Xiangqi: How to Play Chinese Chess for Absolute Beginners, Piece by Piece

When I was a kid, xiangqi was one of those games my cousin and I pulled out when we were bored. If we got tired of Chinese checkers, or there were only two of us, we switched to xiangqi. I liked that it wasn’t just about knowing how the pieces moved; once you got into it, layout and strategy mattered.

Sometimes we got tired of the full board and played a smaller face-down version instead, with pieces turned over and revealed one by one. It wasn’t the standard game, but it was just as competitive. The worst part was when neither of us wanted to give in and we ended up repeating the same moves until one of us finally got sick of it and stopped.

For a chess player, the first minute of xiangqi feels friendly. One piece moves exactly like a rook, another moves a lot like a knight, and there’s a leader to trap. Then a piece called the cannon jumps over your horse and takes your chariot from across the board.

The goal feels familiar, since you’re hunting the other side’s leader. The board, the pieces, and a handful of rules are where it gets sneaky.

What Is Xiangqi?

Xiangqi (象棋) is Chinese chess, a two-player strategy game played on a board split by a river. Each side has 16 pieces: one general, two advisors, two elephants, two horses, two chariots, two cannons, and five soldiers.

The game is widely played in Vietnam too, where it’s called cờ tướng, and Korea has a close cousin called janggi.

Xiangqi Board and Pieces

A xiangqi board has 9 vertical lines and 10 horizontal ones, and the pieces sit on the 90 points where the lines cross, not inside the squares. Every move runs from point to point along the lines.

Two features break up the grid. Across the middle runs the river, often labeled Chu he Han jie (楚河汉界), or Chu River, Han Border, a name traditionally associated with the struggle between Chu and Han that ended in 202 BC. Each side also has a palace, a nine-point area marked with diagonal lines, which the general and its two advisors can never leave.

The pieces are flat discs marked with a Chinese character. The two sides are conventionally called Red and Black, even if the actual colors of a particular set look different.

Where the table shows two characters, the first is the traditional form you’ll see on many sets and the second is the simplified one.

On a xiangqi board, the chariot’s character (車 / 车) is read ju, not che, its everyday reading as in car. Some of the differences in the table come from traditional vs simplified Chinese, and some are simply xiangqi convention, like red’s 俥 and 傌 against black’s 車 and 馬.

At the start, both sides line up the same way, each a mirror of the other. Along the back line, from corner to corner, go the chariot, horse, elephant, advisor, general, advisor, elephant, horse, and chariot. The cannons sit on the third line, in line with the horses, and the five soldiers stand on the fourth line, on every other point.

A standard Chinese chess set follows this layout, from a roll-up vinyl board to a heavy wooden one.

How to Play Xiangqi

Red moves first, and the players take turns moving one piece at a time. You capture by moving onto a point held by an enemy piece, and you win by checkmating the other general or leaving your opponent with no legal move. The table covers the basics, and these are the rules where new players lose their first games:

• The cannon needs a screen. It moves like a chariot, but to capture, it has to jump over exactly one piece, friend or enemy, along the line. No screen, no capture. A cannon sitting behind one of your own pieces is a loaded threat.
• Horses can be hobbled. A horse can’t jump. If a piece sits on the point right next to it, in the direction it wants to go, that move is blocked, which players call hobbling the horse’s leg.
• Elephants can be blocked too. A piece on the point between an elephant’s start and finish stops it, known as blocking the elephant’s eye. Since elephants can’t cross the river, they stay on their own side and play mostly defense.
• The generals can’t face each other. Two generals may never stand on the same file with nothing between them. It sounds like a formality, but it lets your general control the whole file, so the enemy general can’t step onto it, and plenty of checkmates rely on it.
• Soldiers never promote. A soldier moves one point forward, and after crossing the river, one point sideways too. It never moves backward, and reaching the far edge doesn’t turn it into anything else.
• Stalemate is a loss. If you have no legal move, you lose. In chess, that’s a draw.
• Perpetual check doesn’t work. Repetition rules are stricter than in chess. Under tournament rules, a player can’t keep forcing the same cycle of checks, and the checking side generally has to break the cycle or can be ruled to lose.

Xiangqi in China Today

On a warm afternoon in a Chinese park, somewhere between the tai chi group and the square dancers, there’s a good chance of finding a xiangqi game on a stone table. Two players, a glass jar of oolong tea, and a ring of onlookers, a few of them settled into a flat-footed Asian squat for the long haul. An old saying holds that a true gentleman watches a game in silence. In a park, it’s more of a hope than a rule.

Xiangqi has moved onto screens too, with online games and apps making it easy to play almost anywhere. I still prefer a real board, though. There is something satisfying about the weight of a piece in your hand, hovering over the board while you work out your next move, then hearing it land once you’ve made up your mind. The Chinese phrase juqi buding (举棋不定) literally describes that moment of holding a piece and not knowing where to move it. And once the piece is down, asking to take it back never feels quite the same.

Part of xiangqi is the strategy, but part of it is the feel of the pieces, the sound they make on the board, and the person sitting across from you. That’s the case for a real Chinese chess set.

Some parks and street corners also have xiangqi endgame stalls, with a tricky position already set up and an invitation to solve it. Some involve betting, and the position is usually much harder than it first looks. Chinese police have also warned about scams where helpers in the crowd pretend to win in order to draw passersby in.

Xiangqi vs Chess: Which Is Harder?

For a chess player, xiangqi can feel harder at first, mostly because of what you have to unlearn.

Xiangqi often opens up faster than chess. With only five soldiers spread across the front, the chariots and cannons can find open lines early, so the game turns tactical quickly. Chess starts with eight pawns packed across the board, which can make the opening feel more closed.

At first, your chess habits can work against you: you expect the horse to jump and the general to roam like a king, and you keep reaching for a queen that simply isn’t there.

Where Was Xiangqi Invented?

Modern xiangqi took shape in China, although exactly how far back its roots go is still debated. By the Song dynasty (960–1279), the game had developed much closer to the form played today.

One of the most memorable stories comes from a Tang-dynasty tale. A man cuts open two enormous tangerines and finds two old men inside each one, happily playing xiangqi. Centuries later, the story inspired the title of the famous Ming-dynasty manual The Secret in the Tangerine.

Some historians connect xiangqi to the same wider family of ancient games as Indian chaturanga and Western chess, while others argue for a more independent Chinese development.

Your first few games will probably end with a cannon you never saw coming. That’s part of the fun. It’s a good one to send to someone you’d happily challenge. For more of everyday China, from language and culture to business and trends, join the Stellar Chinese newsletter on this page.