General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

Xiangqi

Xiangqi (象棋), also known as Chinese chess, is a traditional two-player strategy board game in which red and black armies of 16 pieces each maneuver on a 9-by-10 grid of intersections, with the object of checkmating the opposing general.¹^•² It belongs to the same family of games as international chess and shogi, and most historians trace all of them to the Indian game chaturanga.³

Key fact	Detail
Board	9 vertical files and 10 horizontal ranks; pieces sit on the 90 intersections, with a river across the middle and a 3-by-3 palace on each back rank¹^•⁴
Armies	Each side: 1 general, 2 advisors, 2 elephants, 2 horses, 2 chariots, 2 cannons, 5 soldiers; Red moves first²
Signature piece	The cannon moves like a chariot but captures by jumping over exactly one piece, the screen (炮架)⁵
Ending rules	Stalemate is a loss for the stalemated player, not a draw as in chess; a player with no legal move loses⁴^•⁶
Governing rules	World Xiangqi Rules (WXF, 2018 English edition); AXF repetition rules first drafted in Macau in 1982⁷^•⁸
Game-tree complexity	About 10¹⁵⁰ by standard estimates, against about 10²²⁶ for shogi and a level comparable to chess⁹^•¹⁰
World championship	The 19th World Xiangqi Championship was held in Shanghai in 2025, with nearly 200 participants from 26 countries and regions¹¹

Board and pieces

Its playing surface consists of nine vertical lines, known as files, plus ten horizontal ones, known as ranks, and pieces are positioned on the ninety intersections of these lines rather than within squares as they are in chess.¹^•⁶ Two markings have no counterpart in chess. A river runs between rank 5 and rank 6 across the middle of the board, and each back rank holds a palace, a 3-by-3 block of points marked with diagonals corner to corner.⁴

Each player starts with 16 pieces.² The general (帥 for red, 將 for black) moves one point along a line and must remain inside its own palace. The advisor (仕 or 士) moves one point diagonally and is likewise confined to the palace. The elephant (相 or 象) moves exactly two points diagonally, can never cross the river, and is blocked by a piece on the midpoint. The horse moves one point orthogonally and then one point diagonally, like a chess knight, but its move can be blocked by an adjacent piece. The chariot moves any distance along a rank or file, exactly as the chess rook does.⁴^•²

The cannon is the piece with no chess equivalent. It moves like a chariot over empty points, but to capture it must jump exactly one piece of either color standing between it and its target; that piece is the screen. With no screen, or with two or more pieces in the way, the capture is illegal.⁵ The soldier moves one point at a time; before crossing the river it can only move forward, and after crossing it gains a sideways move.¹^•⁴

Rules that differ from chess

Three rules shape play in ways chess players do not expect. First, stalemate is a loss: a player who has no legal move loses, whether or not the general is in check, so the chess convention of a stalemate draw does not exist.⁴^•⁶ Second, the flying general rule prohibits the two generals from facing each other on the same file with no intervening piece; a move that creates this position is illegal, which makes the general an active defensive piece along its own file.¹² Third, repetition is regulated rather than simply drawn: the Asian Xiangqi Federation developed a set of rules specifically to prevent endless repetition of moves in competition, and under World Xiangqi Federation rules a side that forces repetition by perpetual check or perpetual chase loses rather than drawing.⁸^•⁵

A game ends by checkmate, by a stalemate loss, by a perpetual check or chase ruling, or by a draw.⁴

Origin and history

Xiangqi, international chess, shogi, janggi, and makruk are relatives: two armies, a piece whose loss ends the game, and a broadly similar set of piece powers.¹³ Most historians trace the family to chaturanga, an 8-by-8 board game played in northern India by at least the 6th century CE; as the game spread along trade routes, the line moving east into China became xiangqi, incorporating Chinese military concepts such as the river, the palace, and the cannon.³^•¹⁴ A competing account argues for Chinese origin or independent development, pointing to early Chinese textual references and to features xiangqi has that the western branch does not.¹³ A 2020 comparative study by Li Ma of Xi'an International Studies University argues that the differences in rules between xiangqi and chess reflect differences in the social structures, thinking patterns, and geography of China and the West.¹⁵

Organization and competition

The World Xiangqi Federation (WXF) was established on 6 April 1993 in Beijing and has promoted the game by organizing international competitions. Growth in tournaments and cultural interaction led the federation, on the initiative of its chairman Timothy Fok at a 2017 meeting in the Philippines, with the support of the Asian Xiangqi Federation, to produce the World Xiangqi Rules as a worldwide competition standard.¹⁶ The AXF competition rules, first approved in Macau in 1982 and revised in June 1989 and March 2003, have been adopted in international competitions including the World Championships.⁸

The 19th World Xiangqi Championship was held in Shanghai in September 2025 alongside the 5th Shanghai Xiangqi Master Open, the first time in 26 years that Shanghai hosted the event. It featured eight categories, including men's and women's individual and team events and U16 and U12 youth individual categories, with nearly 200 participants from 26 countries and regions.¹¹

Computer xiangqi

Xiangqi is one of the largest chess variants in terms of its player base, yet engine development has lagged behind western chess.¹⁷ A 1996 survey of game-programming research placed xiangqi among the four principal research domains, chess, xiangqi, shogi, and Go, and noted that its game-tree complexity is similar to chess, suggesting the same AI techniques would transfer.¹⁸ Later work has gone beyond that prediction. The JiangJun algorithm, a combination of Monte-Carlo Tree Search and Policy Space Response Oracles designed to approximate a Nash equilibrium, was trained on more than 10,000 records of human play and achieved a Master level with a 99.41% win rate against human players on a WeChat mini program.¹⁰ A 2024 system trained by supervised and reinforcement learning without any search algorithm reached a level comparable to the top 0.1% of human players, with a query rate exceeding MCTS-based systems by over a thousandfold.¹⁹ On the theoretical side, generalized xiangqi is known or believed to be EXPTIME-complete, and constant-time property-testing algorithms have been constructed for it.²⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Sports, games, and recreation › Board, card, and puzzle games › Board games › Traditional board, tile, and dice games › Xiangqi (Chinese chess)

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 21, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026 · Last review: Oct 21, 2026

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