Images of olden times

Two Chinese scrolls from the Art Institute of Chicago.


It’s interesting to note that the board dimensions in these scenes appear to be 25x17. I’m curious if anyone knows if this was just the artist’s choice, or if this was actually the standard size of the time?

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I’d assume that the artist probably wasn’t a Weiqi player … AFAIK, before 19x19 was established as standard board size, they played on 17x17.

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Description : Stone Go board excavated in 1952 from the Han dynasty tomb M1 at Wangdu 望都 in Hebei province.

Date : Late Eastern Han period (25–220).

Size : 69 × 69 cm.

Grid : 17×17, with the five primary star points marked.

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Cats and Go, what more do you need?

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“Black Moyo”?

(ref: another thread)

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…and tea, it would appear.

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Cats again :wink:

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I thought I finally had found a community where I wouldn’t have to look at pictures with cute cats. No such luck it seems. :wink:

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Fooled You! :rofl:

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From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_arts

Qí 棋 is a board game and art form which is now called wéiqí (圍棋) in Chinese (go in Japan and the West), literally meaning “surrounding game.” Current definitions of qí cover a wide range of board games, and given that in classical Chinese qí could also refer to other games, some argue that the qí in the four arts could refer to xiangqi.[1] However, xiangqi is often considered a popular “game of the people,” whereas wéiqí was a game with aristocratic connotations.

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These remind me a lot of DGT (digital transmission) chessboards, which are used to transmit the move of a pro game live to a website like Chess24. When received by the website, they’re displayed automatically onto an interface. I had always just assumed that because of the light stones and smaller playing spaces on a goban (DGT boards use the weight of the pieces to track the moves, afaik), the technology was simply impractical for use on them. But this has gotten me thinking again: why not make DGT gobans?

Let’s for a moment assume that weight-based DGT gobans would be impractical, so we’re left with magnetic DGT boards. For this, I have an idea: instead of painted metal stones, what about making the stones out of a mixture of glass and powdered metal? For instance, nickel with clouded glass for the white stones and brass with dark-tinted glass for the black stones? Hopefully those would have enough magnetism.

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From left to right: Tamura Yasuhisa (Honinbo Shusai), Honinbo Shuei, Karigane Junichi.

For some reason, it looks like there are only white stones on the board.

This image isn’t inlining for me, anyone else?

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Maybe they just don’t show due to the low resolution of the image?

Yup, same here. I guess the site doesn’t like deep linking.

HyunHyunKyung
From the quality of paper, the estimated publication period of HyunHyunKyung is 19th century. The size of the book is 183 x 255 mm (width x length) with 8mm of thickness. The book is made of hanji (Korean traditional paper) and has 78 pages in total including the cover.
The feature of this book is that not only were letters imprinted but the baduk boards were also printed. The book was printed by carving each and every page separately. The baduk stones were stamped with brush covers.

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Refreshing to have some history to go along with our pretty pictures :slight_smile: thank you for sharing!

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What a curious picture! I couldn’t find it with tineye.com , who is the artist?

Also, I love the idea of the brooding lava in the goban, just waiting for that small disturbance in the shape of the stones, but then erupting in a violent fight.

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It’s a wonderful picture, but can it really be of olden times? How long ago did people know that there were layers in the crust, with lava pushing up like that? And the idea of the crust floating on lava - isn’t that very new geology (comparatively speaking)?

Ying Yefu, see here: http://hifructose.com/2014/08/18/ying-yefus-macabre-paintings-utilize-traditional-chinese-techniques/

And as you can read there, you are right GreenAsJade, he uses traditional techniques in the modern time…

Also did a similar one with MahJong:

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