Janggi

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

Set a Janggi board beside a Xiangqi board and the family resemblance is obvious: the same nine by ten grid, the same diagonal palace lines, the same cast of generals, advisors, elephants, horses, chariots, cannons and soldiers. Play the two games and the resemblance thins quickly. The Korean elephant moves in a longer, more restrictive pattern than its Chinese counterpart, the cannon cannot jump over another cannon in Janggi the way it can in some Xiangqi lines, and Janggi allows a pass move with no equivalent in Xiangqi, letting a player simply forfeit a turn when no improving move exists.

The board's most visible difference is the river, or rather its absence. Xiangqi divides its board with a river down the middle, and several pieces, the elephant most of all, may never cross it. Janggi has no river at all: the line was dropped from the Korean game, and with it went the boundary, so the Janggi elephant ranges over the whole board instead of being confined to its own half. The diagonal lines cutting through both palaces rather than one carry a similar loosening, letting the general and advisors move diagonally within their fortress in a way Xiangqi never permits. The result is a game close enough to Xiangqi that a player of one recognizes the other on sight, and different enough, starting with a boundary one game keeps and the other abandoned outright, that fluency in one does not transfer cleanly to the other.

Sources The Oxford History of Board Games with Wikipedia, Janggi

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

No Janggi board survives from the Goryeo period, the centuries during which chess like games most likely first reached Korea from China, so the earliest chapter of the game's history has to be argued from context rather than read off an artifact. Trade and diplomatic contact between Goryeo Korea and Song and Yuan China ran continuously across exactly the window when Xiangqi itself was maturing into its modern form, making the transmission plausible on timing alone even without a surviving board to prove it happened.

The documentary record only firms up in the following Joseon dynasty, when manuals and physical sets begin to survive describing rules recognizably close to the Janggi played today. That five hundred year gap between plausible transmission and documented play is typical of how board games move between cultures: the game itself is portable and cheap to copy, while the writing and craftsmanship that would prove its presence to a later historian survive far less often.