I have first known Hu Ronghua 43 years ago. At that time I was learning the game of Weiqi, I often went to Shanghai Qishe (chess centre) to take coaching lessons from the veterans teachers, and very often I saw Hu Ronghua came to my table and watched attentively the game. In 1964 I moved away from the youth sporting school class were I was attending to Shanghai Qishe to become a specialised chess player, in the dormitory I and Hu Ronghua shared the same bunker, one slept in upper deck, the other in lower deck. Since then I was very acquainted with Hu Ronghua, who was two years older than me.
He learned the quick way
Not many people know that at one time the Shanghai sports committee leaders had decided sending Hu Ronghua to study Weiqi instead of continuing with his Xiangqi study, however, after less than half a year's of Weiqi training, he was again transferred back to Xiangqi. Because of this development, Hu Ronghua can play Weiqi to a good level. The year when I first joined the team, almost every evening I would played Weiqi with Hu Ronghua, at that time he was giving me the odd of first move.
One day Hu played a variation at the board's corner, I told him playing this move would lead to inferior play. Hu Ronghua was not keen about this, and so I used the 'analysis' which I happened to have read from a book, and by slightly changing the moves order, I demonstrated Hu's play was really unsound. This greatly attracted Hu Ronghua's interest, and later he would repeately praised the reasonableness of the analysis method.
One month later, the Guangdong chess team then arrived in Shanghai to play a match. In the second round Hu Ronghua was paired against Chen Baixiang. Hu Ronghua opened with a Central Cannon opening, however on the 11th move, under no pressure, Hu moved the Central Cannon sideways. In the end Chen Baixiang conceded defeat saying: "Hu centralised his Cannon, and then de-centralised it, this mesmerised me so much that I could not continue my game properly."
I had watched that game, and on the way back to Qishe I asked Hu Ronghua: "You centralised the Cannon and afterward you de-centralised it, was not you wasting a move?" Hu Ronghua said gleefully: "This was inspired after learning Weiqi's analytical method. Though de-centralising the Cannon wasted a move, however, this in turn put my opponent's Rook and Cannon in bad position. My opponent has to make 2 or 3 moves more to deal with the new situation, therefore in reality I got the advantage in moves' count."
After this it happened accordingly that Hu Ronghua had a complete style change of handling the traditional way of openings of Xiangqi. Some rarely seen openings like 'Flying Bishop Opening', 'Turtle's Back Opening' etc were revived and became splendid weapons in the hands of Hu Ronghua, who thus stepping into his fruitful period of chess innovation and creativity.
The book of heaven without word
The way the chess players trained at that time, mostly each one had a chessboard in front, players moved the pieces over and over, in specialised term they called it 'analysing the game'. After analysis, players noted down their results in their note books. Hence, the Xiangqi players would usually keep their note books to themselves, not allowing others to have a glimpse of what has been written, because all these tightly small characters jotted down were the fruits of their hard labour of study, and nobody liked these to fall into the wrong hands.
I remembered when I had become a member of the chess team, after our daily training, the other members would all very cautiously put their note books in their drawers and locked them, checked again whether these were well locked. One day it happened that a team member had read another member's training note book, this developped into a serious incident, making the team members divided and created bad feeling on the issue.
However, Hu Ronghua was unlike all others, his training note book were most of the time lying around, besides the chessboard, or just put into the unlocked drawer. Someone had taken advantage and waited when Hu Ronghua went out, opened his note book, and lo ! he was astonished to discover that Hu's note book had not a single character written in it, apart from very normal diagrams of opening positions !
Afterward, veteran team member Xu Tianli thought deeply about this matter and came to the conclusion that all these diagrams, in fact were critical chess positions where Hu Ronghua was prepared to make his theoretical novelties. Because Hu Ronghua did not write down what were the moves he was going to play, so no one was able to have any clue about Hu's new moves. Hence Xu Tianli called the training note book of Hu Ronghua as 'The book of heaven without word', therefore it was easy to explain why Hu was not afraid to let 'ordinary people' to have a look at his note.
I have raised this matter with Hu Ronghua himself. Hu Ronghua did not make any comment about the 'Book of heaven without word' story. He said: "If one wanted to create, first of all one has to deeply understand the game position, this is the source. Hence I was accustomed all the time to draw out the diagrams showing positions just before I renovate. Every time when I trained I would looked at the diagrams and made the variations in my mind. Sometimes when I got the inspiration, I would be able to develop in my mind many new variation moves from the main variations."
Thus Hu Ronghua very much not agreeing with others who wrote down their variation moves all in details in their note books, because by writing down all the details variation moves, it discourage people to think further and deeper of the position. Hu Ronghua told me a joke, there was a team member during a competition having a rare opportunity to play a move, and that move was a well prepared trap 'fei dao' (flying dagger), he thought he just needed waiting to ambush and execute his poor opponent, however, in the end the trapper was trapped,
because in his excitement he bungled the moves order, the whole plan backfired, and needless to say, the team member was crushed mercilessly !
source: dongfang wang/xinmin evening news
reporter Cao Zhilin 2005-08-03
~ a XIANGQI EN BLOG translation ~
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