This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The list of places represented at the 1993 founding conference is itself a small history lesson in how far Xiangqi had already traveled beyond China by the time it got a federation. Delegations came from across Asia, where the game's family shares deep roots, but also from Europe, the Americas and Australia, regions with no ancestral chess tradition of their own but with communities, largely built through overseas Chinese migration, that had kept the game alive far from its origin.
Electing Huo Yingdong of Hong Kong as the first president placed the new federation's leadership close to one of the game's largest overseas playing populations rather than to the mainland alone, a choice that reflected where organizational energy and resources for the sport had actually concentrated rather than only where the game had originated centuries earlier.