Where Chu River Blossoms

In the summer of 1998, twelve-year-old Hu Rongxuan finds half a copy of The Plum Blossom Manual, soaked with rain, at his grandfather's street-side chess stall. Falling from its yellowed pages is a bloodstained notebook left by his father, Hu Weiguo. It uses mathematical functions to break down the geometric paths of the horse's moves, and beside a variation of the Screen Horse Defense against the Central Cannon, it says: "The path of chess is the path of life. Once a move is made, there's no taking it back." Hu Rongxuan has never met his father, who left him only the vague title of "provincial champion" and his mother's daily refrain: "A chess fanatic has no future."

It begins with chessboard doodles on his middle school math tests, and Hu Rongxuan's world splits open across the Chu River and Han border. His math teacher, Chen Jianguo, discovers that he can use permutations and combinations to work out a game plan. Retired coach Zhou Mingyuan tests his feel for chess with three blindfolded games on a stormy night. And the idea of "scientific chess" hidden in his father's notebook is like a stone tossed into still water, sending ripples through the traditional chess world. He beats adult players in district tournaments with the "Hu-Style Knight Maneuver" and wins the provincial youth championship with an "improved Turtle-Back Cannon." But at the base of the trophy, he sees his father's name from twenty years ago. The man his mother called someone whose life had been ruined by chess once stood at the same peak.

In high school, Hu Rongxuan heads north with his father's unfinished game and Zhong Zhen's ancient chess manual. Under the online chess handle "Little Ten-Game Champion," he wins a hundred games in a row, but then loses to a migrant worker's unorthodox style in an amateur championship. The defeat leads him to an old chess house in Lingnan, where he uncovers the hidden connection between his father and Zhong Zhen, a chess player from the late Qing Dynasty. On the eve of the college entrance exam, he also deciphers the chess manual's code and finds the unfinished book The Dynamic Model of Chinese Chess. It turns out his father