Where is the origin of Chinese chess?

                                                                   Where is the origin of Chinese chess?

As for the origin of chess, in addition to the origin of India and China, there are also the crystallization of Chinese and Indian culture on the premise that the ultimate source of chess is China.

The crystallization theory of Chinese and Indian culture confirms that the ultimate roots of chess and Chinese chess are in China, but it holds that there was communication and influence between the two chess in the process of creation and evolution. It holds that India's square chess had an influence in the process of creation of ancient chess, and ancient chess also had an important influence on the formation and evolution of primitive chess. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why these two chess games have many similarities in terms of shape, style, rules and so on.

Dr. Cherevko, a former researcher at the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, holds a similar view to that of Dr. Joseph Needham, a famous British scholar, that the ultimate source of chess is in China: He pointed out in the article "On the Origin of Chess" published in the first issue of Soviet Chess in 1984: It is no accident that the division of chess pieces into white and black and their possible various combinations are formed on a board of 64 squares. They appear to be symbols of the 4th century BC Chinese classic book of Changes. White and black represent two cosmic forces, corresponding to the light, positive and good elements and the dark, negative and evil elements. All objective circumstances synthesized in the Book of Changes are the number 64, each of which corresponds to its own symbol, the hexagram, which is composed of six complete or discontinuous horizontal lines (referring to lines), the various combinations of which represent the characteristic ideas of the interrelation of circumstances." Yao Yin Yao, is the length of the eight diagrams, "one" is Yang Yao. "--" is the Yin line. Dr. Cherevkau concludes: "The modern type of Far Eastern chess (in Japan it is shogi), the form of the pieces was formed in 569 AD. Emperor Wu (560-578 AD), the Xianbei ruler of the Northern Zhou Dynasty in the Southern and Northern Dynasties, recorded this invention in official documents." He said, "As the historians have proved, Indian square chess entered China at the beginning of the 3rd century AD. At first, it supplemented the simple Chinese chess, and then, due to inheritance, adapted the Xianbei Chinese chess with new pieces such as' Xiang '." "A further development was the integration of the functions of chess in the Northern Zhou Dynasty with Indian square chess, which evolved into modern Chinese chess in China, into Zhiqi in Japan, into Persian chess in some parts of the Middle East, most likely during the Third Hellenistic Bactrian Dynasty, and then into modern chess." Mr. Permanent Xia, a famous scholar of Indian culture in China, as early as the middle of the 1950s, in his book "Oriental Art Series", he also had a more in-depth discussion on the origin of the two chess. Mr. Permanent Xia has studied the situation in India. In that work he spoke of the ancient Indian Sanskrit text on the "square chess" (Chaturanga), and of the ancient Indian ivory carved chess pieces that now exist in the Louvre Museum in Paris. It was a commander on an elephant, with a horse drawn up by its trunk, and four soldiers on horseback, armed and armed, gathered about them. Under the seat of this chess piece, there are ancient inscriptions, indicating that it is a cultural relic of the late 8th century and early 9th century AD. From the point that the types and numbers of the two chess pieces are roughly the same, Mr. Permanent Xia believes that the two "should be from the same source of the relationship, I think it is not even the same."

In 2001, the archaeological department of the Three Gorges excavated a pottery chess piece in the old coffin mound tomb group in Wanzhou District of Chongqing. According to reports, this is the earliest chess object unearthed in China. When the archaeological team of Yunnan Institute of Archaeology excavated the old coffin mound tomb group in the Three Gorges area - the Eastern Han Dynasty tomb, they found a pottery chess piece in the tomb path. This piece has a diameter of 2.9 cm and a thickness of 1.3 cm. It is engraved with the word "car" in Yin script. This tomb belongs to the early Eastern Han Dynasty, which shows that as early as about 2000 years ago, chess became the entertainment instrument of the people in the Three Gorges area of China. The Han-Wei pottery chess "chariot" unearthed in the Three Gorges is one of the ten important discoveries in the construction of the Three Gorges, which is of great significance to the study of the origin and circulation of Chinese chess. It pushes back the date of the earliest appearance of flat Chinese chess pieces by more than 700 years, that is to say there were flat chess pieces before the 3rd century AD. Back then, square chess had not yet been invented. It is a powerful refutation of the fallacy of the Indian origin theory that chess evolved from the Indian chess, namely square chess. People discuss the origin of chess, nothing more than legend, literature, archaeology, logic as the basis to explore the direction of further research, and make a variety of inferences and conclusions. But literature and archaeology are the best evidence. The discovery of pottery chess "che" in Han and Wei dynasties is the ironproof that chess originated in China.