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The oldest known drawing/carving of weiqi from the Han Dynasty.

kknews.cc 中國最古老的一塊圍棋畫像石——現存於山東曲阜孔廟(續二)

走到文物展品大殿裡豐富的展品,篆刻竹纖,拓片,工藝品等等。找到負責的經理,問起圍棋畫像石,不但沒有拓片,回答和老師傅一樣,不知道沒見過。

I've heard of the "carving" about weiqi, but never actually saw it, or even saw a picture of it till I start researching the history.

The report in the link was written by the head of the Luoyang Weiqi Museum, so I am farily confident the authetisty of the pictures she took. And I will make a brief translation and introduction below:

First of all, these carvings are called 畫像石. a very specific styles of carvings used in the Han Dynasty China (the 2nd century BC to the 2nd century AD). So very high confident it is of its time.

Here are the overall picture of the stone the carving is from

The dimension is 254 cm in length, 85 cm in height, and 26 cm thick, weight more than 1000 kg.

We can see other recreation activities next to the "博弈", people were dancing and playing some kind of instrument (likely some kind of drum, or bell).

There are other carvings of some daily activities in the back of the stone as well

In the close up shot, we can see there are two types of game boards carved on the stone, one is Go in the front, and another smaller board on the side, called (where only recently we've uncovered the actual game board for it), and Go has been associated with it for a very long time - "博弈". We are certain they were both quite prominate during the Han Dynasty (probably more for 博 than weiqi).

Very hard to make out the number of lines on the carving, it degraded quite a bit. But it is for sure more than 9 lines or 13 lines, and on the range at least 15 plus even up to 19. (simply cannot tell for sure, and cannot rule out the original stone worker made it incorrectly to begin with)

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