Thursday, March 19, 2009

Xiangqi

I love pausing to watch a game of xiangqi - the 'Elephant Game', or Chinese chess - whenever I can, hoping that trying to analyse the position and follow a few minutes of play will help improve my own game. No such luck! But it is one of the great charms of Chinese street life, I find; whether it's being played by local folks from my neighbourhood occupying the Bell Tower square on a Sunday afternoon


or by these traders at the Panjiayuan 'antiques' market



or by this group of codgers I snapped on a holiday in Kaifeng a few years ago.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is indeed great fun to play chess, though I am never a good player. Chinese chess is even similar to western chess in many ways. King = General, Pawn = soldier.

There is a great and free Chinese chess program called Chess Wizard. You can download it and play here:
http://www.elephantbase.net/xqwizard/download.htm

It is so unbeatable!

Froog said...

Thanks very much for the tip, TW. I will go and check that out.

I really like xiangqi, I prefer it to Western chess; but I can't find many people to play against.