Customer Reviews

The genealogy of chess

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As many an enthusiast knows, or thinks he knows, modern chess is a direct descendant of a game played in India about 1,400 years ago. Many junkies will be too busy playing to worry much about the game's roots, but others surely will be fascinated by David Li's finding--or contention--that those roots actually can be traced back an additional thousand years.
In "The Genealogy of Chess," Mr. Li exposes serious flaws in much of the prevailing research on the origins of chess, a game played worldwide for centuries but still largely a mystery in many ways. And he builds an intriguing case that traces the game's ancestry to a Chinese army commander named Han Xin, born about three centuries before Christ.
Talmudic in tone and filled with footnotes, Mr. Li's work invites--indeed, cries out for--close scrutiny by open-minded scholars. I'm not sure I agree with Mr. Li that past researchers have sometimes had "an agenda"--that is, a hidden agenda beyond their ostensible mission of getting the story straight. But he also argues, somewhat more persuasively, that past researchers have often lacked the foreign-language skills and other assets needed to do their job right.
I'm not in any position to confirm or refute Mr. Li's work, but I enjoyed learning about the complications of chess historiography.

Li gives an exhaustive study of seemingly all authors who have ever written on the origin of chess. His critiques are comprehensive, but a little too dismissive of the scholarship of others. He gives a thought provoking analysis and makes a good argument for chess as a descendant of an ancestral version of Xiang Qi, the modern Chinese game. He's a little too skeptical of authorities positing an Indian origin for chess and a little too accepting of authorities finding a Chinese origin of chess. His greatest false step is his argument that chess migrated from China to Persia, skipping India. He cites to no historical documents supporting this contention and ignores the Persian tradition that they got chess from India. The best section of the book is his comprehensive description of ancient Xiang Qi variants. Li's argument doesn't quite carry the day in proving a Chinese origin for chess, but it does cause one to be more accepting of the idea. Both chess and Xiang Qi descended from a common ancestor, but whether that ancestor was an Indian or a Chinese game will probably never be conclusively settled.

For more than two hundred years it has been the position of most chess historians (not a large segment of the historian community) that the various forms of Chess were originally from India. This position was based on different types of historical documentation, the earliest of which appear to place the beginnings of chess at about 550 to 600 A.D. Apparently these historians did not have access to documentation that showed an earlier beginning of the game and therefore assumed none existed.

Mr. Li points out that a handful of historians did find documentation showing earlier forms of chess but that these findings were ignored by the larger group due to a bias against the idea that chess could have developed outside of India and surrounding areas. After going over the documentation that the accepted view is based on and the minority view as well, the author then gives an exposition on documentation that for different historical and cultural reasons has never been made use of.

Virtually all of this information comes from chinese texts which have never been consulted by those persons in the western world interested in chess history. The author goes on to show that these materials predate the Indian information by some six hundred years.

If a game is an invention of mans mind, it follows that there is an idea, or initial group of ideas, a developmental period and finally a modification period.
If, during the second and third stages of invention, the game is introduced to cultures other than that where the game originally was concieved; it follows that those cultures will change the game to suit their own tastes.

The point of Mr. Li is to show how the game, today known as Xiangqi, is mentioned in chinese texts from circa 200 BCE and how it evolved, travelled westward and was further modified,(as well as eastward, Japan) eventually becoming Chess as it is generally known today.

For the established view to prevail it is neccessary to present documentation (does not have to be written, artifacts can also be used) that predate the chinese texts and artifacts.