![]() The word may have originally referred to the game now called Weiqi or Go, though in current usage it just means strategy board game. The second means strategy game, and it also signifies one of the four arts - qin (music), hua (brush painting), shu (calligraphy) and qí (strategy games) - that a Chinese gentleman scholar was supposed to be proficient in. The first character is used in the game for the Elephant piece. ( xiàng) ( qí) translates to Elephant Game. On the web and in recent literature, the simplified Pinyin spelling of Xiangqi has become standard, and that spelling will be used here. While many were probably ignorant of the official romanizations, Sloan favors his spelling for being more phonetically accurate. In the literature on the game, it has been transliterated in many other ways, including tseung k'i (Culin), Chong-Kie (Suzuki), Siang k‘i (Murray), tseung-ki (Davidson), Hsang Chi (Gollon), and Shiang-Chi (Sloan, "History of Chinese Chess"). Its Cantonese pronunciation is jun kay, which is romanized in the jyutping system as zoeng6 kei4*2. The Mandarin pronunciation of 象棋 is something like shawn chee, and this gets romanized as Xiàng Qí in Pinyin, as Hiangk'i in EFEO, as HsiangCh'i in Wade-Giles, and as SyangChi in Yale. The two games are played by approximately the same rules, and except for the Cannon, every Xiangqi piece is very similar to the Chaturanga piece that occupies roughly the same position and bears a name similar or identical in meaning. Whatever the relation between Xiangqi and Chaturanga, it seems highly likely that they are related, for the similarities between them are too hard to explain as just coincidences. ![]() It is commonly believed that both Xiangqi and Orthodox Chess derive from the original Indian game of Chanturanga, but some, such as Sam Sloan and David Li, maintain that Chess is actually Chinese in origin. Xiangqi has remained in its present form for centuries. ![]() It is currently played by millions (or tens of millions) in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong and other Asian countries. Xiangqi, known in the west as Chinese Chess, is an extremely popular game in the Eastern Hemisphere. Xiangqi (象棋): Chinese Chess Purchase this set on Amazon
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