Ancient Chinese Games
In ancient China, as in other places, both board games and movement games probably come from war training. Board games trained generals in battlefield strategy, and martial arts trained men to fight. According to some stories, it was the Yellow Emperor, about 2600 BC, even before the Shang Dynasty, who first invented martial arts. We don't know much about that, but certainly people in the Chou Dynasty (about 1100 BC) were fighting using Jiao li martial arts techniques. By about 550 BC, in the Eastern Chou Dynasty, Sun Tzu wrote a book called the "Art of War", which describes a lot of martial arts ideas and techniques. Around the same time, Taoists probably began practicing Tai Chi.
By the time of the Han Dynasty, about 50 AD, we have better information about the martial arts. At this time, Pan Ku wrote a book about Kung Fu called "Six Chapters of Hand Fighting." By 220 AD, about the time the Han Dynasty collapsed, a doctor named Hua T'uo wrote another book about Kung Fu called the "Five Animals Play" which shows five different ways of fighting named after the tiger, the deer, the monkey, the bear, and the bird.
Shaolin monks practicing Kung Fu
Just before 500 AD, Buddhist monks came to China from India and founded the Shaolin monastery, which is in central China, near modern Zhengzhou. Chinese monks at Shaolin developed kung fu as an art and to defend their monastery and their country. There are records of the Shaolin monks fighting to defend their monastery from bandits around 610 AD, and fighting to defend their country in 621 AD, at the end of the Three Kingdoms civil wars. After that, we don't hear much more about martial arts in China until the 1500's AD, which is outside the period of this site.
People in China also invented some of the world's earliest kites, made of bamboo and silk, around 800 BC. Many people flew kites as a game, but people also used kites to measure distances, signal over long distances, and test the wind.
People in China also invented a lot of board games. The most popular one today is Go. People
were playing Go in China as early as 2000 BC, during the Shang
Dynasty. Othello is a simple version of Go.
By medieval times, mostly rich, powerful people played Go, while poor people played Xianqi, or Chinese chess, which is more like the Indian (and modern American) game of chess. It is possible that Xianqi was the earliest chess game; people were probably playing it by the 400's BC.
In case you were wondering, Chinese Checkers is NOT a Chinese game. It was invented in Germany.
