Every national xiangqi champion from 1956 to 2025, with engine-annotated games

I built the full record of the national championship out of Chinese sources: 22 winners across 57 editions from 1956 to 2025, with title counts, every year won, and the shared 1962 title marked as shared. Baidu's translated encyclopedia entry has a bare list in English. What I wanted was the games attached to the names and the association's rulings in the same table.

Some of what came out of it:

• Hu Ronghua won fourteen national titles, the first at fifteen and the last at fifty-five. He won or shared all ten championships held between 1960 and 1979. The gap in the middle of that run is the Cultural Revolution rather than a rival.
• Ten of the thirteen men who have won since 2005 carry a published ruling from the Chinese Xiangqi Association, including every winner from 2010 to 2023. I kept every name in the table with the finding next to it, because a list that quietly dropped them would be a worse record of what happened.
• Most of the champions have a game on the page, annotated by Pikafish and playable move by move. The engine's preferred move hangs as a branch you can play into instead of reading about.

https://mistboard.com/blog/xiangqi-champions

There is a companion page for the world championship, 11 winners across 19 editions (https://mistboard.com/blog/xiangqi-world-championship), which is where I hit something I could not close. Four games survive from the 1993 edition in the databases I drew on and none of them are Xu Tianhong's, so his section has no game in it. If anyone has a source for a Xu Tianhong game from that event, I would take it.