Chinese Chess: An Introduction to China's Ancient Game of Strategy

Chinese chess, or ôelephant chess,ö has intrigued the powerful and the quizzical for centuries. Although its rules are similar to the well-known Western game, subtle and fascinating variations must be mastered in order to understand the strategies it requires.

H. T. Lau breaks the silence of decades of publishing on this game and introduces Chinese chess to Westerners, discussing with the aid of 170 diagrams the board, the movement and values of the pieces, and basic rules for capturing and defeating an opponent.

This book includes eighty mid- and end-game excercises designed to sharpen playing skills, and concludes with two appendixes devoted to the elegantly constructed games found in The Secret Inside the Orange and The Plum-Blossom Meter, two classic seventeenth-century works on Chinese chess.