Dunhuang Go Manual

The Dunhuang Go Manual or Dunhuang Go Classic or simply the Classic of Go (Chinese: 敦煌碁經; pinyin: Dūnhuáng Qíjīng) is the earliest surviving manual on the strategic board game of Go (Chinese: 圍棋; pinyin: wéiqí). Dating from the 6th century, it exists as a single manuscript that was discovered in the 'Library Cave' of the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China by Aurel Stein in 1907, and which is now in the collection of the British Library in London, England.

The manuscript (Or.8210/S.5574) is a paper scroll 15.5 cm high and 240 cm long. The hand-written text comprises 159 lines of about 15–17 characters per line. The handwriting is cursive, and in places untidy and hard to read, with many obvious transcription errors. The manuscript is incomplete, with probably three to five lines of text (45–75 characters) missing at the beginning. The end of the manuscript is intact, and gives the title of the text as Qi Jing (碁經) "Classic of Go", and notes that it is complete in one scroll. Unfortunately the name of the author, which would probably have been given at the start of the text, is not provided.

The manuscripts in the Dunhuang library cave date from the 5th century up to the early 11th century, when the cave was sealed. Lionel Giles (1875–1958), the first scholar to recognise the contents of this manuscript, dates the manuscript to the late Tang Dynasty, about 900 AD. However, it is believed that the text of the manual was composed during the late 6th century under the Northern Zhou dynasty (557–581). The main evidence for this is the fact that the author of the text refers to the black pieces as "crow pieces" (烏子) rather than "black pieces" (黑子). The explanation for this unusual term is that Yuwen Tai (507–556), father of the first emperor of the Northern Zhou, and posthumously honoured as the founding emperor of the dynasty, had the nickname 'Black Otter' (黑獺), and therefore the character 'black' (Chinese: 黑; pinyin: hēi) was tabooed in documents written during the Northern Zhou dynasty, being replaced by the word 'crow' (Chinese: 烏; pinyin: wū) which is a synonym for 'black' in Chinese.

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