64 squares, 90 points
Rook, knight, bishop, queen, king: xiangqi calls them chariot, horse, elephant, advisor and general, and sets them out in the same order from the corner. Choose a piece and watch it move on three boards at once: shatranj, the chess of a thousand years ago; chess today; and xiangqi. Europe's bishop and queen once moved almost exactly as the xiangqi elephant and advisor do now.
Among the walrus-ivory chessmen found on the Isle of Lewis, carved between 1150 and 1200, sit bishops in mitres, each holding a crozier. On the board they could not do what a bishop does today. Their move was a jump of exactly two squares along a diagonal. It was the move of the piece they had replaced, which the Arabic world called al-fīl, the elephant.
Xiangqi, the chess played across China and Vietnam, has an elephant in the same place in the line. It still moves exactly two points along a diagonal.
The boards below show one piece at a time. Start with the elephant, then try the counsellor.
The one piece on which all three boards agree. It runs any distance along a row or a column until something stands in its way, and it captures the first enemy it meets.
From a corner of an empty board it has 14 moves in shatranj and in chess and 17 in xiangqi. The move is the same; the xiangqi board is one line wider and two lines longer.
One step straight, then one step diagonally outward: the same eight targets in all three games.
The chess knight and the shatranj horse jump. The xiangqi horse walks. If a piece stands on the point right next to it, in the direction it sets off, both moves that begin that way are closed. Chinese players call this 蹩马腿, hobbling the horse's leg. Put a piece in its way and compare the three boards.
In shatranj the elephant leapt exactly two squares along a diagonal, over whatever stood between. That was all it could do. Starting from its home square it could reach only 8 squares of the 64 in an entire game, and the four elephants on the board moved on four separate sets of squares, so no elephant could ever capture another.
The xiangqi elephant makes the same step: exactly two points along a diagonal. Two things differ. It cannot leap: a piece on the point in between stops it, which players call 塞象眼, blocking the elephant's eye. And it never crosses the river, so it can reach only 7 points.
The chess bishop slides as far as the diagonal is open and can stand on 32 squares. That move is recorded in Europe from the late 15th century.
The piece beside the king was a counsellor before it was a queen. In shatranj the firzan moved one square diagonally and nothing more.
The xiangqi advisor moves the same single diagonal step, and only inside the palace, the 3 × 3 box around the general: 5 points in all.
The chess queen moves any distance in eight directions: up to 27 moves from one square, where the firzan had at most 4. The oldest recorded game played with this queen is in a Valencian poem, Scachs d'amor, usually dated to about 1475.
In shatranj and in chess the king steps one square in any direction. Chess later added castling.
The xiangqi general steps one point along the lines, never diagonally, and never leaves the palace: 9 points. The two generals may not face each other along an open column, so a general can pin a piece from the far side of the board.
One step forward in all three games, and never back.
The shatranj and chess pawns capture one square diagonally forward. The xiangqi soldier captures the way it moves, straight ahead. Once it has crossed the river it may also step sideways: move it across and see.
Chess added the double first step. A shatranj pawn that reached the last row became a firzan; a chess pawn becomes a queen, rook, bishop or knight; the xiangqi soldier never changes.
No such piece. Nothing in shatranj needed another piece to jump over.
No such piece. Chess has nothing that captures by jumping over a screen.
The cannon moves like the chariot. To capture, it must jump over exactly one piece of either colour, the screen, and it takes the first piece beyond the screen if that piece is an enemy. Put a piece in its way and it gains a target.
A cannon with this rule is described in the 11th century, in a seven-player variant attributed to the historian Sima Guang (1019–1086). When it joined the two-player game is not known.
Tap any square or point to move the piece there. With the keyboard: select a board, then use the arrow keys.
Europe received the pieces with Arabic names. Its languages kept, borrowed or replaced those names in different ways. Some follow the look of the carved piece, some its move, and the reasons are sometimes disputed. The bishop is an elephant in Russian, a runner in German, a fool in French and Romanian, a shooter in Czech, a camel in Hindi. The lists below group 31 languages by what the word means to its speakers today; where it means nothing but the piece, the list says so.
Chinese went the other way. Its names for the pieces of Western chess are 车, 马, 象, 兵: chariot, horse, elephant, soldier, the same words xiangqi uses.
Medieval French called the piece alfin or aufin, from Arabic al-fīl, the elephant. Fol, later fou, replaced it; the piece is called fol in the Roman de la Rose, about 1275–1280. Etymologists disagree on how the change happened. Spanish and Catalan alfil keep the Arabic word and mean nothing else today. Italian alfiere means standard-bearer today. English bishop is recorded as a chess name from 1562.
Russian ferz' comes through Turkish from the Persian name of the counsellor; in Russian today it means only the chess piece. The lady and the queen are European.
English rook is the Persian rukh. The piece is usually traced to the Indian chariot, Sanskrit ratha, but what rukh itself meant is disputed. In Hindi the corner piece is the elephant and the bishop is a camel.
The king is a king or a shah nearly everywhere, and the pawn is a foot soldier in most languages and a farmer in German and the Scandinavian languages.
A river across the middle, a palace at each end, and a piece that shoots over others. Chess has castling, the pawn's double step and a pawn that can become a queen. Each rule below exists on one board only.
Xiangqi today
It slides like a chariot but captures only across exactly one piece, friend or enemy, and only an enemy piece. Here it can take the horse beyond its own soldier and nothing else.
Xiangqi today
The cannon stands on the point in front of the horse, so the two forward moves are closed. A chess knight in the same spot would jump.
Xiangqi today
With nothing between them on an open column the two generals would face each other, which is forbidden. The chariot here may move only along the column.
Xiangqi today
The general and the advisors stay inside the palace. The elephants stay on their own side of the river. Together the defenders can stand on the 15 tinted points: 9 in the palace and 7 for the elephants, one of them shared.
Chess today
Each player may castle once in a game: the king moves two squares towards a rook and the rook crosses to its other side. Neither piece may have moved before, the squares between them must be empty, and the king may not castle out of, through or into check. Shatranj and xiangqi have no such move.
Chess today
A chess pawn may advance two squares on its first move. An enemy pawn beside it may then capture it as if it had advanced only one, but only on the very next move. Both rules exist only in chess.
Chess today
A chess pawn on the last row becomes a queen, rook, bishop or knight. In shatranj it became a firzan, which moved only one square diagonally. A xiangqi soldier is never promoted.
Shatranj, about 1000
In shatranj, losing every piece except the king normally meant defeat, even without checkmate. If the bare king could at once capture the opponent's last piece, the game was drawn. Chess and xiangqi have no such rule.
| Shatranj | Chess | Xiangqi | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Checkmate | wins | wins | wins |
| A player has no legal move and is not in check (stalemate) | that player loses | draw | that player loses |
| A king left with no other piece | normally loses | no such rule | no such rule |
Ten moves, each tried in shatranj, in chess and in xiangqi. Decide for each board, then check.
1/10 The elephant moves two steps diagonally, and a piece of its own side stands on the square in between.
2/10 The elephant moves far along an open diagonal: five steps on the 8 × 8 boards, four in xiangqi.
3/10 The elephant moves two steps diagonally across the middle of the board. Nothing is in the way.
4/10 The counsellor moves one step diagonally.
5/10 The counsellor moves three steps straight ahead.
6/10 The horse moves two steps forward and one to the side, and a piece of its own side stands directly in front of it.
7/10 The chariot moves four steps along an open column.
8/10 The king moves one step diagonally.
9/10 The foot soldier advances two steps from its starting place.
10/10 A foot soldier in the far half of the board moves one step sideways.
The two games are generally regarded as related. The armies match too closely, in name and in order, for most historians to think otherwise. How they are related is a harder question, and the surviving evidence does not settle it.
The best-documented path runs from India to Persia and on to the Arabic world and Europe. That part is not in serious dispute. What is missing is a document that shows how, when and in which direction an early form of the game passed between India and China.
H. J. R. Murray (1913) held that the game was invented in India and that xiangqi derives from it, adapted to Chinese terms and older Chinese games. This remains the prevailing account.
Joseph Needham (1962) argued that a Chinese astronomical and divinatory "image game" supplied the ancestor, which became a war game in India in the 7th century.
Jean-Louis Cazaux (2001) proposed a hybrid: an eastern game contributed features to the Indian and Persian one. He presents it as a hypothesis.
David H. Li (1998) credited the general Han Xin, about 203 BCE. Critics, among them Peter Banaschak, point out that no early source supports the story.
The dated evidence, in order. None of it shows a direction of travel between India and China.
569
The dynastic history records that the emperor composed a book on a game called 象戏 xiangxi and explained it to his court. The book is lost. Surviving descriptions speak of the sun, the moon and the stars, and scholars disagree on whether this game has anything to do with today's xiangqi.
7th century
A Sanskrit court biography from northern India puns on an eight-by-eight board and the four-part army, caturaṅga: elephants, horses, chariots, foot soldiers. It is the strongest early Indian reference. It gives no rules.
Between the 6th and 9th centuries
A Middle Persian text tells how an Indian king sent the game to the Persian court as a riddle. It names the pieces and plainly describes chess. The story is set in the 6th century; the text as it survives was put together later, and scholars date it anywhere from the late Sasanian period to the 9th century.
Early 9th century
In a tale by Niu Sengru (779–847), set in the year 762, a man watches two miniature armies fight by rule at night. Their adviser recites the order of battle: the horse flies aslant and stops at the third step, the commander ranges across in the four directions, the wagon drives straight in and does not turn back, the armoured soldiers keep their order. Later a game board with metal pieces is dug out of an old tomb under the room, and the tale says the verse described how the pieces of xiangxi move. It is the earliest Chinese description usually read as a game of this family.
9th and 10th centuries
Players at the Abbasid court in Baghdad, among them al-ʿAdlī (about 850) and aṣ-Ṣūlī (died 946), write treatises with openings and problems. Later manuscripts that copy them are the source for the shatranj moves shown on this page.
About 1000
A Latin poem kept at a Swiss monastery describes the game and its pieces. Dated to the late 10th or the 11th century, it is among the earliest European texts on chess and already mentions a board in two colours as a useful novelty.
1019–1086
A seven-player variant attributed to the historian Sima Guang gives each side a cannon that captures across one piece. A preface by Chao Buzhi, dated 1079, describes another form played on eleven lines. Several related games existed side by side.
960–1127
The earliest excavated xiangqi sets that can be securely identified date from this period. A porcelain set of 32 pieces from a Song tomb at Luoyang was excavated in 1997.
1150–1200
Walrus-ivory pieces found on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, dated 1150–1200 by the British Museum. Their bishops are among the earliest surviving chess bishops shown as churchmen. On the board they still moved as elephants.
1283
A Castilian manuscript made for King Alfonso X describes the pieces and their moves, and 103 chess problems, most of them taken from Arabic sources. The elephant is still alfil and still jumps.
13th century
The Shilin guangji, a household encyclopedia compiled in the 13th century, includes xiangqi play in a form a player today would recognise.
About 1475 to 1497
The Valencian poem Scachs d'amor, usually dated about 1475, contains the oldest recorded game with the long-range queen and bishop. Luis Ramírez de Lucena's printed book, Salamanca, about 1496–1497, teaches both the old game and the new.
Late 16th century
According to the historian H. J. R. Murray, Jesuit missionaries brought the first accounts of the Chinese game, and actual sets, to Europe.
1632
橘中秘, a manual of openings and endgames, is printed. It is still studied.
What can be said today: xiangqi took its own form in China, with the river, the palaces and the cannon, and is clearly recognisable by the Song period. In Europe the long-range queen and bishop are recorded from the late 15th century, and other rules of chess went on changing after that. Before those dates the two lines grow faint, and they have not been traced to a single dated starting point.
The moves on every board are produced by one set of rules, checked against published counts of legal move sequences from the starting position: 20, 400, 8,902 and 197,281 at depths of one to four half-moves in chess, and 44, 1,920 and 79,666 at depths of one to three in xiangqi. The numbers of squares a piece can reach are counted from those rules.