| home index i ii iii iv v ... literature Go, an addictive game general information history of go china Introduction The Chinese game of weiqi, better known to us by its Japanese name go, has been done a great disservice by the chess historian H.J.R. Murray. In Murray 1952 :35-36 he concludes his brief discussion of games in ancient China thus: "The oldest and best of the native Chinese games, wei-k'i, is older than AD 1000." This is prefaced by other outrageous remarks: "... Chinese historians have always tended to exaggerate the age of their inventions and in particular the age of their games. Modern scholarship holds that the only Chinese board-games before the Christian era were simple games of the merels type, i.e. games of alinement. The yih mentioned by Confucius (551-479 BC) and Mencius (372-289 BC) was the smaller merels." Yet only a year before, the great sinologue Bernhard Karlgren was castigating those who found it fashionable to pour scorn on the antiquity of Chinese texts: "It looks very scholarly and critical. But with few exceptions such condemnations are based on flimsy, insufficient and subjective arguments..." (Karlgren 1951:117) Moreover, what was to Murray "modern scholarship", so far as I can see, totally contradicts his assertion. Limiting ourselves, in deference to his suspicions, to non-Chinese scholars, we find Dr Ogawa Takuji, for example, in a very important article ( | |
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