One Ancestor or Two: The Xiangqi Origin Dispute

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

H.J.R. Murray, whose 1913 History of Chess set the terms for a century of scholarship on the whole chess family, placed Xiangqi downstream of Chaturanga, carried east along trade and diplomatic routes and reshaped by Chinese military and cosmological ideas along the way. On this reading, the general confined to a palace and the river dividing the board are Chinese elaborations layered onto a game whose deepest root is still Indian.

David H. Li challenged that account directly, arguing in The Genealogy of Chess that Xiangqi grew out of indigenous Chinese traditions, including the older game liubo, with no debt to Chaturanga at all, and that the resemblance between the chess family games reflects a shared human interest in war simulation games rather than a single line of descent. Neither position can be settled from board evidence alone, since surviving Tang and Song dynasty sources describe rules and pieces without describing where the idea for the game itself came from, and the dispute is recorded on this atlas as a live dissent rather than a resolved fact.