Living in Taiwan for most my adult life, and now Beijing, I've seen countless people play, but this is the first attempt to force it onto a western chess board

Living in Taiwan for most my adult life, and now Beijing, I've seen countless people play, but this is the first attempt to force it onto a western chess board I've come across. To be honest the degree of bastarization was a bit painful. Calling the horses knights is one thing since they're very similar in movement, but calling elephants "bishops"!? That's just crazy. Also, the only time I've seen the game with no river is when Koreans play, and they have a number of different rules (elephant movement, naked kings, cannon vs. cannon, etc...) If you want to actually play the game, you really need to know what the real pieces are. Just imagine how hard it would be for a Chinese player who learned the rules of chess to get a game if he replaced all the pieces with Chinese characters (as in xiangqi). There are all kinds of free downloads for this kind of game. For English speakers who want to learn, I recommend Qianhong. It's free, it's got all kinds of tutorials and it's modular so you can replace it's weak built-in engine with much stronger ones, like the elephant engine: http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-computer-chinese-chess.htm#Qianhong http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-computer-c...