When I first looked at the cover of this book I though, “woah, this is going to be brutal,” but then I started to understand why this is so interesting and relevant to our study of Games and Play. Moskowitz goes into the history of Weiqi, how the game was made unpopular until the Tang dynasty popularized the game because the Emperors played it. He also describes how during the cultural revolution the game was deemed to be one of the “four olds” and banned, however, due to the same persistence that brought the game back during the Tang dynasty, the game was legalized and encouraged a few years later due to its association with “national pride.” Weiqi’s nature of persistence is one of the most fascinating things that Moskowitz brings up. He talks about how the game has not only persisted in Chinese culture, but how it has also persisted throughout the world amongst intellectuals. He points out that wherever a brilliant mathematician can be found in a movie there is probably a Weiqi board around (here he points to A Beautiful Mind.)

I also found it interesting whenever Moskowitz went into what Weiqi means in China. He went to great length to describe how Weiqi is related to the Chinese idea of “Suzhi,” which is a lot like a symbol of Chinese nationalistic excellence. He describes how well off parents in China send their Children to Weiqi schools so that they will be well rounded individuals. I found this fascinating, I feel as though here in America we do the same thing, whether its signing your kid up for baseball of piano lessons, all those activities we do as kids are aimed at making us more wholesome individuals. As Moskowitz points out though, in China the kids do not get nearly as much play time as American kids do. He tells how some Chinese kids spend all of their waking hours, how this behavior was endorsed by Confucious, and how these kids justify it themselves (tough job market). All of this was very interesting to me.

Moskowitz’s experiences with the elderly Chinese Weiqi players was also very interesting. He paints them as though they could be seen in Central Park. His experiences with those old men probably tought him as much about the Chinese people s it did about Weiqi. He tell that the men, who all lived through the Cultural Revolution, were extremely humble in their actions, and that they did not do much to draw attention to themselves, and he points out that both of these would be good characteristics to have during the Cultural Revolution. In this book I learned just as much about China’s as I did about Weiqi, and I think that those histories, not coincidentally, pair very well together.