Terence Peter Donnelly’s book "Hsiang Ch’i: The Chinese Game of Chess", published in 1974, was the one of the first English-language introductions to Xiangqi. In more recent years, Mr. Donnelly has maintained a popular website with information about the history, rules, and notation of XiangQi, as well as the six complete sample games from his book and a number of endings. Because the XiangQi viewer on his site relied on a Java runtime environment, which is becoming less and less widely supported, Mr. Donnelly decided to close down the site and asked me to archive some of the material. I salute you Mr. Donnelly for your efforts over the years!
In his own words:
NOTE: Most of my xiangqi site has been shut down, so please don’t link to this. Some material has been archived at Xiangqi in English.
When I wrote my little manual of Chinese Chess more than four decades ago, information on the game in English was very difficult to obtain; apart from H.J.R. Murray’s somewhat unreliable treatment in A History of Chess and a few other brief accounts in books about games of the world, there were one or two introductory texts that were long out of print and almost impossible to find. Even when I began assembling this website on the foundation of the six annotated games in my book, little information was available on the internet.
All that has changed, and there are now dozens of sites where xiangqi can be learned and played, including some that offer hundreds of sample games and endings.
The game viewer I used here was an old, unsupported Java applet that never worked on mobile devices and was becoming less viable with each new version of Windows. I have experimented with Joshua Hou’s Javascript viewer, but conversion is a lot of work, and I’m unlikely to do much more of it.