We certainly thank Sam Sloan for his post concerning Ken Whyld's passing
on 11 July 2003, at age 77. In his post, Sam Sloan mentions that his 1984
article was "slammed" by Whyld. While I also did not have the pleasure of
meeting Whyld in person, I did have several indirect dealings with him as
well as a letter from him. When I was doing research on the Genealogy of
Chess, back in 1997, Whyld, through a mutual friend residing in London,
offered to assist me to do research on chess literature written in German,
which I politely declined. (I did not want to constrain the scope of my
research; in addition, I did not think that his access to chess literature
in UK could compare to my access to that at the Library of Congress.
Further, though a struggle, I could manage to get the gist of writings in
German and did cite works by van der Linde and others in the text of my
work.) Later, through that same mutual friend, Whyld wanted a copy of an
article appearing in a journal published at Oxford, which indirectly
validated my earlier assessment of relative access to research material;
at that time, he was residing in Oxford -- were that reference available,
he could have easily secured a copy by walking to the university library
the same way as I would do by going to the Library of Congress from my
residence. After my book was published in 1998, Whyld took issue with
some of my comments in the Epilogue and said so in his letter to me.
Needless to say, he did not like my findings (that proto-chess was
invented in China, by an all-winning commander-in-chief in 203 BCE, who
gained inspiration from sources such as Weiqi ("Go"), Liubo (a
chance-based game), I (The Book of Changes, which was the basis for
Macedonian philosophy professor Pavle Bidev's switching his allegiance
from chess-was-invented-in-India to chess-was-invented-in-China) and Sun
Tzu's Art of War), despite my 18 months' research at the Library of
Congress and over 200 citations in western languages (including the one
mentioned in Sam Sloan's link, Chakravarti Chintajaram), in Chinese, and
in Japanese. In deference to his reputation, I chose not to respond and
let my work speak for itself; my vindication came when my work earned the
Book of the Year 1998 honor from the book-review editor of GAMES magazine.

Since the publication of this book, I have continued to gather additional
evidence, hoping, someday (though unlikely to be in the near future), to
do a follow-up book on the history of chess.
David Li