The Forest of Play

THE FOREST OF PLAY

Yi Lin Xin Bian, the 1977 xiangqi manual Yang Guanlin spent twenty years compiling, complete and playable. Eight chapters, in Chinese, English and Vietnamese, with a neural network engine built in. Everything runs on your device.

Most chess books teach one thing. This is an entire education between two covers: how to study, what the pieces are worth, sixteen named ways to deliver mate, ten endings nobody can win, the odds games the old professionals kept as trade secrets, ten families of opening taken off the national championship scoresheets, the middlegame, the endgame, four ancient compositions corrected, and forty annotated master games.


THE MAN WHO COMPILED IT

Yang Guanlin, born 1925 in a village in Dongguan, Guangdong. No chess school, because there were none. He was watching chess at three and had no rival in his village by ten. When the war ruined the family he farmed, took in tailoring and worked as a porter, studying endgames at night by a lamp. From 1948 he took the staked boards in Guangzhou, then a street pitch in Hong Kong.

In 1956 China held its first national individual championship. He won it, becoming the first national champion in the history of the People's Republic, and won again in 1957, 1959 and 1962. The chess world called him the Magic Uncle, for what he could do with an ending everyone else had written off.


TWENTY YEARS, AND THE DECADE THEY CROSSED

From 1957 on I began compiling it in my spare time, and the study of the openings in it has been added to and amended many times. The time spent on the compiling may be called not short.

The national championship was not held from 1967 to 1973, and the magazine Yang edited closed in 1966. Xiangqi went quiet for a decade. This book appeared in April 1977, six months after that decade ended, and reportedly passed half a million copies by its third printing.


THE CHAPTER THAT JUSTIFIES THE BOOK

Giving odds is the oldest professional format in Chinese chess, and the street professionals kept it secret because it was how they ate. Yang says so, then publishes it: eight one-horse and twelve two-horse games, with the rules nobody writes down, including the iron pawn.


WHAT IS INSIDE

- 293 entries across eight chapters, in the order the book prints them.
- 12,273 half moves of main line play, plus 1,727 side lines carrying 16,014 more. Every one playable.
- 2,992 annotated points: 1,119 on the main line, 1,873 in side lines.
- Around 76,000 characters of original Chinese, carried into English and Vietnamese.
- 118 positions from a set diagram, 60 opening classifications, families A to E.
- 40 master games with 576 notes, 1937 to 1974, including Xie Xiaxun before the war and Hu Ronghua playing the openings he pioneered.


HOW YOU STUDY IT

Replay. Step a move at a time, jump to either end, walk into any side line. Notes surface where they belong, which matters here: two thirds of the commentary is off the main line.

Learn. A board where nothing moves by itself. You take both sides by hand and must find the move the book gives. Optional arrows show the choice; turn them off and work from memory.

Go off book. Play the move nobody played, explore, then return to the point of departure in a tap.

Ask the engine. A full strength neural network engine runs entirely on your device. Yang compiled this with his own eyes over twenty years, and the question is not where a modern search catches him out. It is how seldom it does.


THREE LANGUAGES, YOUR OWN BOARD

One setting chooses English, Vietnamese or Chinese, running through all 293 titles and all 2,992 annotations. Untranslated text falls back to the original, never a blank.

Thirteen board sizes. Thirty-five board themes. Six themes and five hand set highlight colours for the study board. Five board fonts. Light or dark.

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