📚 Mengru Shenji — a Ming-dynasty endgame manual
No chariots, no cannons — Red has only two knights and five pawns, yet the machine confirms: Red checkmates in 20 moves. The opponent, meanwhile, is nearly complete: both advisors, both elephants, two knights and a cannon. This is a position of patience and camouflage, exactly like its name: “reducing the stoves” was Sun Bin's ruse — cooking fewer stoves each day so the enemy believed his army was deserting and melting away. The end of that trap at Maling, with the words carved on a tree trunk that Pang Juan read by his own torchlight, is told in the anecdote below; the position comes from Mộng Nhập Thần Cơ. Here on the board: do you have the patience to walk two knights through the whole 20-move road?
✓ Engine-verified — The Fairy-Stockfish engine (NNUE) confirms Red checkmates in 20 moves — the main line was checked move by move, every move legal. Date checked: 2026-11-03.
The enemy lights a torch to read his own death warrant — and the flame is the signal to kill him
On a tree trunk by the road were a few words in white. The pursuing general lit a torch to read them: "Pang Juan dies beneath this tree." He had barely finished when ten thousand arrows rained from the dark forest — the torch he himself had lit was the signal to begin the ambush. The man who set…
Stories around this position — storytelling, not part of the engine-verified content.
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