Event

Jun 11, 2025
Soul and Body of Shengguantu: The Stable Terminology Needled the Way through Gameboards

Abstract

Shengguantu 陞官圖 [Promoting Officials or Table of Bureaucratic Promotion] is an antiquated board game in Chinese history, dating back as far as the Han Dynasty. When it came to Ming-Qing Dynasties, Shengguantu began to show a trend of multi-way developments, with power space, geographical space, role space, divination, and indoctrination space emerging. These changes in the game board could be seen as a multi-prism, reflecting prosperous social life and ideology in the last 300 years. However, the terminology of Shengguantu keeps its stability, needling its way through time and content changes. These terms cover the movement of chess, the organization of charts, and the interpretation of the rules. Certainly, there are subtle differences when the terms are applied to specific contexts, which are the gaps that historians need to explain. Based on the Shengguantu pieces collected in China and Europe, possibilities will be explored to build a game genealogy, taking game terminology as the center.

Biography

Tianyue Lei is a PhD Student at the Renmin University of China, China.

Address
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany
Room
Zoom/Online Meeting Platform
Contact and Registration

We welcome both internal and external guests. Registration is only required for physical attendance. For more information about the colloquium series, please contact Jacob Schmidt-Madsen.

Zoom link: https://eu02web.zoom-x.de/j/68564259061

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 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. A special keynote lecture on games and language will be delivered by Alex de Voogt who has been instrumental in shaping the modern landscape of board game studies.

2025-06-11T10:00:00SAVE IN I-CAL 2025-06-11 10:00:00 2025-06-11 11:00:00 Soul and Body of Shengguantu: The Stable Terminology Needled the Way through Gameboards Abstract Shengguantu 陞官圖 [Promoting Officials or Table of Bureaucratic Promotion] is an antiquated board game in Chinese history, dating back as far as the Han Dynasty. When it came to Ming-Qing Dynasties, Shengguantu began to show a trend of multi-way developments, with power space, geographical space, role space, divination, and indoctrination space emerging. These changes in the game board could be seen as a multi-prism, reflecting prosperous social life and ideology in the last 300 years. However, the terminology of Shengguantu keeps its stability, needling its way through time and content changes. These terms cover the movement of chess, the organization of charts, and the interpretation of the rules. Certainly, there are subtle differences when the terms are applied to specific contexts, which are the gaps that historians need to explain. Based on the Shengguantu pieces collected in China and Europe, possibilities will be explored to build a game genealogy, taking game terminology as the center. Biography Tianyue Lei is a PhD Student at the Renmin University of China, China. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany Zoom/Online Meeting Platform Jacob Schmidt-Madsen Jacob Schmidt-Madsen Europe/Berlin public