Xiangqi Red General

It is the piece Red must protect. Xiangqi, also called Chinese chess, is a two-player board game. Each general stays inside its own marked palace, and the goal is to trap the opposing general. Its job is loosely comparable to a king’s in Western chess, though the rules differ. Red’s general is labeled 帥 in traditional Chinese or 帅 in simplified Chinese; the black-side counterpart uses 將 or 将. The labels mark opposing sides, not different piece roles.

A Xiangqi diagram in the Chinese book Shilin Guangji is dated 1330–1333, showing the game was played by then; it does not establish when Xiangqi or the general piece began. In 2010, China proposed encoding the pieces as symbols for game roles, allowing fonts to draw the same piece with traditional, simplified, or other ideographic designs.