1. Home
2. Travel In China > China Culture > Chinese Traditional Arts >

History of Chinese Weiqi

With a history of over 3,000 years, the game can be regarded as the originator of all ancient chess games. The fantastic Weiqi embodies ancient Chinese philosophy and cultural profoundness and at the same time involves lots of flexible strategies.
According to ancient books, weiqi was invented by the legendary Chinese emperor Yao and his counselor Shun. This attribution indicates the incredibly early time the game originated.
In the Spring and Autumn Period, people would use terms in weiqi like "ju qi bu ding" (meaning "holding a game piece but not sure what move to make") to describe vacillation in politics. It's quite clear how popular the game was at that time. Later, numerous talented weiqi players emerged in all dynasties and many emperors in ancient China were weiqi lovers, such as Cao Cao, Emperor Taizu of the Song dynasty and Zhu Yuanzhang.
There were lots of interesting stories about weiqi in Chinese history. In the Yuan Dynasty, the famous book on weiqi Xuanxuan Qijing (The Classic of the Mystery of the Mysterious) came out. It was a glorious example of comprehensive weiqi works in ancient China.

The rules of Chinese weiqi

The rules of weiqi are very simple but there's plenty of choice to move the game pieces, with countless variations of strategies. This is where the charm of the game lies. The time for one round of weiqi can be as short as 15 minutes or as long as a few days. In most cases, though, it takes one or two hours to finish one round.
The Weiqi is a game that combines science, art and competition. It's perfect for intelligence boosting, personality cultivation and flexible strategy learning. It's no wonder the game has been popular for thousands of years and is gradually becoming the international cultural game.

Propagation of Chinese Weiqi

Vietnam, Japan and Korea have long been influenced by Chinese culture. Weiqi was spread in Vietnam no later than the 12th century. After the mid-19th century, Weiqi has been widely popular in Japan and Korea. Before the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Weiqi gameswere very popula in Southeast Asian countries. And Weiqi was spreaded to Europe in the mid-17th century. For a long period of time, many Europeans thought the Weiqi was invented by the Japanese. Later, they gradually learned that the Weiqi actually was appeared in China as early as possible.

The games of Weiqi are now spread all over the world, but the mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea are the most prosperous. Western countries are getting hotter. Southeast Asia is developing. By 2017, the countries with the highest professional Weiqi levels are China and South Korea.