May 13, 2026
The Emergence of the 19×19 Go Board: A Hypothesis Based on the Yuánjiā Calendar (元嘉曆)
- 10:00 to 12:00
- Colloquium
- Max Planck Research Group (ASTRA)
- Ichiro Tanioka
Abstract
Today, the game of Go is played on a 19×19 board, yet there is no natural explanation for why this particular size became standard. In an earlier lecture in the present series, Chihyung Nam suggested that Go was played on a 17×17 board until the 4th or 5th century AD.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the 19×19 board emerged during the 5th century, at which point the 17×17 board appears to have disappeared. In this presentation, I will examine when, where, and how the 19×19 Go board came into use, drawing on historical developments in China, Korea, and Japan.
Biography
Ichiro Tanioka is a Japanese sociologist, educator, and distinguished scholar of games, society, and culture. He serves as Chairman of Tanioka Gakuen, President of Osaka University of Commerce, and Professor in its Faculty of Business Administration. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of Southern California and has made important contributions to gambling studies, criminology, social research methodology, and the history of intellectual games.
In 2012, he was awarded the Medal with Blue Ribbon, one of Japan’s Medals of Honor, presented by the Emperor of Japan to individuals who have achieved distinction in their profession and made notable contributions to society. Professor Tanioka has also played a prominent role in the world of Go: he was the first chairman of the Go History Society, serves as a Go Ambassador for the Japan Go Association (Nihon Ki-in), is a member of the Go Hall of Fame Awards Committee, a director of the International Go Federation, and a councilor of the Japan Go Association. He is the author and co-author of numerous books on probability, gambling, data, social research, intellectual games, and the history of Go.
Ichiro Tanioka. Source: Ichiro Tanioka, 2026.
Contact and Registration
We welcome both internal and external guests. For more information about the lecture, please contact Daniela Trinks. For more information about the colloquium series, please contact Jacob Schmidt-Madsen.
Zoom link: https://eu02web.zoom-x.de/j/68564259061
Feel free to distribute information and Zoom link widely.
About This Series
Asia is home to some of best known and longest surviving board games in the world. Backgammon originated in West Asia, Chess in South Asia, and Go in East Asia. The list goes on and can be expanded to include hundreds, if not thousands, of games that most people have never even heard of. Yet the history of their transmission, translocation, and transcreation across the Asian continent remains little explored and poorly understood. This owes in part to obvious barriers of culture and language, but also to a lack of communication between board game scholars. Even a cursory glance at the sources – whether textual, visual, material, or ethnographic – shows that they speak a common language that we as researchers do not.
The ASTRA COLLOQUIUM series "The Ludic Languages of Asia: Sources and Terminologies" brings together board game scholars working with primary sources in a variety of Asian languages. It asks them to present their sources and discuss questions of context, structure, content, and language use. The goal is not only to establish connections between specific games and game cultures, but also between researchers and methodologies. The series is rooted in a larger project to build a database of ludic terminologies across linguistic glossaries in Asia.