1001 GoGoD Games for your Coffee Break #43 (5 March 2013)

John Fairbairn · #1

One of the more irritating cliches about go is that it is 4,000 years old. Halve that and you get closer, but even so - that's pretty old. So it may come as something as a shock to realise that the following game from 1930 has the strange status of being the oldest known game in Shimonoseki, at the tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu. Over the centuries the city of Shimonoseki has seen myriads of samurais passing through, so we can safely assume lots of games were played there. But they were presumably all blitz games played on SGS and so not considered worthy of preservation. In fact this game is believed to be the oldest known in the whole of Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Not many people know that!

tundra · #2

John Fairbairn wrote:

One of the more irritating cliches about go is that it is 4,000 years old. Halve that and you get closer

I completely agree. Though hearing it so many times, one wonders if the cliche is at least 4,000 years old ;-)

Phoenix · #3

John Fairbairn wrote:

Over the centuries the city of Shimonoseki has seen myriads of samurais passing through, so we can safely assume lots of games were played there. But they were presumably all blitz games played on SGS and so not considered worthy of preservation.

...Can't stop laughing.

jts · #4

I see some utility in repeating the traditional dating. The first games of Go were not necessarily played on a material that would stand the test of time, were not necessarily treated as grave goods, etc. Most of the other ridiculous discoveries attributed to the pre-Xia emperors seem ridiculous because the actual discovery of flutes, drums, pig herding, or whatever else took place many millennia before the dates alleged by early Chinese historians.

1001 GoGoD Games for your Coffee Break #43 (5 March 2013)

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