Shan Xiali

The player

Shan Xiali, born in Shanghai in 1962, is a two-time women’s national individual champion - in 1980 and 1984 - and one of the first stars of the women’s championship, which had only been created in 1979. Named a grandmaster in 1984, she was the second woman to earn the title.

She won three national women’s team titles with Shanghai. The game here shows the crisp, experienced play of a first-generation women’s champion.

Shan Xiali - Hu Ming, 1994

1994 National Individual Championship · 1994 · Hu Ming (red) vs Shan Xiali (black)

Shan Xiali, the veteran Shanghai player and a women’s national champion of the 1980s, takes Black against Hu Ming in a short, sharp forty-seven-ply fight between two of the women’s game’s leading names.

A cannon takes the first soldier on move twenty and the exchanges are heavy through the thirties. Shan keeps two chariots and the extra soldier and converts quickly. A crisp win from an experienced hand.