Becoming a sport is a crucial part of Go's thousands of years of history. Since then, Go has changed from a tool to a profession in China, gradually multiplying and taking root and blossoming into fruition.
In the long river of history, Go may have been used as astronomical divination and military deduction at first, but it was ultimately a game, and the Gaomen clan used this to entertain, spend time and even escape from the world, and over time, the status became noble, and at the latest in the Tang Dynasty, Go and music, calligraphy, painting and called "four arts" gave birth to the function of cultivating sentiments. The population of the Song and Yuan dynasties increased dramatically, the citizen class rose, there was a popular demand for entertainment, and Go was transformed, often appearing in the folk gambling game. No matter how it evolves, what kind of function is given, what appears in front of the stage is the Go itself, and the image of the player is blurred, which is the performance of Go has always been "used" as a tool and has not formed a profession.
In the Palace Museum's "Yixuan Xiaoqinxian Empress Yi chess chart axis" (partial), the beardless man standing opposite Cixi playing chess is speculated to be Li Lianying. In fact, there is no record of Cixi playing Go in the main history, but there are many wild history passages of Lafayette playing chess. And the fact that this painting exists so delicately in the world can only be said to be due to the royal family's elegant taste with the help of Go.
The classification of Go as a sport, especially the entry into the sports sequence of socialist China, opened up the possibility of a go profession. Under the call of the leader of "developing sports and enhancing the people's physique", strengthening the body and winning the championship are closely linked to national rejuvenation, and sports committees have been set up in various places to cultivate sports talents with national strength.
In 1957, Go was the first national championship, and in 1959, it became the first national games competition, which encouraged provinces and cities to continue to select masters to strive for honors for their regions, and the athlete training system like other competitive sports was established in areas with basic conditions and enthusiasm for Go. Chess players born in the 1940s and early 1950s have mostly taken this opportunity to step into the threshold of the Go world.
In the 1959 National Games, the figure of a chess player in the 1940s first appeared, and the sixteen-year-old Luo Jianwen played in the same room as a teenager with his 50s and 60-year-old predecessors. This is not because Luo Jianwen was brilliant in the early wisdom of his contemporaries, but in the 1950s, China's Go competitions completely adopted the sports games model, and only one representative of the participating provinces and cities could be produced, which was bound to make Beijing and Shanghai, which had many masters, shout "inner volume", and the vast majority of Go underdeveloped areas felt lucky. Born in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, Luo Jian's diploma became the only Chinese professional chess player (since 1982) to participate in the 1st National Games, and Chen Zude and Wu Songsheng, who are only one or two years younger than him, have no access to this record because they are in Shanghai.
In 1960, Chen Yi and He Long received Beijing training chess players, and Luo Jianwen (fourth from the right facing the camera) was among them.
From September 14 to 18, 1959, 20 chess players gathered at the Beijing Working People's Cultural Palace (i.e. the Ming and Qing Taimiao Temple) to play the five preliminaries of the Go event of the 1st National Games in four groups. The 20 people are: Liu Dihuai (Shanghai), Guo Tisheng (Beijing), Huang Yongji (Anhui), Huang Chengchen (Sichuan), Pang Fengyuan (Hebei), Zheng Dingyuan (Hunan), Chen Dai (Henan), Shao Futang (Hubei), Yuan Zhaoji (Guangxi), Zheng Huaide (Jiangsu), Zhang Chengquan (Shandong), Zhang Liyuan (Zhejiang), Luo Jianwen (Fujian), Zhang Liangwei (Guizhou), Dai Xinquan (Yunnan), Tanyang (Jilin), Wu Tongkuan (Shanxi), Ye Yanrong (Shaanxi), Zhang Zishang (Gansu), Tian Ningsheng (Tibet).
Among the twenty people, only Liu Dihuai and Guo Tisheng were veteran chess players who were well-known throughout the country during the Republic of China period. The rest like Huang Chengchen, Zhang Liyuan, Zhang Chengquan, Pang Fengyuan, Zheng Dingyuan, Dai Xinquan have long been at the top of the chess world in Chengdu, Hangzhou, Jinan, Tianjin, Changsha, Kunming and other places, all of which have the reputation of "chess kings", but the xiongfeng can only be limited to one place. In 1958, Chen Dai, who was nearly half a hundred years old, was transferred to Henan for work reasons, and since then he has been known as the "King of Chess in the Central Plains", and it is very difficult to meet the teenage Shanghai chess boys. In 1964, Dai Xinquan was beaten by Chen Zude to let the third son (see Chen Zude's autobiography "Beyond Self"). In the middle of the twentieth century, due to the lack of information and poor communication, the level of local chess players can be imagined.
As for the chess players representing Guizhou, Shaanxi, Gansu, Tibet and other "remote areas", they are even more unable to compete with Liu, Guo and others, and even their names have only appeared once in the history of Go. It is worth noting that Hu Peiquan, whose strength is only slightly inferior to Liu and Guo, has gone to Xi'an at this time, but has not become a representative of Shaanxi Province, and competitive Go and scholarly Go are two parallel lines after all.
In the second round of the third group of the 1st National Games Preliminary Round, Hubei Shao Futang (1926-2014) and Guangxi Yuan Zhaoji (1918-2004) met. In the 1960s, Shao Futang was elected as the first coach of the national Go training team, and Yuan Zhaoji was introduced and coached by the Guangzhou Go team promoted by Chen Yi's comrade-in-arms and Guangzhou Vice Mayor Sun Leyi, all of whom were self-made figures under Tao Li. In terms of chess style, Shao Gong is stable and Yuan is murderous, and most of the time in this game is white main attack and black main defense. However, the wild power trained by "left and right mutual combat" is not suitable for scrutinizing the official, and the loss of the east and the west is all for the sake of the black left dragon, but it has been buried by the white 200 one-handed chess, and this hand is like leaning on the H6 position, relying on the first hand of the upper I3 is infinitely powerful. After the failure of the pursuit, Bai only lost by the difference of 1 son, and Yuan Zhaoji also relegated to the third place in the group due to the difference in one set, and did not have the opportunity to enter the final to compete for the place.
Anhui Huang Yongji (1927-2012) was a fresh force cultivated by the Chinese Go community in the 1950s, and he also lived up to expectations, winning the fifth place in the 1st National Championship in 1957 and the sixth place the following year, and was a successor among the old predecessors who received the prize with gray hair. However, in the fourth round of the second group of the 1st National Games preliminary round, Huang Yongji, who was in charge of black, was stubbornly blocked by Shandong general Zhang Chengquan (1914-1988), and black chess fell into the disadvantage for a long time. However, single combat, the lack of confrontational training is ultimately neglected in intensity, white 124 white chess has countless opportunities to be played first in the 147, by the victory, but until the white 146 carelessly long, black 147 has to make up for itself, AI shows the winning rate turned into a black chess victory. The ups and downs of the victory and defeat of these two games should be a normal reflection of the thickness of Chinese Go at that time.
Zhang Chengquan (first from right) watches his grandchildren play chess in his later years.
Huang Yongji continued to work hard after escaping from death, winning all the preliminaries to win the first place in the group, defeating all opponents except Liu and Guo in the final, and winning the third place for the first time. In 1960, he took the national championship into his arms and became a veritable local star of Anhui Go (in fact, Anhui gave birth to the most national players in the first half of the twentieth century, Liu Dihuai was born in Tongcheng, Anqing, Anhui, and was born in Huangshan Shexian County, Anhui, but both were far away from their hometown for a long time). Zhang Chengquan won the third place in the group and failed to qualify, returned to Jinan to resign from the office of the cotton textile factory, and opened chess clubs in Daming Lakeside Garden, Huiquan Temple and other places to popularize Go, and the Go spark in the land of China was passed down from generation to generation by countless nameless torches.