The great Needham and his fellow Sinologists at Cambridge taught me better. It was not only the two quoted texts that strengthened my belief in China as the birthplace of chess, but also the circular bronze and ivory counters for the astrological Hsiang Hsi and for the war game Hsiang Chhi found during excavations. Similar finds are totally lacking in India. Indeed, India ist a chess Sahara Desert for archaeological finds, written documents, literature, early references, legends in folklore, or anything akin.
China actually abounds in all of the afore-mentioned.
Thus two new games hat emerged from the astrological Hsiang probably even the military Hsiang Chhi. Even today people often forget that in our current Hsian only two pieces are known as elephants, and two others have the similar sounding homophone meaning soothsayer. The Indians took about fifty years to develop the imported Hsiang to a Buddhist version of bloodless war, by means of the magic square of 64 cells. The 9-cell MS has a reciprocal relations to the Chinese chess board, as silent witness to the magical origin of protochess, from the 8 Kua, plus zenith in the niddle, to the 9 numbers of the Lo Shu MS or Chiu Kung, as chess is called in China. Thus it is sufficiently clear who the godfather is.