CREDITS

The version of the I Ching or Book of Changes quoted from throughout is the Richard Wilhelm translation, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes and published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1951.

The translation of Ch’u Yuan’s T’ien Wen, or ‘Heavenly Questions’ is by David Hawkes from The Songs of the South, An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems, published by Penguin Books, London, 1985.

The translation of Chiang Yen’s ‘Lady Pan’s “Poem on the Fan”’, from the Yu T’ai Hsin Yung, is by Anne Birrell, from her annotated version of New Songs From A Jade Terrace, published by George Allen & Unwin, London, 1982.

The quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies is from the Hogarth Press, fourth edition, 1968, translated by J. B. Leighman and Stephen Spender.

The game of Wei Chi mentioned throughout this volume is, incidentally, more commonly known by its Japanese name of Go, and is not merely the world’s oldest game but its most elegant. As far as this author knows it has no connection to the trigram of the same name in the I Ching – the sixty-fourth, ‘Before Completion’, but a playful similarity of the kind beloved of the Han might possibly be noted.

Finally, The Game of Wei Chi by D. Pecorini and T. Shu (with a Foreword by Professor H. A. Giles) is a real book and was published by Longmans, Green & Co. in 1929. It was, alas, long out of print, and I have Brian Aldiss to thank for my much-treasured copy. It was my fond hope that its use herein might some day lead to the re-publication of this slender classic, as proved the case.

David Wingrove

December 1988/April 2011