num_pages: 206
description: The Evergreen Game Records  of 1682 can be considered the first truly mature go commentary manual. It is one of the earliest commentary books anyway but the comments here are by a genuine Chinese master of the game Wu Ruizheng  and his comments cover all aspects of the game with a rich technical lexicon encompassing not just moves but concepts.We can see from this book that Chinese masters as early as the start of the Qing era were aware not just of concepts that we take for granted now but of others that stemmed from group tax and so are either not known now or which now have a different slant. Remarkably these 'new' concepts can show the way to tease out the concepts that AI programs apparently use but cannot describe.Evergreen Game Records was also the book to introduce the genius Huang Longshi to a wider public. But all the 66 games here are by Wu's contemporaries the top masters of late Ming and early Qing.Offered here is a complete translation also with the original text and contains extensive additional notes on the vocabulary and thus on the theory of old Chinese go. Biographical notes on the players are also added.The translator John Fairbairn  is an orientalist and journalist is a long established go author specialising in history. He has published major works on Go Seigen and various Edo players notably Honinbo Shuei and the great rivals Honinbo Genjo and Yasui Chitoku. He has also produced a full exposition of the 1347 Chinese classic Xuanxuan Qijing .The present book is part of his attempt to map the evolution of go theory over the centuries mainly through further Chinese classics of the Ming to Qing eras in which games commentated by the old masters in their own words will predominate.In line with the ethos behind this series the Museum of Go Theory books also offer something of a 'medieval tour' in which the various masters and their milieu are brought to life using above all their own words.
language: English
title: Evergreen Go Records
publisher: None