Every Xiangqi Champion

Before there was a title

Xiangqi reached its modern form at the end of the Northern Song: sixteen pieces a side, nine files by ten ranks, the river, the palace, the general and advisors confined to it. By the Southern Song it was played widely enough that Wen Tianxiang, the statesman the Mongols executed in 1283, grew up in a family of players and left a book of forty endgame problems. Nine hundred years of the game, and composed positions like his are nearly all that survives: not one record of a game anyone actually played.

What survives from the Ming onward is manuals: 橘中秘 of 1632, the most reprinted xiangqi text of the Ming and Qing, and 百局象棋谱 of 1801 with its hundred and seven positions named after proverbs. You can name the authors. You cannot say who was strongest, because nobody was keeping score. The first era with contested titles ran through the 1920s and 1930s and had no federation: newspapers organised the matches, and the winners were given names rather than trophies. Zhou Deyu finished three points clear when East China played North China in February 1931 and was crowned 七省棋王, Chess King of Seven Provinces, the seven being how many provinces the four players came from. Huang Songxuan then played him twenty games, finished one ahead, and Guangdong crowned him 九省棋王, Chess King of Nine Provinces. A title race settled by nickname inflation is not a system, but it was the closest the game had.

Xie Xiaxun organised those matches and is the figure worth knowing. He played Western chess well enough to win a five-nation tournament at Shamian in 1936 with eighteen wins, one loss and one draw. In October 1937 he went to Southeast Asia as a national envoy and spent two years playing for the war: simultaneous displays, blindfold games, boards laid out with people as the pieces. He raised more than fifty million in banknotes and silver, and sent three thousand young overseas Chinese home to fight. In 1939 he played Zhou Enlai in Chongqing, and the drawn game they published in the Ta Kung Pao was titled 共抒国难, relieving the national crisis together. He died in 1987, aged ninety-nine.

Then, in August 1956, the State Sports Commission made xiangqi an official sport and published the first competition rules. That December, in Beijing, the first national championship was played. Xiangqi was the only competitive event; go and Western chess were demonstrations. It has been played fifty-seven times since, missing 1961 and 1963 to the famine, 1967-1973 to the Cultural Revolution, 1976 to Mao's death, 2021-2022 to the pandemic, and 2024 to want of a sponsor.

Every national champion, 1956 to 2025

Fifty-seven editions, twenty-two winners. One row per player, in the order they first took the title, with a bar over the years they held it.

Three things fall out of the shape. Hu Ronghua holds the middle of the chart for forty years, in two long runs either side of a gap that history took rather than a rival, then four scattered singles that land after the men who replaced him had themselves come and gone. The 1980s and 1990s are the only stretch where four or five names trade the title year to year. And from 2005 the bars turn red: thirteen men have won it since, and ten of them have a ruling against them.

Thirteen of these men have an annotated game further down the page, one each, in the same order. The nine without one are here because a list of champions that leaves people out is not a list of champions.

Yang Guanlin 杨官璘, 1956

Four national titles: 1956, 1957, 1959, and a fourth in 1962 shared with the boy who had just taken the game off him. He came out of Guangdong, played for money in Hong Kong between 1949 and 1951, and by the time the sport was organised he was good enough that it called him 第一国手, the nation's foremost player. Other players called him 魔叔, Magic Uncle. His reputation rested on endgames, which is a polite way of saying he beat people in positions everyone had agreed were drawn.

He was the answer for most of a decade, and for longer than the record suggests. Five years after Hu Ronghua took the title off him, Yang was still beating him.

Li Yiting 李义庭, 1958

They called him 小神童, the little prodigy, and he had earned it by sixteen: a four-game match against Yang Guanlin in 1954 that finished two apiece. He beat Yang again at the first national championship, in the tournament Yang went on to win, and took the title himself in 1958 at twenty.

Then he stopped. Poor health and the politics of the late 1960s ended his competitive career in 1966, at twenty-eight, which is the whole reason a player this good has one championship. He coached afterwards, and the player he pushed forward was Liu Dahua, two sections down.

Hu Ronghua 胡荣华, 1960

Fourteen national titles, the first at fifteen and the last at fifty-five, and every one of the ten championships held between 1960 and 1979, one of them shared. They called him 胡司令, Commander Hu. He played out of Shanghai, on his own, against the strongest player every other province could field, and he did it by rebuilding the openings underneath the game: the flying elephant, the anti-palace horse and the same-direction cannon are all mainstream today because Hu kept winning with them.

This is the game he arrived with. Round three of his first national tournament, Black against the reigning champion.

And this is thirty-four years later, in a tournament he did not win, against a man who had taken two national titles of his own in between.

Liu Dahua 柳大华, 1980

Two titles, 1980 and 1981, and the man who ended the longest run in the game: Hu had won every championship held for twenty years when Liu took the 1980 tournament off him. He is from Huangpi, in Hubei, and the sport knows him as 东方电脑, the Eastern Computer, for a memory that let him play nineteen simultaneous games blindfold in 1995. That was a world record until one of the champions further down this page broke it with twenty.

He beat Li Laiqun in the 1980 tournament, then Yang Guanlin five days later.

Li Laiqun 李来群, 1982

Four titles between 1982 and 1991, and the first of them mattered past his own career. Li is from Handan in Hebei, and 1982 was the first time the men's championship crossed the Yellow River: until then it had belonged to the south, to Guangdong and Shanghai and Hubei. He went through that tournament unbeaten, and through Hu Ronghua directly rather than around him.

Chinese writers reach for two images for his game: a needle wrapped in cotton, and a python's coils. Both mean the same thing, which is that the position has already closed before you notice it closing.

Lü Qin 吕钦, 1986

Five national titles and five world titles, more of the latter than anyone before or since. Guangdong called him 羊城少帅, the Young Marshal of Guangzhou, and paired him with Xu Yinchuan as 岭南双雄, the twin heroes of Lingnan. In almost any other era that record is the headline of the sport. Here it reads as a long second place behind Hu Ronghua.

Xu Tianhong 徐天红, 1989

National champion in 1989, world champion in 1993 with six wins, three draws and no losses. He is from Taizhou in Jiangsu, and the sport calls him 笑面佛, the Smiling Buddha, because he smiles right through a game. What is behind the smile is the opposite of friendly: tight openings, very few holes, and a habit of grinding advantages too small to see into wins.

The year after his national title he met a fifteen-year-old from Guangdong, at the same age and on the same stage where Hu Ronghua had beaten Yang Guanlin thirty years earlier. This time the champion won.

Zhao Guorong 赵国荣, 1990

Four national titles spread across eighteen years, 1990 to 2008, plus the 1991 world championship. He learned in Harbin under Wang Jialiang, who was known as the Northeast Tiger, so the sport made Zhao the New Northeast Tiger. What people mean by it is that he plays bigger against stronger opponents, and that he fused the careful northern game with the sharper southern one.

Xu Yinchuan 许银川, 1993

Six national titles and three world titles. He won the first at eighteen, second only to Hu's fifteen, and spent the 1990s and 2000s as the best player in the country not named Hu Ronghua. Like Yang Guanlin before him he built it on endgames, and like Yang he came out of Guangdong. He is one of the three men to have won a national title since 2005 with no ruling against him.

Here he is against the man who ended Hu's run.

Tao Hanming 陶汉明, 1994

The only champion here who came up outside the system. Tao grew up on the street chess stalls of Haicheng in Liaoning, turned professional late, and in 1994 became the first amateur-trained player to win the national title, playing for Jilin and taking it from Lü Qin on tiebreak in the final round. The sport named him 绿林棋王, chess king of the greenwood, which is the Chinese phrase for outlaws in the forest, and it is a verdict on his game rather than his upbringing: unorthodox, and ferocious in the middlegame.

His game is wild by the standards of every other champion in this sequence, built on prepared surprises rather than accumulation. Here he is two years after the title, against a two-time champion.

Yu Youhua 于幼华, 2002

One title, in 2002, at forty-one, taken in the middle of the years that belonged to Hu Ronghua, Lü Qin and Xu Yinchuan. A Guangzhou newspaper writer had named him 拼命三郎 two decades earlier, roughly the desperado, after the 1981 championship: he finished sixth and did not draw a single one of his thirteen games. He plays for complications and accepts what comes with them.

Sun Yongzheng 孙勇征, 2011

One title, in 2011, won without losing a game: five wins and six draws. He is where the list stops being straightforward. On 12 January 2025 the Chinese Xiangqi Association banned him for four years and three months and revoked his grandmaster title, in the same announcement that sanctioned forty-one people.

Every man who won the national championship from 2010 to 2023 now has a ruling against him. What that means for the list is at the foot of the page.

Wang Yubo 王禹博, 2025

The twenty-second man to win it, in Jinan in December 2025, a first title for a Beijing player coached by the grandmaster Zhang Qiang. His is the only game below in which the opponent appears nowhere else, and that is a consequence of the section above rather than an editorial choice.

The decade that was struck

The red bars in the chart are the reason this list needs a footnote. Between 2024 and 2026 the Chinese Xiangqi Association worked through a match-fixing case the Chinese press calls 录音门, the recording gate, and it has a page of its own: the investigation, everyone sanctioned, the reasoning, and the sources.

Set that against the table above and the damage is easier to see than to state. Thirteen men have won the national championship since 2005 and ten of them have a ruling against them, including every single winner from 2010 to 2023. Xu Yinchuan, Zhao Guorong and Wang Yubo are the three who do not.

The names stay in the table. A list that quietly dropped them would be a worse record of what happened, and these are published findings from the sport’s own governing body rather than allegations. What the rulings do not tell you is which games were fixed, or how a player at that level is supposed to be caught, and that is a longer story than a list of champions can hold.

Where that leaves the list

Sixty-nine years, fifty-seven championships, twenty-two winners. For the first fifty of those years the question had a clear answer and it was usually Hu Ronghua. For the fifteen after that it has an answer the sport has since taken back. Wang Yubo’s title in December 2025 is the first since Xu Yinchuan in 2009 that nobody has had to qualify.

Every game on this page is a chapter in a study you can work through properly: the full move tree, the engine’s lines as branches you can walk, one chapter per champion in the same order, and the 2025 world final at the end.