World Xiangqi Championship: History, Winners and Munich 2015

A world title for xiangqi

Xiangqi, often called Chinese chess, has its own world championship, organised by the World Xiangqi Federation. The first edition took place in Singapore in 1990, and the event was then held roughly every two years. Each edition awards individual titles for men and for women, together with a prize for the best non-Chinese player, a category that tells its own story about where the game is played outside China.

The hosts have moved around the world: Kunming, Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Macau, Paris, Xintai, Jakarta, Huizhou, Munich, Manila, Vancouver and later Kuching, Houston and Shanghai again. The list of venues in Wikipedia’s table shows the 14th edition in 2015 in Munich, and the 9th edition in 2005 in Paris, which makes Germany and France the two European hosts of the first nineteen editions.

The Munich edition

The 2015 championship in Munich produced these individual winners:

• Men: Zheng Weitong
• Women: Wang Linna
• Best non-Chinese player: Kazuharu Shoshi of Japan

Shoshi is the most frequent winner of the non-Chinese prize in the table. He took it in 1999, 2003, 2007, 2015 and 2019, five times in all, with Munich as the fourth of them.

Munich has stayed in the xiangqi calendar since. On 9 September 2023 the Johannissaal of Nymphenburg Palace hosted a rapid event that was the German leg of the Shanghai Masters. Sixteen players from Germany, Italy, Israel and China, five of them women, played five Swiss rounds at ten minutes plus five seconds per move. Xue Handi of Stuttgart, the European champion, won without a defeat, with Xu Haoyang second and Nikola Martinovic third. Grandmaster Sun Yongzheng gave a simultaneous display against ten particularly strong participants and did not lose a single game, though ChessBase stressed that the joint analysis with the master mattered more than the result. Xue Zhong of Munich, secretary general of the European Xiangqi Federation, promoted the day, which also showed a robot arm that moves pieces after reading the board optically.

Who has won the main titles

A pattern appears in the men’s column of the table. Lü Qin won the title five times, in 1990, 1995, 1997, 2001 and 2005. Xu Yinchuan won three times, in 1999, 2003 and 2007. Wang Tianyi won in 2013, 2017 and 2022, and Xu Chao followed in 2019. The women’s title has been shared among a smaller group, with Tang Dan the most frequent winner after her titles of 2011, 2013, 2017 and 2025. From the 17th edition in Kuching in 2022 the table also lists men’s team events and an open rapid event, and the 2025 edition in Shanghai saw its men’s individual title go to Lai Ly Huynh of Vietnam, who also won the open rapid event in 2022 and 2023.

How the game differs from Western chess

Anyone who follows the results should know how the board looks. Xiangqi is played on nine lines by ten, and the pieces stand on the intersections, not in the squares. Each side has sixteen pieces: a general, two advisors, two elephants, two horses, two chariots, two cannons and five soldiers.

Three features set the game apart. The general and the advisors may not leave the palace, a three by three zone with diagonal lines. A river divides the board between the fifth and sixth ranks. Elephants cannot cross it, and soldiers gain a sideways step after they have crossed. And the two generals may not face each other on an open file, a rule known as the flying general, which in practice means that a move creating that situation is illegal.

The goal is to checkmate the opposing general, and stalemate is a loss for the player who has no legal move, unlike in Western chess. For the broader history of chess variants, readers can browse the chess history hub, and the section on computer chess covers how programs approach board games.

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