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In his acclaimed book "Encyclopedia
of Chess Variant" (first edition), D.B.Pritchard
presented the rules of a "Cambodian Chess" game having
unknown origins and displaying elements at the crossing of Western
Chess (like Indian Chess and Thai Makruk) and Oriental Chess like
Xiangqi. The source is P.A.Hill.
On the other hand, there
is a page on the Web, signed by Vuthy Tan, a Cambodian at the
time living at Portland, Oregon which describes the Ouk
Chatrang, the Chess variety
which is popular in Cambodia, with plenty of precious details. It
appears that this game is almost identical to the Makruk played in
Thailand. (This page has disappeared, fortunately this is the
Mirror page: Cambodian
Chess Games by Vuthy Tan).
Then we are facing an enigma: if the Ouk Chatrang is genuine
Cambodian Chess, what is Hill's Chess exactly ?
Hill's "Cambodian" Chess:
Pritchard presents the Hill's game as "an old variant
displaying elements of Burmese Chess, Chaturanga and Makruk".
This definition could certainly have been applied to the real Ouk
Chatrang but not at all to the game is presenting !
Actually, the Hill's game appears to be a sort of hybrid
between Xiangqi and Makruk rather and nobody can tell why it is
supposed to be old. Here the rules given by Pritchard according to
Hill's details.

Each side has 18 men: 1 King, 2 Boat, Elephant, Horse,
Official, 9 Fish. The array is displayed above. The pieces are
figurines, the pawns are disks. The board is an 8x8 uncheckered
but play is on the intersections (9x9).
The King is orthodox.
The Boat moves as the
orthochess Rook.
The Horse moves as the
orthochess Knight
The Elephant moves as a King
but cannot capture in the 3 backward directions.
The Official is the old Queen
(or Fers): moves 1 square diagonally, but can only capture in the
2 forward directions.
The Fish moves and captures 1 square straight forward but
when it crosses the centre line (on its second move) it is
reversed and thereafter moves as a King.
Comments:
From the Makruk, one finds the King, the Horse, the full line
of Pawns in an advanced position and the uncheckered 8x8 board.
The Rook is common to all Chess game, Xianqi included, but the
name of Boat is from Makruk.
From Xiangqi, one finds the play on intersections, the first
line of 9 pieces. The Fish (=Pawn) and its promotion is very
original although inspired by Xiangqi.
The Official is original although inspired by its counterpart
which is identical in Makruk and Xiangqi.
Then, this game looks like a puzzling hybrid. Were it be true,
it would be a very important stone in the history of Chess, being
a bridge between Western and Oriental games.
More information:
The following information has been given to
me by Peter Michaelsen. He forwarded me an e-mail from Philip
Cohen who had a correspondance with late John Gollon, the author
of "Chess
Variations: Ancient, Regional, and Modern". D.B.Pritchard
is referring to the same correspondance. John Gollon said that he
had received in 1969 from an U.S. serviceman (P.A.Hill ?), who had
served as an interrogator in Saïgon, the description of a
variation of Chess which he obtained details from a Cambodian born
guerilla officier he was questioning.
In addition to the information already given above, this
correspondance gives the names of the pieces : Chhwie (King),
Ta Hien (Official), Tam Mai (Elephant), Sheh (Horse), Tuk (Boat),
Trei (Fish). We learn that the Fishes are irregular disks
marked differently on either side so pieces which have crossed the
center line and have been flipped can be distinguished.
John Gollon commented : "At the time, I boiled
over with enthusiasm about this ackward (backward? awkward?)
little game, viewing it as either a link between the Chaturanga
and Chinese Chess forms, or as a blend resulting from the meeting
of the two traditions (Thaï and Burmese Chess, say, still are
more closely linked to Chaturanga-like games, while Chinese Chess
is the chess of Vietnam)...The correspondent later expressed some
concern that he may have been mistaken in some details. I have
never been able to check with an official Cambodian source. So
there could be some errors - then again, perhaps there are none."
We want to know !
More than 30 years after, no confirmation of this peculiar game
has been disclosed So far, we ought to take it as a fake. It is
well known now that the Chess played in Cambodia is the Ouk
Chatrang which is exactly identical to the Makruk played in the
neighboring Thailand
So what is it exactly ? Most probably an invention, a very
cleaver invention from someone knowing very well Chess and all its
Asian varieties. Moreover, the game seems very playable. So, what
is it ? Hey, Mr Gollon wasn't it a joke you left for your
followers ? Well done !
(Of course, if you know more information
about this, please drop me a mail)
Supplement of information in 2001:
On 20/07/2001, Stewart Thomson, the eldest nephew of
late John Gollon, did mail to me. He wrote the following:
"Now, as for John's personality...insofar as I may speak
for him, I can say with fair certitude that he would not have
intentionally invented or deliberately allowed an inaccuracy to
exist solely to be found later by fact-finders. This I base
on my experience of him as a perfectionist of a high caliber (he
would start nothing, not even watch a movie, if he could not
finish it) and as a scholar with particular integrity in general.
Though he was possesed of a singular sense of humor, I doubt
seriously that he would have let that spill over into his book.
We will never know, true, but this would be my guess--very likely,
the P.A. Hill (yes?) that he received the variation from is the
key to the matter. I hope I can persuade you on this issue,
simply because I just don't think he'd consciously have done it,
much like the artist who refuses to put hidden tracks in his
album. If he had invented any chess variant, he would have
wanted it to be accredited as such."
The best is probably to respect this evidence from someone who
did know John Gollon very well.
Supplement of information in 2007:
An article has been written in Variant Chess
magazine n°55 (Sept. 2007), dealing with this strange so-called
Cambodian Chess. Available
here. Or here.
There, John Beasley, who completed and edited David Pritchard's
"The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants",
apologizes for having assessed that this version of Cambodian
Chess was doubtful because lying on a single, not confirmed,
evidence. Peter Blommers told him that he possesses a photograph
of a set and that this game was several times reported by a
Japanese collector, Okano Shin, in various books or exhibition
booklets.
The rules given by Okano Shin agree with those from Hill with
those little exceptions:
The board
bears both diagonals crossed, like in Sit-tu-yin
(Burmese Chess).
The Elephant moves as a King
but cannot capture in the 3 backward directions and the 2
sideways.
The name of the pieces are: Kwon (King), Neamahn
(Official), Kwos (Elephant), Seh (Horse), Tuuk (Boat), Trai
(Fish).
So, maybe this game had some true existence.
This information has been repeated in Variant Chess n°64 in
August 2010.
Supplement of information in 2012:
I had the chance to be in copy of several exchanges of e-mails
between several Chess researchers in Europe (Peter Michaelsen,
Peter Blommers, John Beasley) and in Japan. The help of Yasuji
Shimizu has been instrumental to clear out the new elements
published in 2007 and 2010.
The situation has been summarized by John
Beasley on his website. To avoid any loss, this is the summary
he made. I fully agree with his conclusions.
Cambodian Chess
(John, 2/4 November
2012, extended on 12 November)
In the first edition
(1994) of The
Encyclopedia of Chess Variants,
David Pritchard described a chess game allegedly played in
Cambodia. His authority was a copy, now in the Pritchard
archive in the Musée Suisse du Jeu, of a letter written by the
late John Gollon to Philip Cohen, reporting information he had
received in 1969 from a U.S. serviceman serving as an
interrogator in Saigon, who in turn had received it from a
Cambodian-born guerrilla officer he was questioning. The name
'P. A. Hill' had been added as a manuscript annotation to the
words 'U.S. serviceman'. However, this description was
challenged, and in The
Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants
(2007) I took it upon
myself to omit the game from the main text and to mention it
only in an editorial note, with the comment that the authority
for its existence appeared to reduce to a single informant
whose statements were at variance with all other known
testimony.
There have since been
several developments.
Immediately upon
publication of the Classified
Encyclopedia,
I received a letter from Peter Blommers saying No, there was
indeed supporting testimony; the Japanese collector Okano Shin
possessed a set, and he himself had a photograph of one. He
subsequently sent me photocopies of pages from several books in
Japanese, by Umebayashi Isao and Okano Shin or by Okano Shin
alone, with translations into English of the relevant items.
There were minor differences between the games described by
Hill and by Umebayashi Isao and Okano Shin as translated (the
names of some of the pieces were quite different, there was a
slight difference in the elephant's capturing power, and the
board in the photograph had diagonal lines across it in the
manner of Myanmar chess), but these seemed to me to be no more
than the differences which might be expected in the
recollections of separate informants; if anything, they added
confidence that the testimonies of Hill and of Umebayashi Isao
and Okano Shin were independent (in particular, the presence of
the diagonal lines across the board did not seem likely to be a
detail that somebody had invented). I therefore reported this
new testimony in Variant
Chess 55
(front page and page 4) and repeated it in Variant
Chess 64
(pages 177-178), making clear that I accepted it as sound.
Further apparent confirmation subsequently came to light in the
shape of a report that Umebayashi Isao had once visited
Cambodia and had bought a book on Cambodian Chess there, and I
reported this also in Variant
Chess 64
(page 234).
However, I was recently
told by Yasuji Shimizu, initially through Peter Michaelsen and
then directly, that all this appeared to have been founded on
misunderstanding. The set photographed was in fact owned by
Umebayashi Isao, and was not a survival but a modern
reconstruction based on the information in the first edition of
the Encyclopedia.
Umebayashi Isao knew of no other information about the game,
and he obtained the names of the game and of its pieces from a
Cambodian dictionary. The descriptions of the game in the
various Japanese books were again based on what appeared in the
first edition of the Encyclopedia,
and it is my conjecture that the difference in the elephant's
capturing powers slipped in as a mistranscription or
mistranslation somewhere along the way. As for the diagonal
lines on the board in the photograph, Yasuji Shimizu told me
that the catalogue of an exhibition held in 2002 included a
photograph of a board and men for Chator (Malay Chess, 'Main
Chator' in the Encyclopedia
and the Classified
Encyclopedia)
owned by Umebayashi Isao since 1999, Chator being another game
whose board features diagonal lines, and the identical graining
of the wood showed the two boards to have been the same. This
catalogue also included some Makruk boards, without diagonal
lines, but all these had stepped rims around the outside. He
therefore conjectured that when Umebayashi Isao and Okano Shin
needed a board for the photograph in their book, which was
published in 2000, they found the Makruk boards unsuitable
because the rims came too near to the squares for men to be
placed on the square corners, and so they used the Chator
board.
I reported all this in a
posting on 2 November, updated on 4 November, acknowledging
that what I had written in issues 55 and 64 of Variant
Chess appeared
to have been wholly misguided, and that we were back to where
we were when I was working on the Classified
Encyclopedia:
the game currently played in Cambodia was Makruk (Thai Chess)
with one or two minor variations, the authority for the game
described to P. A. Hill in 1969 appeared once more to reduce to
a single informant whose statements were at variance with all
other known testimony, and what had appeared to be independent
confirmation of the existence of this game had in fact all been
taken directly or indirectly from what appeared in the first
edition of the Encyclopedia.
Be it noted that Umebayashi Isao and Okano Shin were in no way
to blame for the misunderstanding; a caption under the relevant
photograph said 'Re-creation', and had I been able to read
Japanese I would have realised this.
It then occurred to me to
ask a question which might have been asked earlier: do the
'Hill' rules as given by Gollon produce a playable game? These
rules can be found in the Encyclopedia
and the Classified
Encyclopedia and
also in issue 55 of Variant
Chess (downloadable
via 'BESN and VC' alongside), but for present purposes the
following summary is sufficient: the board is 9x9, the men are
King, Rook, and Knight with their ordinary chess moves,
Elephant and Official, whose moves are subsets of the king's
move, and Fish, which moves and captures one step forward until
it reaches the sixth rank, when it gains additional powers, and
the initial array is RNEOKOENR (shades of Xiangqi!) with 9xF on
the fourth rank. There is a diagram showing the initial setup
on the front page of Variant
Chess 55.
I quickly found that
these rules do not
produce a playable
game, in that Black has a very simple strategy which gives
White the choice of accepting a draw by repetition or
sacrificing material. All he has to do is to mirror White's
moves; for example, if White starts 1 Nc3, Black replies
1...Nc7, and so on. In ordinary chess, White can defeat this by
giving check or by capturing the mirror-image man (for example,
1 e4 e5 2 Qh5 Qh4 3 QxQ). Here, no such maneouvre appears to be
possible until it is too late. Initially, none of White's
pieces can cross his fish line (apart from the knight, which
will be immediately captured if it does), so to make progress
White must sooner or later advance a fish, and Black's facing
fish will simply take it. This will leave White a fish down
without apparent compensation, which cannot be good, and
Black's men (apart from his extra fish) will still mirror
White's so he can continue with the mirroring strategy if he
wants to. True, once White has advanced a fish he will be able
to bring a piece to the square it has vacated, but this square
is now commanded by Black's extra fish, so how will this help
him? Suppose 1 Na3 Na7 2 Ke2 Ke8 3 Fc5 Fxc5 4 Nc4, intending to
meet 4...Nc6 with 5 Nxd6+ giving check and preventing Black
from continuing the mirror play; yes, but why should Black play
the mirror move 4...Nc6? He can play 4...Fxc4 instead, and his
fish ahead has become a knight ahead.
Had the game ever been
played at all seriously, this simple non-losing defensive
strategy would have come to light. I conclude that not only
does the authority for the game reduce to a single informant
whose statements are at variance with all other known
testimony, but that something must have gone wrong somewhere
along the line and in fact no such game existed. Whether the
error lay with Hill's Cambodian-born informant, who had perhaps
seen makruk played in childhood but had never played it himself
and had misremembered the details, or whether Hill himself did
not properly understand what he was being told, or whether Hill
and Gollon got their lines crossed, we can only guess. I don't
know how the U.S. military obtained its Vietnamese-speaking
interrogators, but I suspect that it took the best linguists
among its draftees, sent them on a crash course in Vietnamese,
and set them to work, and that their knowledge of the language
was often little more than was needed for the purposes of
military interrogation. But unless Hill or his informant reads
this and comes forward, we shall never know.
My thanks to Jean-Louis
Cazaux for trying out this strategy against the Zillions
implementation of the game, and verifying that the computer
(which won't have thrown a fish away unless it could see
compensation within its look-ahead horizon) did indeed give up
and concede the draw.
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Discover the genuine
Cambodian Chess : Ouk
Chatrang
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