I especially enjoyed the Chen reading this week. Chen’s tracing of the ways in which weiqi served as a metaphor for war, society, and the cosmos seems reminiscent of last week’s readings, which told us that chess was treated in much the same manner. What’s interesting to me is that the metaphors built around chess usually utilized the different social strata portrayed in the game as an integral part of the metaphor. Weiqi, on the other hand, is abstract. No piece is any different from any of the other pieces of the same color. And yet, as Chen demonstrates, there was still a vibrant poetic culture surrounding the game. The simplicity of rules, complexity of tactics, and representations of confrontation and contradiction allowed for a wide variety of metaphorical functions. Like the game itself, weiqi’s metaphorical life seems a bit more abstract than chess. Chen even argues that this abstraction actually freed metaphors from constraints, and added to the poetic life of weiqi.

Chen also mentioned a few poets who endlessly watched weiqi games but didn’t actually play. He even described one poet, Ch’ien Ch’ien-i as being “addicted” to weiqi without even playing. I don’t suspect that this level of spectating was very common in pre-industrial societies, but I still think it’s interesting, especially in light of some of the pieces we read in the first couple weeks of the semester that associated the rise of spectator games with industrial society.

Finally, I’d like to quibble with one of the points raised in the Lo and Wang piece on weiqi from The Art of Play. They suggest that the game did not spread westward because “its pieces lacked the figural imagery that makes chess so compelling” (p. 199). However, this doesn’t seem to hold up given that we learned last week that Islamic cultures tended to forbid representations of humans in games. Even if weiqi’s abstract nature might have prevented it from gaining popularity in Europe, it seems like it shouldn’t have been a deterrent to gaining popularity in Islamic cultures. I don’t know enough about weiqi to suggest other reasons for its lack of popularity outside of East Asia, but I am not convinced that its abstract nature is one of those reasons.