for the ancient Chinese board game, see Liubo
The earliest Liubo boards to have been discovered are a pair of ornately decorated stone boards from a 4th-century BCE tomb in the royal tomb complex of the State of Zhongshan at Pingshan in Hebei.
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In 1993, a wooden board with turtle divination diagrams and prognostications on one side and a Liubo diagram and forty-five prognostications on five topics on the other side was excavated from a late Western Han tomb at Yinwan in Donghai County, Jiangsu.
In his book "The Genealogy of Chess" (which won the 'Book of the Year' 1998 award from the editors of GAMES Magazine), Li surveys evidence regarding the origins of chess and concludes that an early version of chess called xiangqi was invented in China in 203 BC, by General Han Xin, who supposedly drew on the earlier game liubo as well as on the teachings of The Art of War.