I especially enjoyed the Chen reading this week. Chen\u2019s tracing of the ways in which weiqi served as a metaphor for war, society, and the cosmos seems reminiscent of last week\u2019s readings, which told us that chess was treated in much the same manner. What\u2019s interesting to me is that the metaphors built around chess usually utilized the different social strata portrayed in the game as an integral part of the metaphor. Weiqi, on the other hand, is abstract. No piece is any different from any of the other pieces of the same color. And yet, as Chen demonstrates, there was still a vibrant poetic culture surrounding the game. The simplicity of rules, complexity of tactics, and representations of confrontation and contradiction allowed for a wide variety of metaphorical functions. Like the game itself, weiqi\u2019s metaphorical life seems a bit more abstract than chess. Chen even argues that this abstraction actually freed metaphors from constraints, and added to the poetic life of weiqi.<\/p>\n
Chen also mentioned a few poets who endlessly watched weiqi games but didn\u2019t actually play. He even described one poet, Ch\u2019ien Ch\u2019ien-i as being \u201caddicted\u201d to weiqi without even playing. I don\u2019t suspect that this level of spectating was very common in pre-industrial societies, but I still think it\u2019s interesting, especially in light of some of the pieces we read in the first couple weeks of the semester that associated the rise of spectator games with industrial society.<\/p>\n
Finally, I\u2019d like to quibble with one of the points raised in the Lo and Wang piece on weiqi from The Art of Play<\/em>. They suggest that the game did not spread westward because \u201cits pieces lacked the figural imagery that makes chess so compelling\u201d (p. 199). However, this doesn\u2019t seem to hold up given that we learned last week that Islamic cultures tended to forbid representations of humans in games. Even if weiqi\u2019s abstract nature might have prevented it from gaining popularity in Europe, it seems like it shouldn\u2019t have been a deterrent to gaining popularity in Islamic cultures. I don\u2019t know enough about weiqi to suggest other reasons for its lack of popularity outside of East Asia, but I am not convinced that its abstract nature is one of those reasons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I especially enjoyed the Chen reading this week. Chen\u2019s tracing of the ways in which weiqi served as a metaphor for war, society, and the cosmos seems reminiscent of last week\u2019s readings, which told us that chess was treated in much the same manner. What\u2019s interesting to me is that the metaphors built around chess…<\/p>\n