“Ministers of Fire” is a newly-published critically-acclaimed novel by Mark Harril Saunders which displays an ancient Chinese soldier on its dust jacket. The soldier is not a creation of a graphics designer but is actually an ancient Chinese chess piece dating back about 1000 years. The author contacted me late last year after seeing the [...]
Chinese chess (xiangqi)
Chinese chess or xiangqi (象棋) is one of the most ancient forms of chess. Old Chinese chess pieces, similar to the “chariot” (車) piece displayed here, were made of bronze and can date back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD). A complete set of these old Chinese chess pieces would be extremely difficult to collect. [...]
According to a report in the Yangzi Evening News, archaeologists recently unearthed five ancient Chinese chess (xiangqi 象棋) pieces from a tomb located at Tiger Hill in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. The tomb dates from the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Archaeologist Mr. Zhang Tiejun (张铁军) emphasized that, among the burial objects, only five Chinese chess pieces were [...]