Note 604 — CXXXI. THE WEI-CH‘I DEVIL.

A most abstruse and complicated game of skill, for which the Chinese claim an antiquity of four thousand years, and which I was the first to introduce to a European public through an article in Temple Bar Magazine for January, 1877. Apropos of which, an accomplished American lady, Miss A. M. Fielde, of Swatow, wrote as follows:—“The game seems to me the peer of chess.... It is a game for the slow, persistent, astute, multitudinous Chinese; while chess, by the picturesque appearance of the board, the variety and prominent individuality of the men, and the erratic combination of the attack,—is for the Anglo-Saxon.” return to text