📚 Xinwu Canbian — a Ming-dynasty endgame manual
Red to move with exactly four pieces: the king, one chariot, one cannon and one pawn. Black still has a chariot, a full pair of advisors in the palace, and five pawns — a small army. Anyone glancing at the board would mark Red as lost. Yet the classical manual Tâm Võ Tàn Biên (game 36) concludes: draw. Red's three fighting pieces — chariot, cannon, pawn — must combine flawlessly to hold that result. The 'three heroes' of the name are historical men: Zhang Liang, Xiao He and Han Xin, three great talents Liu Bang admitted he could not match in their own fields — yet knew how to employ, all three. That famous act of self-examination from 202 BC is recounted in the anecdote below. On this board, can Red's three pieces do what those three geniuses did — turn the whole situation around despite being so few?
「三人とも英雄で、私は彼らを使える」――劉邦の最も有名な自己評価
202年、洛陽の南宮の宴席で、劉邦は朝廷全体に、皇帝なら大抵は口に出す勇気のない問いを投げかけた。「私が天下を得て、項羽が失ったのはなぜか？」官僚たちが先に答え、次に彼が自らの答えを示した――あまりに謙虚で、2,000年にわたり「人を使う」教訓となった答えを。彼は自分が及ばないと認めた三人とは誰か？ 『史記』（第7巻・高祖本紀）は彼の言葉をそのまま記録する。先に高起と王陵が答えていた。項羽は傲慢で、人を見下し、功ある者を害し、富を保持して報償を与えなかった、と。劉邦は言った。「あなた方は一つを知って、もう一つを知らない。帷幄の中で謀を運らし、千里の外の勝利を決することでは――私は子房（張良）…
Stories around this position — storytelling, not part of the engine-verified content.
r4a3/9/3ak4/5PR2/6C2/9/1p7/3pp4/3pp4/5K3 wOpen this position in the app: try it against the computer or watch the engines play it out.
▶ Play this studyLoad this position into the Setup editor: rearrange it, edit it and try your own variations.
🧩 Open in Setup