Culture Insider: Ancient Chinese table games

A tomb found by archaeologists which has a history of 2300 years in Shandong.[File Photo]

What did ancient Chinese do for fun? Obviously they couldn't surf the Internet or watch TV; in fact, ancient Chinese had many kinds of board and card games similar to the ones modern people play.

Liubo

Recently, archaeologists found some game pieces in a 2300-year-old tomb in Shandong. Archaeologists believe that the tomb belongs to a nobleman of Qi State (280BC-221BC). And they also found a broken chessboard, 21 numbered rectangle flags and a 14-sided dice made of animal bone. Seal characters of the numbers 1 to 6 were carved on one side of the sifter twice, while the remaining two sides are blank. After being mended and pieced together, the chessboard turned out to have two eyes carved into it, surrounded by patterns of clouds and thunder.