About Xiangqi Arena

What this site is

An arena first: rated and casual games against players worldwide, with Elo ratings, rank tiers from Silver to Diamond, time controls from bullet to classical, and direct challenges between friends. Around the arena we built the study tools we wanted for ourselves - a 92-lesson interactive course that runs from how the horse moves to complete opening systems, a puzzle campaign and rated puzzle ladder with a daily puzzle and Puzzle Storm, and an archive of 32,204 professional games searchable by player and opening, with engine analysis that shows where each game turned.

The guide library you are reading is the public face of that course: the same twenty opening systems, the same checkmate patterns, the same reference material our lessons teach - free to read for anyone, no account required. If you have ever wanted to know why the Central Cannon has led tournament practice for a century, or what "scooping the moon from the sea" means, it is all here.

Why we built it

Xiangqi is one of the most played board games on earth, and its online life has lagged the game’s depth for years: strong play happens inside apps with dated interfaces, study material lives in scanned books and scattered videos, and the international audience - the millions of players who do not read Chinese - has been an afterthought. We kept wishing someone would build one place where playing, learning and studying belong together, in the player’s own language, with the polish modern chess players take for granted. Eventually we stopped wishing.

The four languages are not a checkbox. Xiangqi’s largest communities outside China are Vietnamese-speaking, and the game’s literature spans Simplified and Traditional Chinese; a platform that only speaks English serves none of them well. Every lesson, every guide, every piece of interface text on this site is written or reviewed per language - including the names of the masters in our archive, which Vietnamese players know by their Sino-Vietnamese readings.

Xiangqi Arena is built and run by a small independent team. It is not affiliated with any federation or games company; it is sustained by memberships and, on some free pages, restrained advertising.

Where the content comes from

The master-game archive covers professional play from 1990 to 2008 - 3,387 titled players, every game engine-checked for move-record integrity before entering the database. The lesson course and this guide library are written by our team: the opening model lines are book theory verified move by move with engine analysis (the same lines our interactive lessons enforce), and the checkmate patterns follow the classical Chinese teaching tradition. Player bios in the masters section are our own editorial summaries of public tournament records.

Mistakes are ours; corrections are welcome - the contact page reaches a human, usually the one who wrote the page you are correcting.

How these pages are written

Every guide and profile on this site is written by our editorial team - the players who built the lesson course - and carries the date it was last revised. That date moves only for a substantive edit: a corrected line, a new section, a rewritten explanation. Fixing a typo does not count, so a date you can trust is one that has stayed put.

Opening model lines come from book theory and are verified move by move with engine analysis before they appear in a guide; they are the same lines our interactive lessons enforce. Diagrams are computed from those lines rather than drawn by hand, so a diagram cannot disagree with the text beside it. Master biographies summarise public tournament records and are cross-checked against championship rolls, and the featured games are taken from the archive itself.

English is the working language. The Vietnamese and Chinese editions are translated from it and reviewed for terminology - piece names, move names and opening names follow each language's own chess tradition rather than a literal rendering - and the Traditional Chinese edition is derived from the Simplified with corrections kept by hand for names and terms. When a reader reports an error we fix every language at once and the revision date moves. The contact page reaches the person responsible.

How we run it

Fair play is enforced with server-side move validation and anti-engine measures in the rated pools. Ratings follow standard Elo with public formulas. Accounts are free and the full game is always playable at no cost: memberships fund the site and unlock deeper study allowances, and we show restrained advertising to free accounts on some pages - none to members. We collect the minimum data needed to run the service; the privacy policy says exactly what and why, in plain language.

Contact

Questions, corrections, press, or partnership: use the contact page and a human will answer. Bug reports and feature requests from players are read daily - much of the site’s current shape came from them.