My first Taobao purchase: assorted Chinese tsumego books

[xela]

If I understand correctly, Taobao is like Chinese ebay: a marketplace with lots of independent sellers offering everything you can imagine. There's a lot of go books on there. At first glance, the cover prices look incredibly low, well under half of what I'd pay for similar items here in Australia. Once you add in shipping and other fees, it's still reasonable but not such a bargain. If I could find the same books in a local shop, I wouldn't go to the trouble of navigating a foreign language site. But I haven't found anyone importing tsumego to Australia, so here goes...

If you're not in China, then ordering direct from the Taobao site is a baffling ordeal. I haven't tried it. But there's a lot of third party agents who will handle the payment and shipping for you, and make things a bit easier. Some look more reputable than others. Pretty much all of them have some online reviews from people who say their order never turned up, or items arrived that were different from ordered. So there's some amount of risk here.

I went with ParcelUp. This is not an endorsement: it's the only one I've ever tried, so I can't say it it's better or worse than anyone else. It looks like they all have pretty much the same system: ordering is a two-stage process. Your first payment is the cover price plus shipping within China. The agent buys the items from individual sellers and ships them to their main warehouse. Then you get a notification with links to photos, so you can check you've got the right items. Your second payment is for international shipping and agent's fees.

I ordered eight books on 21st December, got the photos on 30th December, and my parcel arrived on 8th January, 18 calendar days after ordering. The cover price of the books was US$52, and shipping plus fees came to another US$60.

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I selected "no extra packaging", but still got a box entirely covered in sticky tape with a very generous amount of bubblewrap inside. The books from top to bottom are:

• Hashimoto, Time and Wind (three volumes)
• Weiqi Sihuo Xunlian (围棋死活训练 life and death drills, three volumes)
• Weiqi Duan Wei Ceshi (围棋段位测试.中级测试（业余1～4段), dan level test 1d-4d)
• Weiqi Life and Death 1000 Problems (圍棋死活1000題, actually half tesuji, not just life and death)

It will take me at least a couple of years to work through them, so I'll post more detailed reviews at a later date. A couple of things to note: I've previously purchased a few Chinese and Japanese books from ebay sellers and Amazon, and noticed that the Japanese books are beautfully produced, good print quality and binding, a pleasure to handle and look at, while the Chinese books tend to feel cheaper and lower quality. In this package, the 1000 L+D problems is the exception: it's larger and not quite as elegant as the Japanese books, but pretty good overall. The 1-4 dan test, on the other hand, smells of what I hope is glue and has not so good print quality and rather messy page layout. The first volume of Weiqi Sihuo Xunlian turns out to be second hand, with pencil marks on the first ten pages until the previous owner gave up. It was the same price as volume 2 from the same seller, which is (apparently) new. I expected Time and Wind to be a Chinese translation, since the original is out of print. Actually, the text is in Japanese, with 1994 as the publication date inside the back cover -- but a QR code inside the front cover! So it clearly isn't the original. The print quality is very poor, with black ink bleeding a bit on the solution diagrams so that you can barely make out the stone numbers, and a glued not sewn binding that looks like it will fall apart with repeated use.

Overall I'm not too bothered by the physical quality. I bought them to solve the problems, not as collectables. I'm just mentioning this in case it's an issue for anyone else.

For suggestions of other books worth buying, try the lists at https://senseis.xmp.net/?ChineseGoBooks, https://tchan001.wordpress.com/category ... s-chinese/ and https://tchan001.wordpress.com/2016/04/ ... -2d-to-8d/, or just post Chinese characters out of https://senseis.xmp.net/?ChineseGoTerms into the search box :-) If you find something good, please share the details here!

[kvasir]

I think that even if you might not study all the books in their entirety that you are following a good principle by getting multiple books on one topic. My experience with Chinese and English Go books is that the quality and also my interest in the content varies a lot. I have often failed to predict if I will sustain the interest to go through an entire problem book. Sometimes it is just one strange diagram in the first few pages that puts me off the whole project. This is especially the case when working through the diagrams is a more demanding task. So, having many books on the same subject could greatly increase the chance that one of them is a good fit.

I think that much of the print quality has to do with expectations in different countries. English Go books tend to be expensive when considering that they are usually not newly published. Maybe the print quality is one way publishers can use to make books attractive to buyers over multiple years. In Japan there seem to be really high expectation for print quality and there are lot of large book stores with a huge selections. Maybe Go books there have to compete with other books for a more generic audience. Go books in China can be very cheap and they seem to follow the usual book cycle of higher quality editions first and then lower quality and lower price as the years go by. In a few years a book that was available in hardcover could be sold as a pamphlet made of recycled paper. That is if there is still demand. For example I have Chen Zude's book on the Danghu match and it is a high quality printing, then I have Chinese translations of Go Seigen's Black opening and White opening, which seem to have a lasting popularity among Chinese Go players, and in this case the print quality is pretty bad (especially of the diagrams) but better editions are undoubtedly available.