The game where Liu Zhongfu met the Old Lady of Black-horse Mountain and played go with her. Also known as the Vomiting Blood Game.

55=50; 58=43; 108=98; 109=70; 111=98

(JF) It is not clear who is Black or White. One Chinese source has Liu as Black and winning. Yasunaga Hajime believed Liu lost (hence the otherwise unexplained reference to vomiting blood), or that he made the game up. As with Wang the Firewood Collector, a claim to have met immortals was a polite whimsy to explain one's brilliant play.

Black-horse Mountain (Li-shan) was a spa area to the south-east of the old capital Chang'an where Emperor Xuan Zong went with his consort Yang Guifei.

Click here to download the game in sgf format. In some texts 70 is marked as "brilliant" (equivalent to !! in chess). 98 and 108 are also worthy of note.

Games from the oldest book of Go

The book is a collection, by Li Yimin, of old text classics (Go Secrets, The Go Classic in Thirteen Chapters), uncommented games, openings and a smallish number of problems. Much of it was copied into the more accessible Xuanxuan Qijing (Gateway to All Marvels - see elsewhere on this site) a century later, but the latter book is a problem book par excellence. The main interest of C&IP is its window on the past, and the clearest view is through its games, most of which we present here.

It should be noted that there are variant texts and even some variations in diagrams. The most notable is that sometimes five starting stones are shown instead of four, the extra one being a white one at the centre point. Modern go scholars reject this extra stone in these games, but there are some grounds for believing that old Chinese go did once use such a fifth stone.