through the Islamic world until it arrived in Europe in the Middle Ages. At the same time, it travelled into China and thence to Japan, where it took a very distinct form as shogi. There is also a Korean version very similar to the Chinese one. (Further south, the chess of Thailand, which is holding its own as a national pastime, appears to be on a different evolutionary branch.) By the end of the Song dynasty (960-1279), the modern Chinese game was fully developed.
Some authorities insist that China is the birthplace of chess. If this is so, the game must have been exported very early in its development, because the present Chinese game is an obvious improvement on chaturanga/shatranj. What seems more likely is that the prototypical chess converged with one or more native Chinese games. The modern game may even contain traces of an ancient system of divination in which pieces representing celestial bodies were moved about a map of the cosmos, divided by the Milky Way. The Milky Way is called a river by the Chinese, and the chessboard, as we shall see, has a river running through it. Charles Kliene gives more evidence of this association in the highly entertaining Preface to his Seven Stars: A Chinese Chess Variation with Three Hundred Endings. See also Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, vol. 4 pt. 1, pp. 314 ff, and H.J.R. Murray’s A History of Chess (1913), p. 122.
Even the name of the game may suggest a connection with some type of astrological tablet. Qi means a strategy game, and xiang is the character that appears on the so-called elephants of the black side. (The equivalent red pieces are called by a homonym that signifies "adviser" or "augur".) Like so many Chinese words, xiang has several meanings: it can indeed mean "elephant", but it might equally refer to the ivory from which some sets are made, or it might signify "image" or "symbol" or even (according to Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary) "star" or "heavenly body". Thus xiangqi might be translated "celestial game". "Elephant game" is a possible translation, but it does not seem apt, given the very limited role of the elephant in play; unless the name simply suggests the game's Indian origins.
It is interesting to compare the evolution of chess in China and the West. The game of chaturanga/shatranj suffered from several weaknesses, and these weaknesses were remedied in very different ways, as follows:
An important part of the game’s history is the development of the problem. Unlike Western chess problems of the "black to move and mate in three" variety, xiangqi problems usually offer one side an easy forced win, given the first move, but can also be won by the other side if the advantage is reversed. Charles Kliene has documented one such ending, and gives a colourful description of the hustlers (, which translates as something like "powers of chess layout") who would set up such jeux partis at the side of the road and challenge all comers. Evidently this custom is still alive today.
Player take alternate turns. In each turn, a player must make a single move with a single piece. If a piece ends its move on a point occupied by an enemy piece, that piece is captured and permanently removed from play.
The object of the game is to capture the enemy general. The game is won as soon as one player can make no move that prevents capture of his general. This is checkmate. Stalemate, where one player has no legal move but is not in check, is a win for the last player to move.
It is illegal to make any move that exposes your general to immediate capture. This is called moving into check.
It is illegal to avoid defeat or attempt to force a draw by repeating the same series of moves over and over. In particular, perpetual check is not allowed, and the onus is on the attacker to vary his move.
The markings on the board have the following significance:
There is also some variation in the form of the characters, especially in older sets.
Although the pieces are often referred to by the names of their Western equivalents, I believe this practice dishonours the distinct tradition of the Chinese game, and I prefer to use translations of the Chinese names. I have, however, retained the standard abbreviations of the pieces for notation.
Image | Name | No. on each side | Abbreviation |
General (King) | 1 | K | |
Mandarin (Assistant) | 2 | A | |
Elephant | 2 | E | |
Horse | 2 | H | |
Chariot (Rook) | 2 | R | |
Cannon | 2 | C | |
Soldier (Pawn) | 5 | P |
General. One square in any non-diagonal direction within the castle. Cannot move outside the castle. In addition, the general has the theoretical power of moving like a rook along a file from his own castle to the enemy castle, to capture the opposing general. Therefore it is illegal to make any move that leaves your own general on an open file opposite the opposing general, because to do so would be to move into check.
Mandarin. One square in any diagonal direction within the castle. Cannot move outside the castle.
Elephant. Two points in any diagonal direction. It must move two points, and cannot leap another piece of either colour. Cannot cross the river. An elephant can thus reach only seven points on the board.
Horse. One point in any non-diagonal direction, followed by one point in a diagonal direction, so that it ends two points away from where it started. This is similar to the knight’s move in Western chess, except that the move is blocked by any piece occupying the point at the "elbow" of the move. Hence it is important to remember that the non-diagonal part of the move comes first.
Chariot. Any number of points in any non-diagonal direction. Cannot leap. This is just like the rook’s move in Western chess.
Cannon. When not capturing, moves just like the chariot. When capturing, must leap a single piece of either colour before proceeding to the point occupied by the target piece. This intervening piece is called a screen.
Soldier. One point straight forward. After it reaches the opposite river bank, can move one point forward or directly sideways. Never moves diagonally or backward. No further promotion is gained when a soldier reaches the farthest rank of the board.
Using the viewer applet you
can also see the moves of a sample game, from a collection published in Shanghai in 1958. This game is by no
means typical in its brilliancy, but it does show the fast-moving, tactical nature of Chinese chess.
Note: If you do not see the viewer applet, you may be running a recent version of Windows that does not include the Java Virtual Machine. You can install it here.
Click here
for a popup reminder of the pieces and how they move.
In the traditional system, the files are numbered 1-9 from right to left for each player separately. As you look at the diagrams, red’s 9 file and black’s 1 file are at your left. The ranks are not numbered. Moves are indicated in the following syntax.
(1) Name of piece; (2) Original file; (3) Direction ("advances" , "retreats" , or "traverses" ); (4) Destination file or Distance
When two pieces of the same kind occupy a file, the number of the original file is replaced by the word "front" or "rear" , depending on the relative position of the moving piece to the player who owns it. (There are ways of dealing with more than two soldiers on a file, but this is such a rare situation that I won't go into them here.)
The final element is always the destination file for the mandarin, elephant, or horse, and for other pieces when they are "traversing", i.e. moving laterally. Otherwise it is the number of points directly forward or backward that the piece moves.
Some examples:
For more examples, see the notation of the sample game above on this page.
The following scan shows the beginning of a game, from a collection published in mainland China in 1958. Black is at the bottom of the diagram and moves first. Black's moves are given entirely in Chinese numerals, while Arabic numerals are used for red. (This distinction is more useful in the traditional top-to-bottom, right-to-left system of writing, where the moves of the two players are not in separate columns.) Note the character for "rear" identifying the cannon in black's ninth move. The annotations are in numbered footnotes, and the character for "diagram" appears at the end of the tenth move.
The second system of notation identifies the points of board by file and rank,
A being the leftmost file, and 0 being the rank at the bottom of the diagram. Moves are indicated by start
and end points.
In my own book, I numbered the files in tens and the ranks in units, so that points were numbered from 10 to 99. However, I’m now convinced that the traditional notation is the easiest to follow.
Several Chinese chess programs for the PC have appeared in the last decade or so. The most easily obtainable is probably the one in Microsoft’s Classic Board Games collection. At hard level, this plays a competent game, but the openings are not based on a library and are therefore repetitious. A better opponent -- indeed, the 2004 computer xiangqi champion -- is XieXie.
Yutopian.com sells other Chinese chess software, most of it with a Chinese interface, as well as dedicated chess computers and books. Their site also has a lot of information, including some classic endings in PDF format. (To read the diagrams, you have to download a special font.)
Other sites devoted to the game are appearing (and disappearing) regularly. I will mention only the World Xiangqi Federation site, on which you can find the full text, in English, of several books on tactics, as well as other resources. Several sites offer online play, including ChessHub.