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Fangqi

game

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 25, 2023
Entity authorityQ777361
Source-derived summary

Fangqi (Chinese: 方棋; pinyin: fāngqí) is a strategy board game played traditionally throughout Northern China as a training game for weiqi (Go). Fangqi is also known as diūfāng (Chinese: 丢方) and xiàfāng (Chinese: 下方). Muslim people of Chinese origin (Dungans), brought the game with them to Central Asian countries such as Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Equipment

Board size varies from region to region. In Ningxia, the game is played on a 7×8 gridded board using black and white Go stones, 28 stones per player. The game is popular in agricultural communities in Northwestern China, and often played on a board traced out on the ground.

Rules

The pieces are played on grid line intersections, the same as in Go. The game is similar in concept to nine men's morris:

Players alternate turns placing stones, attempting to form 2×2 squares, until the board is filled.

Each player removes one of their opponent's stones.

Each player counts up the squares they have formed and removes an equal number of the opponent's stones, as long as those pieces are not part of a square.

Editorial summary

“Fangqi” enters the record as game. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fangqi and game can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 180-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Fangqi and game.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Fangqi” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Fangqi and game provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q777361. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Fangqi”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Fangqi primary sources, Fangqi archive and Fangqi research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Fangqi”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Fangqi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.