Chess Culture

Author: Hu Ronghua Chess School
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-10-01
Features: I have been playing chess for half a century, and more than half of my life has been spent in the ups and downs of this vast chess world. Fourty-three years ago, when I first participated in the national competition, I was the youngest player on the battlefield; today, I am still fighting on the battlefield, and the familiar faces of my opponents and chess friends who once competed with me have disappeared one by one. They have all retired from the field one after another, and I have grown from the "little Hu" of back then to the "Hu teacher" of today. At the age of 58, the "old man" among the top-tier chess players in the national first division is undoubtedly the oldest in terms of age. It's a piece of cake for me, a veteran of the chess world, to talk about technical issues; but if you ask me a seemingly simple question—what is chess?—I'm really not sure how to answer it. What is chess? It is a gymnastic exercise for the mind, a miniature war, a microcosm of life. These summaries are all correct. I think we can add a few more points: chess is a discipline, chess is an art, chess is a culture. Isn't chess considered a minor pursuit? How can it be linked to profound culture? In fact, chess culture can be said to have a long and rich history. If you have ever encountered ancient chess manuals, just the prefaces and postfaces alone are absolutely concise, philosophical, and beautiful prose. In the Plum Blossom Manual, to record the strategies, it uses two poems and ninety different characters to establish a unique "coordinate system" on the chessboard. The lines "In discussing the situation, they are separate, like the sun and the moon" reflect the profound erudition of the manual's author. Moreover, the titles of ancient manuals and the names of ancient games are imbued with a strong cultural atmosphere. When writing the preface for the School Curriculum Textbook on Chess Culture they compiled, I felt that after the school incorporated chess teaching into its curriculum two years ago, they no longer simply taught students chess techniques but also compiled this profound discipline of chess culture into easy-to-understand lessons for the students. This teaching method that combines technique and culture will enable students to understand chess as a whole and appreciate it. Only by understanding the cultural connotations of chess will students find joy in playing it during games. This textbook is intended for primary school students.