What is xiangqi (Chinese chess)?
If you are new to xiangqi, this page tells you what the game is, where it came from and how it differs from international chess. Xiangqi, also called Chinese chess, is a strategy game for two players. The pieces stand on the points where nine vertical and ten horizontal lines cross, and the two armies, Red and Black, face each other across a river in the middle of the board. Each side tries to checkmate the other's general. The game belongs to the same family as international chess and shogi, and its cannon, which captures by jumping over exactly one piece, has no counterpart in either. It is the most popular board game in China, and it is also widely played in Vietnam, where it is called cờ tướng.
Why do many boards say "Chu River, Han Border"?
Many boards have four characters written across the river: 楚河漢界, "the Chu River and the Han Border". The marking looks old, but boards began to carry it only in the 1920s and 1930s. Some boards put a proverb in the same place instead, "觀棋不語真君子，起手無回大丈夫", which says that a true gentleman watches a game in silence and a real man never takes back a move. The four characters themselves recall a real war.
After the Qin dynasty fell in 206 BC, Xiang Yu 項羽, the Hegemon-King of Western Chu, and Liu Bang 劉邦, the King of Han, fought for control of the empire. In 203 BC they agreed to divide the country along the Hong Canal, with Han to the west and Chu to the east, but Liu Bang soon broke the truce. He and his allies trapped Xiang Yu at Gaixia, and in 202 BC Xiang Yu killed himself on the bank of the Wu River. Liu Bang founded the Han dynasty that same year, and the river on your board is named after the border the two sides had agreed on. There is also a folk legend that Han Xin, one of Liu Bang's generals, invented the game while he was held in prison.
How the game took shape
The word 象棋 is older than the game itself. In "Summoning the Soul", a poem of the Warring States period, it means ivory pieces for the board game liubo, and later writers used it for other board games as well. The first known description of a game like xiangqi is a ghost story in 玄怪錄, a collection of Tang dynasty tales usually attributed to 牛僧孺. In the story, a man named 岑順 sees two tiny armies fight a battle in his room at night. A military adviser recites the rules to his king in verse: the horse flies on a slant, the general moves sideways, the chariot drives straight ahead, and the six kinds of piece move in their proper order. Later his family digs into the floor of the room and finds an old tomb, with a game board and pieces of gold and bronze. The story is set in the Baoying era of the Tang dynasty, which began in 762, so the game it describes is known as 寶應象棋.
Where the game came from before then is still debated. Most historians trace xiangqi to chaturanga, the Indian game from which international chess also descends. Some Chinese historians and Sinologists see it the other way round: in their view xiangqi began in China and spread west, where it gave rise to Indian and Persian chess.
Under the Song dynasty (960 to 1279) the game came close to the one you play today. During the Northern Song it was played in a large version and a small version. Between the late Northern Song and the Southern Song it reached its modern form, with the general kept inside its palace, a rule you still play by today. Pieces from this period were made of ceramic or bronze, and the bronze ones have a character on one face and a picture on the other. The oldest complete game records, two games and one endgame study, survive in 事林廣記, a compendium of everyday knowledge compiled by 陳元靚, a writer of the late Southern Song. Its original edition is lost, and the oldest printings that survive date from the Yuan dynasty.
The classic xiangqi manuals were written under the Ming and Qing dynasties. 適情雅趣, compiled by 徐芝 and published in 1570, runs to ten volumes, and its usual editions hold 550 games and positions from the opening, the middle game and the endgame. 橘中秘, a late Ming manual by 朱晉楨, is known for its study of the Central Cannon and for a set of rhymed maxims. 梅花譜, by 王再越, who lived in the Kangxi era, answers the Central Cannon with the Screen Horses defence. It was never printed under the Qing, and handwritten copies kept it alive until its first printing in 1917. The Qing dynasty also produced the four great collections of composed endgames.
In January 1956 China's national sports commission listed board games as sports, and that December the first national championship was held in Beijing and won by 楊官璘. The first World Xiangqi Championship followed in Singapore in 1990. The World Xiangqi Federation was founded in Beijing on 6 April 1993, during the third championship, and it now organises the event. Today xiangqi is played mainly in Chinese communities around the world and in Vietnam.
On Xiangqi Arena, games follow the competition rules of the Chinese Xiangqi Association and the Asian Chinese Chess Rules, with two exceptions: repeated positions are judged by the World Xiangqi Federation's rules, and a game is drawn when each side has made 30 moves without a capture. The oldest dated master games on the site come from the national events of 1990, and you can replay them move by move in the master game database.
How xiangqi differs from international chess
Pieces on the points
Xiangqi pieces stand on the ninety points where the nine vertical lines and the ten horizontal lines cross. Chess pieces stand inside squares.
The river and the palace
A river divides the board in two. The elephants cannot cross it, and a soldier that has crossed it may also move sideways. The general and the advisors cannot leave the palace, a square of nine points marked with two diagonal lines.
The cannon
The cannon moves like a rook in chess. To capture, though, it must jump over exactly one piece of either colour, called the screen. No chess piece captures this way.
Early attacks
At the start, four of the nine files have no soldier on them, and the soldiers stand two files apart, so they cannot protect one another the way pawns do in chess. On your first move you can bring a cannon to the central file and aim it at the soldier in front of the other general, and fighting often begins within a few moves.