Chinese Chess

First edition of the English translation, published in the same year as the first edition (in German). OCLC records only 8 copies in public libraries.

Original sewn wrappers with a pasted vignette to the upper cover, the title in English and Chinese surrounded by representations of chess pieces. Covers with sunned margins, small marginal tears at the spine folds.

Profusely illustrated with 80 in-text examples of chess games, as well as a photograph depicting monks engaged in a game of chess.

An exceptionally rare treatise on Chinese chess, published in Peking in 1937 by the only German-language publishing house in China before the Second World War.

This is the second Western treatise devoted exclusively to xiangqi, following Wilkinson's rare A Manual of Chinese Chess (1893).

This work is among the handful of titles published in China by Siebenberg-Verlag (北平七峰发行), founded in Peking the previous year, in 1936.  The Asian art collector Walter Exner had established it together with the author of this volume, Karl Gruber, headmaster of the German School in Peking, who also published that same year an essay on the imperial tombs of the Qing dynasty (Die Westlichen Kaisergräber bei Peking). This rare publishing venture, conceived to bring the culture and art of East Asia to European audiences, was swiftly curtailed by the Second Sino-Japanese War. Forced to cease operations in Peking, the publishers left behind a remarkably scarce example of foreign-language printing produced in China during those turbulent years. The publishing house continued to operate in Europe under the Siebenberg imprint until 1996.