Inscrutable Chinese chess

Press, 18 August 1978, Page 13

Inscrutable Chinese chess

By

DENNIS BLOODWORTH,

“Observer”

The Korchnoi-Karpov chess circus in the Philippines may, like war itself, yield precious moments of acute danger amid the hours of boredom, but it will produce nothing like the shock felt in Singapore four years ago when a local boy made good by beating the Russian grand master, Keres. True, Keres was playing 30 games simultaneously and won or drew the rest, but the boy was only 12 years old — and Chinese. Chess is not alien to the Asian, for it is one of the many treasures of the East that an acquisitive Europe laid rude hands upon, recast almost beyond recognition, and then sold back to its original owners.

But, as the ancient Indian game of “Shatranj”

spread to the West in the seventh century, it also spread to the Orient, and if the French first distorted it at one end of the globe, the Chinese did the same at the other. An intellectual minority in Asia play international chess, just as it does in Europe. But the game that iron-calved Chinese trishawmen will squat down to on a street-comer in Singapore between hauling human cargo, that draws idle workers on the factory floor in Shanghai, and even kids to the vacant lots of Hong Kong, is “Hsiang-chi” — the “elephant chess” of China. Hsiang-chi -is disconcertingly familiar, yet satisfyingly strange. As' in Western chess, the board has 64 squares; there are 16 pieces a side and the object is to check the king. There are also almost precise equivalents of the rook (chariot), the bishop (elephant), the

knight (horse), and the pawn (soldier). So far, so dull. But the game is played on the lines, not the squares; there are only five pawns; the king is confined to a court at the base of the board and protected by two “counsellors”; and there is no queen. Instead, two “cannon” move like rooks but take like draughts, leaping over an intervening piece or each other. Unlike its Western equivalent, “elephant chess” is at once a pastime of the millions, yet a touchstone of Chinese culture and discipline. The all-round Confucian gentleman, whether court

mandarin or fighting general, would study music, poetry, painting, and chess. Chinese history is embellished with improving tales of heroes who kept their cool and played the game at moments when they might have been forgiven a little mild sweating.

Wounded in the arm by a poisoned arrow, the great Chinese general Kuan Yu, who was to be venerated as the god of war from Soochow to San Francisco, disdained the quilt which his surgeon wished to throw over his head while he “opened up the flesh right down to the bone, scraped away the poison, and sewed it up with thread,” — and showed his mettle by playing chess throughout the grisly operation. And when the eastern Tsin dynasty was threatened by an immense invading Tibetan horde, the

agitated commander of the outnumbered Chinese army hastened to the Prime Minister for orders, only to be told sternly to sit down and make the opening move. It was a lesson in the art of unconcern, and the Chinese afterwards proceeded to whip their formidable enemy at the battle of Fei river, as Drake was to beat the Spaniards after his game of bowls. Apocryphal? History may seem to be tripping over itself, for the battle was fought in the fourth century, and Kuan Yu was wounded in the third — long before China acquired chess from India. But there is no Hollywood

anachronism here. Peel off and discard the assumption of Indian origins, and something far older and much more intriguing emerges.

Hsiang-chi is played with flat discs inscribed with the Chinese character for each piece. But the character the “elephant” from which it gets its name and its Indian flavour can equally mean “image.” Furthermore, the two opposing halves of the Hsiang-chi board are separated by a blank strip known as “the river.” And this is no ordinary topographical obstacle, but the “heavenly river.” as the Chinese call the Milky Way. The strip is a relic of an earlier “celestial chess” whose beginnings disappear into a dark corner of the history of mysticism. The ancient Chinese used a divining board.

marked with the constellations and other cosmological signs and divisions, in order to foretell events. This consisted of a square plate representing the earth, on which could pivot a circular plate representing the heavens. Meanwhile, “pieces” were making their appearance, and whereas at first these were cast on the diving board, like dice, in time they were moved, as in chess. The object? A fourth century alchemist wrote of “playing with three sets of chessmen to foretell the success or failure of military enterprises.” Suddenly we are among the distant forerunners of

the generals in the Pentagon who subject their possible future strategies to the dubious test of computerised gameanalysis.

One antique Chinese chess manual indicates that the pieces were “images” of the sun, moon, and planets and stars above, and of the elements and other natural forces below, that could help establish the state of balance between Yin and Yang, and so answer vital questions that an ambitious ruler might wish to ask of the cosmos.

It has been suggested that the old discs representing the 28 constellations then became the pawns of Hsiang-chi, the sun and moon became the king, the planets the other pieces, and comets the chariots and cannon. Mystic divination. in short, turned into a war game.

But that was . not the only spin-off. The ladle representing the Great Bear in the centre of the “celestial chessboard” was justifiably called the “south-pointing spoon.” And the board was astrologically “set” by it. For very early on it came to be made of lodestone or magnetite instead of wood, and therefore served on the board the purpose man put to the constellation it represented in the heavens — the location of the Pole Star, and so of the north. The Chinese ancients had produced in one device the archetype not only of the chessboard, but of the magnetic compass.

Hsiang-chi, like Western chess, has now been “internationalised” by a Singapore enthusiast who has produced a cheap plastic set, fabricated in Hong Kong, whose pieces are not identified by Chinese characters but by easily identifiable symbols. With them come a simple instruction manual in English.

It certainly deserves world recognition, but whether that is true of the philosophy that inspired early players is another matter. The theory that it could “foretell the failure or success of military enterprises” would be salutary if it meant — as legend relates it once did — that the war game became a game war. and the

board a substitute for the battlefield.

But in an imperfect world it is more likely that war would become an extension of chess, instead of politics as Clausewitz said. O.F.N.S. Copyright.