The best xiangqi openings for beginners aren't complex: the Central Cannon, Screen Horse, and Elephant opening teach safe kings, clear plans, and attacking ideas.
The best xiangqi openings for beginners are the ones that keep your General safe and get your pieces working together quickly, and for most people that means just three: the Central Cannon, the Screen Horse defence, and the Elephant opening. Learn those three ideas and you can sit down across from almost anyone and actually know what you're doing for the first ten moves.
I learned the wrong way first, memorising move orders like a phone number and forgetting them the moment an opponent did something I hadn't rehearsed. It took me embarrassingly long to understand that an opening isn't a script, it's a plan. Once you grasp what each setup is trying to do, you stop needing to remember the moves at all, because they simply make sense. So rather than drill long lines, I want to walk you through the handful of openings that taught me, and hundreds of my students, how the game actually breathes.
Start with the Central Cannon — it teaches you to attack
If you only ever learn one opening, make it the Central Cannon (中炮). You swing a cannon over to the middle file so it stares straight down the board at the enemy General, and just like that you have a real threat before you've even finished developing. The plan is easy to hold in your head: nudge the central Soldier forward, bring your Horses out to guard the middle, then get your Chariots onto open files where they can do some damage.
I lost a hundred games before the Central Cannon really clicked, and every one of those losses taught me a little more about coordination. That is the gift of this opening. It forces your cannon, horses, and chariots to talk to each other toward a single goal. Even when the attack fizzles out, you walk away knowing what it feels like to hold the initiative, to make your opponent react instead of you. Those instincts follow you into every game you'll ever play, no matter what else you add later.
Answer it with the Screen Horse defence
Once you've been on the receiving end of a Central Cannon, you'll want to know how to survive one, and that's exactly what the Screen Horse (屏风马) is for. When your opponent aims a cannon at your central file, you calmly bring both Horses to the central squares so they form a screen right in front of your palace. It's solid, it forgives small inaccuracies, and it doesn't demand that you calculate a forced sequence on move four.
The lesson the Screen Horse teaches is patience, and it's the one beginners resist hardest. You do not have to meet aggression with panic. Keep your shape, develop naturally, and let the attacker overreach, because they usually do. Then those two quiet Horses turn into launchpads for your own counterplay. Learn the Central Cannon and the Screen Horse as a pair and you've seen both sides of the single most important argument in xiangqi, and understanding both sides is what makes you dangerous.
The Elephant opening, for when you want a calm game
Some days you just don't feel like a brawl, and that's precisely when the Elephant opening (飞相局) earns its keep. You start by flying an Elephant to the centre, which does nothing flashy at all. It quietly builds a stable, flexible base and keeps every option on the table. For a beginner who feels rushed and outgunned in sharp lines, it's a breath of fresh air, because you rarely blow yourself up in the first ten moves playing this way.
Don't mistake calm for weak. Plenty of strong players lean on the Elephant opening their whole careers because it is genuinely hard to attack. It trains you to develop in harmony, to keep your General tucked safely behind its Advisors and Elephants, and to wait for your opponent to show their hand first. If you're the kind of player who keeps charging in before you're ready, and honestly most of us are early on, this opening quietly cures the habit for you.
A couple more worth knowing
Once those three feel comfortable, two more setups round out a beginner's toolkit. The Cross-Palace Cannon (过宫炮) slides a cannon across the front of your own palace to the far side, an offbeat but perfectly sound way to develop toward one wing while sidestepping heavy theory. It surprises club players constantly, and it follows the same healthy principles as everything else here.
The other is simply a straightforward cannon-versus-cannon game, where both sides post their cannons and contest the centre on even terms. There's no forced attack to memorise, so you just learn how tension, tempo, and trading feel, and that quiet understanding is a huge part of getting good. Think of these two as flavour. They keep your play from becoming predictable once you have the fundamentals down cold.
The rules that matter more than the moves
Here's what I tell every beginner itching to skip ahead and memorise lines: don't. The openings above all point back to the same three habits. Develop your pieces toward the centre. Keep your General safe behind its Advisors and Elephants. And before every single move, ask one honest question, which is what is my opponent actually threatening. Answer that and you'll dodge most of the disasters that sink new players.
Pick one opening from this list, ideally the Central Cannon, and play it in your next ten games without switching. Then add the Screen Horse so you're comfortable on the defensive side too. That's it, you really don't need more than that to start winning. Head over to XiangqiPlay, load up a game against the computer or a live opponent, and try the Central Cannon right now. You'll learn more from ten honest games than from any amount of reading, this article included.