Who are the best xiangqi players of all time? Twelve champions, from Hu Ronghua and Lü Qin to Tang Dan and Lại Lý Huynh, with their verified titles.
Most lists of the best xiangqi players of all time begin with Hu Ronghua, who won 14 Chinese national titles, and include Lü Qin and Xu Yinchuan, who won eight world titles between them. Yang Guanlin, Tang Dan and Vietnam's Lại Lý Huynh also have strong claims. Here are twelve players, with the records behind each choice.
A list like this is a judgement call, so it is worth being clear about how this one was built. The main evidence is titles: the Chinese National Individual Championship, first played in 1956 and for decades the main yardstick of the game, and the World Xiangqi Championship, held since 1990. Longevity counts too, and so does influence on how the game is played and taught. Masters from before 1956 are left out because their results are so hard to compare, which is unfair to the great names of the Ming and Qing manuals but keeps the comparison honest.
Match-fixing also matters. Several of the strongest players of the last twenty years were banned for life by the Chinese Xiangqi Association between 2024 and 2026. Wang Tianyi is included because his playing record is impossible to ignore, but his ban is part of his entry, and the others appear only in that context.
Yang Guanlin, the first national champion
Yang Guanlin (1925 to 2008), from Dongguan in Guangdong, won the first national championship in 1956 and took the title again in 1957, 1959 and 1962, four times in all. He played professionally in Hong Kong from 1949 to 1951, and in 1982 he was one of the first two players given the rank of special grandmaster. Chinese sources call him the King of Southern Guangdong and note his skill in endgames.
His bigger legacy may be as a builder. He formed Guangdong's provincial team in 1959, served as its coach while still playing, and helped develop players including Lü Qin and Xu Yinchuan. He also wrote more than a dozen books on the game.
Hu Ronghua, the record holder
Hu Ronghua, born in Shanghai in 1945, won the national championship at his first attempt in 1960, aged 15. He kept winning it until 1979, ten titles in a row, although the event was not held every year during the Cultural Revolution and his 1962 title was shared with Yang Guanlin. He then added four more, in 1983, 1985, 1997 and 2000. Fourteen national titles is still the record, and he is both the youngest and the oldest national champion, at 15 and 55.
He was famous for blindfold play and for opening ideas, writing books on the Reverse Palace Horse defence and on a hundred games with the Elephant opening. Oddly, the world title eluded him. The World Xiangqi Federation's records show him finishing second to Lü Qin at both the 1990 and 2001 championships.
Liu Dahua, the man who ended the streak
Liu Dahua, from Huangpi in Hubei, ended Hu's run by winning the national title in 1980 and again in 1981, which Chinese sources describe as breaking the southern players' hold on the championship. In 1995 he set a blindfold record by playing 19 opponents at once, a mark that stood until Jiang Chuan played 20 in 2011. In 2010 he became only the second player over 60 to win a major national individual event.
He belongs in the story for another reason. In October 2023 he publicly accused a senior sports official of covering up corruption in the game, one of the reports that preceded the official investigation into match-fixing.
Lü Qin, five times world champion
Lü Qin, born in 1962 in Huiyang, Guangdong, is the most successful man in World Xiangqi Championship history, with five individual titles: 1990, 1995, 1997, 2001 and 2005. He also won the national championship five times, in 1986, 1988, 1999, 2003 and 2004, and Chinese sources credit him with eleven Wuyang Cup titles. With Xu Yinchuan he was known as one of the two heroes of Lingnan, the southern region that includes Guangdong.
Zhao Guorong, the northern champion
Zhao Guorong, from Harbin in Heilongjiang, won the second World Championship in 1991 and was runner-up in 1993. His four national titles came in 1990, 1992, 1995 and 2008, eighteen years from the first to the last. He was taught by Wang Jialiang, known as the Northeast Tiger, which earned Zhao the nickname New Northeast Tiger. He was still the reigning national champion in 2009 when a young Wang Tianyi beat him.
Xu Yinchuan, the patient technician
Xu Yinchuan, born in Huilai, Guangdong, in 1975, became national champion in 1993 at 18, the second youngest after Hu Ronghua. He won five more national titles, in 1996, 1998, 2001, 2006 and 2009, and three World Championships, in 1999, 2003 and 2007.
He is admired above all for his endgames and for a calm, unhurried style that is often compared to taiji. He sat at the top of China's rating list until Wang Tianyi overtook him in 2014.
Wang Tianyi, with an asterisk
On results alone, Wang Tianyi, born in Beijing in 1989, would sit near the top of this list. He won four national titles, in 2012, 2016, 2019 and 2023, and three World Championships, in 2013, 2017 and 2022. He held the number one ranking from 2014, and in May 2023 he became the first player to pass a rating of 2800.
In September 2024 the Chinese Xiangqi Association banned him for life and stripped his grandmaster title for match-fixing, and in September 2025 a Hangzhou court convicted him along with five other grandmasters. Much of his generation fell with him. Zhao Xinxin, Zheng Weitong and Wang Yang were banned for life in January 2025, and Hong Zhi, Xie Jing and Xu Chao in April 2026. The business outlet Caixin described the case as one that wiped out an entire generation of champions. Their games still exist, but their place in any all-time ranking is now an open question.
Lại Lý Huynh, the outsider who broke through
Lại Lý Huynh, born in Vĩnh Long in 1990, is the only player from outside China to win the men's World Championship. He did it in Shanghai in 2025, beating Yin Sheng in the final two years after losing the 2023 final to Meng Chen on a rapid tiebreak. He has won Vietnam's national championship six times, one short of Trềnh A Sáng's record of seven, and he won the World Championship rapid event in 2022 and 2023.
The great women champions
Xie Siming, from Beijing, won the national women's championship five times between 1980 and 1987 and the Asian women's title four times, and in 1983 she became China's first female special grandmaster. Hu Ming won the national women's title in 1986, aged 15, then five years running from 1990 to 1994, and took the World Championship in 1991 and 1993. With the Asian individual title in 1994 she became the first woman to hold national, Asian and world titles.
Wang Linna was the second woman to complete that set, with world titles in 2001 and 2015 and national titles in 1997, 2000, 2009 and 2014. Tang Dan, born in Anhui in 1990, has the best World Championship record of any woman, with four titles: 2011, 2013, 2017 and 2025. She also won the women's individual gold at the 2010 Asian Games and has won the Chinese national women's title many times since her first in 2007.
Learning from them
The best games of these players turn up again and again in the openings, middlegame plans and endgame techniques that serious students work through. Reading about them only goes so far, though. On XiangqiPlay you can practise with 5,000 engine-proven mate puzzles, and a free account lets you test yourself against the computer at eight levels, from Easy to God.
XiangqiPlay Team
XiangqiPlay newsroom
