For those who can make it to the British Museum before 5 January 2015 (perhaps those travelling here for the London Open, from which the BM is an easy walk), there is a Ming Dynasty exhibition running. Among the bling of silks and ceramics, there is a weiqi set from before 1389.

As with an existing exhibit of a Korean sunjang board, it is marred by very poor presentation, but at least there's a chance to commune with a board over 700 years old.

It's a folding paper board, from a tomb. The caption doesn't say, but I imagine it wasn't actually played with and was just a funerary offering. There are also a couple of bowls, but just three pieces and it's not clear whether they are contemporaneous.

A large part of the board is faded, but it appears to be 19x19. The maker seems to have mismeasured and run out of space for the last line, so the last row is too narrow, but it looks as if it would have still been usable.

The caption is what lets it down. It is uninformative (doesn't say why such an object would be in a prince's tomb), misleading (calls it a Japanese game of skill - go), and plain wrong. The three stones are set up on the board with two black on d16 and q16 and a white one on q4 and it says this was the Reversed Drooping Lotus opening.

RDL is a mistranslation for tiger lily, and the Tiger Lily opening is black d4 g4, white f3. This slightly drooping shape resembles the way the long spindly bits of a tiger lily grow out from the centre of the petals, a bit like an elephant's trunk sniffing the air. I'll leave someone else to supply the correct botanical terms - I'm from an era when boys weren't taught biology. They thought it would make us go blind.

Have you considered contacting the curator?

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