Go, Chinese chess and mahjong: classic Chinese games

In Chinese, go is called 围棋 (wéiqí), literally the "encirclement board game". Two players, Black and White, take turns placing a stone of their colour on an empty intersection of a board of 19 by 19 lines, 361 points in all; Black moves first. Once placed, a stone never moves. A stone, or a chain of connected stones, that has no empty point left next to it along the lines (a "liberty") is captured and taken off the board. The aim is to surround more empty territory than your opponent.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, go is popular in China, Korea and especially Japan, the country it is most closely identified with. In Korea it is called baduk.

To "play" a board game, Chinese uses the verb 下: 下棋 (xià qí) means to play chess or go, and you say 下围棋 for go and 下象棋 for Chinese chess. Mahjong takes a different verb, 打, as card games do (打牌): you say 打麻将 (dǎ májiàng).

Go is very old, but nobody knows exactly how old. Britannica calls it probably the world's oldest board game, thought to have originated in China some 4,000 years ago: some sources give a date as early as 2356 BCE, but Britannica judges the 2nd millennium BCE more likely. The first written reference generally recognized is in the Zuo zhuan (左传, c. 4th century BCE), about an event of 548 BCE. The Analects of Confucius and the Mencius also mention it, under its old name: 弈 (yì).

Tradition gives it a legendary inventor: the mythical emperor Yao (尧) is said to have created it to educate his unruly son Danzhu (丹朱). The Bowuzhi (博物志) by Zhang Hua (张华), under the Jin, already told it. The old encyclopedias that quote it give two wordings: "Yao created go, and Danzhu excelled at it" or "Yao created go to teach his son Danzhu". This is legend, not history.

The board changed over time: the earliest had 17 lines, and the 19-line board became standard somewhere between the Northern and Southern dynasties and the Tang (618–907), depending on the source. From China the game spread to Korea and Japan.

Go was one of the four arts of the scholar, 琴棋书画: the qin zither (guqin), go (棋), calligraphy (书) and painting (画). The earliest text that groups the four is the Fashu yaolu (法书要录) by Zhang Yanyuan (张彦远), a 9th-century Tang author, which says of the monk Biancai (辩才) that he excelled at all four.

In March 2016 go made headlines around the world. In Seoul, from 9 to 15 March, the program AlphaGo, developed by the company DeepMind, played five games against the South Korean professional Lee Sedol. AlphaGo won four; Lee won only the fourth, thanks to a 78th move that became famous. It was the first time a program had beaten a 9-dan professional without a handicap. The Korea Baduk Association then awarded AlphaGo an honorary 9-dan rank.

In May 2017, at the Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, China, the program AlphaGo Master played three games against the Chinese player Ke Jie, then ranked number one in the world, on 23, 25 and 27 May. It won all three: the first by half a point, the other two by resignation.

To talk about these matches in Chinese, two verbs are enough: 赢 (yíng), to win, and 输 (shū), to lose. Artificial intelligence is 人工智能 (réngōng zhìnéng).

Chinese chess, 象棋 (xiàngqí), is played on a board of 9 lines by 10; as in go, the pieces stand on the intersections. Each player has 16 pieces; one plays red, which usually moves first, the other black. The aim is to checkmate the opposing general. Two rules set it apart from Western chess: each general is shut inside a "palace" (九宫, jiǔgōng) of three points by three, marked by two diagonals, and the two generals may not face each other directly.

Across the middle of the board, between the 5th and 6th ranks, the vertical lines stop: this is the river. According to Britannica, it limits access to the enemy camp, which makes the game slower than Western chess. It is marked 楚河, "Chu River", on one side and 汉界, "Han border", on the other.

The words recall the war between Xiang Yu (项羽), leader of Chu, and Liu Bang (刘邦), king of Han. According to People's Daily, Liu Bang fell back on Xingyang (荥阳), in present-day Henan, in 205 BCE, and the two armies fought there for two years. Xiang Yu finally made a pact with Liu Bang to split the country along the Hong Canal (鸿沟): the west for Han, the east for Chu, as the Shiji (史记) records. Liu Bang soon broke this truce of 203 BCE, defeated Xiang Yu and founded the Han dynasty. Tradition identifies the Hong Canal with a ravine in the Guangwu hills (广武山) near Xingyang.

The game is much younger than the war. According to Britannica it has been played in China since about 700 CE and, like Western chess, is believed to descend from the Indian game chaturanga; it reached its present form between the late Northern Song and the Southern Song.

Each side lines up 16 pieces: one general, two advisors, two elephants, two horses, two chariots, two cannons and five soldiers. Each piece bears a character. For several of them, red and black have the same role but different characters: the red general is 帅, the black one 将; the red soldier is 兵, the black one 卒.

A few rules have no equivalent in Western chess:

• the general and his advisors never leave the palace;

• the elephant cannot cross the river;

• the horse and the elephant are blocked if a piece stands on the point in their path;

• the cannon moves like the chariot, but to capture it must jump over exactly one piece;

• the soldier moves one step forward; once across the river it may also move sideways, but never back.

Chinese sources regard the chariot as the strongest attacking piece: it can cross the whole board in a single move, in a straight line, if nothing is in its way.

Mahjong, 麻将 (májiàng), is much younger than go or chess: Britannica says it is probably of 19th-century origin. It grew out of Chinese card games in which players draw and discard; the switch from cards to tiles most likely took place in the mid-19th century, and the oldest surviving sets, from around 1870, were acquired in Fuzhou, Shanghai and Ningbo. Its birthplace is disputed between Ningbo (宁波) and Fujian. Ningbo credits Chen Yumen (陈鱼门, 1817–1878) with inventing it, a disputed claim, and a mahjong museum now occupies his family's ancestral hall, in the grounds of the Tianyi Pavilion (天一阁). The name is generally said to come from the local Wu dialect, as a form of 麻雀 (máquè), "sparrow".

A full set has at least 136 tiles, four of each:

• three suits numbered 1 to 9, called 筒 (or 饼), 条 (or 索) and 万 in Chinese;

• the four winds: east, south, west, north (东南西北);

• three "dragons": 中, 发 and 白.
The most common Chinese variants, including the official competition rules, add eight flower and season tiles, for 144.

After the First World War the game reached the West. Joseph P. Babcock, an American living in Shanghai, wrote modified rules, gave the tiles English names and coined the name "mah-jongg". The game became a fad in the United States, England and Australia in the mid-1920s.

Mahjong has had a turbulent history in the People's Republic. After 1949 the ban on gambling made it decline, and the government frowned upon it as a source of gambling addiction. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) the game itself was banned: it was part of the "old culture", and nearly all mahjong sets and equipment were outlawed or destroyed. According to The Diplomat magazine, the ban was formally lifted in 1985. In July 1998 the national sports administration issued competition rules, the basis of "national standard mahjong" (国标麻将), meant to turn it into a mind sport rather than a gambling game.

Today mahjong is played all over China and the Chinese-speaking world, in many regional forms. It is a four-player game and a fixture of family gatherings, especially during major festivals such as Chinese New Year.

It is no longer just a game for the elderly: in 2026 China Daily described its appeal to young people, with a mahjong club at Peking University and social media full of photos of tile tables. To suggest a game, one sentence is enough: 我们打麻将吧！