Weiqi, a millennia-old Chinese board game, is gaining traction in the West. For some, it's also made some money

----By Wong Joon Ian

New arrivals in China are usually impressed by the country's rich store of cultural artefacts. The entrepreneurial foreigner sees a trove of export inventory here, from antique furniture to local handicrafts. But wringing profits from chinoiserie exports is deceptively difficult, since it's a saturated market with fierce price competition.

For proof, just ask Aaron Shershow, who came to China in 2000 as a movie production manager. He thought it would be a great idea to take the restored furniture he saw in the Chinese countryside and sell it back home in Los Angeles with some partners.

"Everything went wrong with the business. We were in a very competitive area, with a lot of other people selling the same sort of thing," he says. "[The business] went down the toilet."

Faced with two containers full of Chinese furniture, Shershow, 40, turned to the internet to liquidate his stock. While selling the furniture online, he and his new partner Pong Yen, another Angeleno in the movie business, started testing the market with different Chinese handicraft. Unexpectedly, they discovered a lucrative niche - boards and pieces for the ancient Chinese board game, weiqi, also known by its Japanese name, go.

"The response we got from our sales was that we would do better selling [Chinese] games rather than kitschy Chinese items," Yen, who is 30, says. "And every other product is already being exported from China."

Although Shershow and Yen didn't know it at the time, they were riding the first swells of a growing wave of weiqi fervour in Europe and North America. Although the game is big business in Asia - Japan's weiqi market is valued at about US$400 million, Korea has several dedicated television channels, and 20 million people in China are thought to play - it's still a specialist game in the West. John Gibson, the European Go Federation's secretary, estimates that there are about 50,000 players in Europe. Half of those are casual players who know the rules - how to encircle and capture your opponent's black or white stones on the gridded board - but may play only occasionally.

Go overseas

One of the largest European weiqi equipment sellers is Het Paard, a company based in the Netherlands that sells over the counter and through its website. Its co-owner, Peter Zanveld, says he sells ?200,000-300,000 worth of weiqi products a year, mainly to customers in Germany and the Netherlands. He says weiqi in Europe is growing surely but slowly.

"For example, in a country like Finland, about 10 years ago, [weiqi] was a very, very small business," he says. "Now, it is maybe the country with the most go players per capita [in Europe]."

Weiqi is also attracting new players in the United States. According to Sidney Yuan, who runs one of the largest weiqi retailers in America, Yutopian Enterprises, sales at his company have been doubling yearly since he opened shop in 1994. Although he declined to reveal his sales figures, he estimates the US weiqi products market is worth around US$10 million a year.

That market is growing steadily, says Feng Yun, China's top female weiqi player. Feng, whom the New York Times likened to weiqi's Pete Sampras, moved to New Jersey in 2000 when her husband took a job there. There were - and still are - no players even close to her calibre in the US, so she started her own weiqi school. Enrolment was brisk, and it quickly expanded. She now employs five part-time teachers at four locations, and is planning a formal curriculum with textbooks and computer programs to enable quicker expansion.

That market is growing steadily, says Feng Yun, China's top female weiqi player. Feng, whom the New York Times likened to weiqi's Pete Sampras, moved to New Jersey in 2000 when her husband took a job there. There were - and still are - no players even close to her calibre in the US, so she started her own weiqi school. Enrolment was brisk, and it quickly expanded. She now employs five part-time teachers at four locations, and is planning a formal curriculum with textbooks and computer programs to enable quicker expansion.

"In the US, I'm the only one organising group lessons, and it's been very successful," Feng says.

"My classes are on weekends, so it eliminates the [total] number of people I can teach. That's why I normally keep around 80 to 100 students - I can't have more because there's only so much space." she says.

So why is weiqi now so popular in the West? One reason is internet gaming. Kiseido, one of the oldest weiqi book publishers serving the Western market, runs a popular weiqi server with almost 70,000 registered players.

"When I was growing up, you would

play with anybody, even if he was a complete beginner, because then you'd have a game," says Richard Bozulich, Kiseido's founder. "Now with the internet, you just sit down at your computer, log on and you have all kinds of people you can play with. What the internet has done is it's made [weiqi] accessible."

Weiqi's Western popularity also lies in its intrinsic elegance, which has been extolled since it was first played by the Chinese King Yao in 2100 BC. "I think a lot of people in the West, they're looking for something a little bit more esoteric. Go is probably a more profound, deeper, game than chess or any other game," Bozulich says.

Hard-to-find hardware

Westerners who started off playing virtual weiqi began wanting real-life equipment. Online shopping happened to be one of the most convenient ways to buy the stuff.

"[In the US], unless you live near a major city with a huge Asian community like New York or San Francisco, it's pretty hard to find a shop to look at a [weiqi] board," Yen says. "People were even resorting to making their own."

Spotting that gap in the market, Shershow and Yen started Yellow Mountain Imports with US$50,000 three years ago to sell Chinese weiqi boards, stones and accessories online.

Yen says they're now a profitable company with about US$450,000 in sales a year, with 60 percent coming from weiqi equipment and the rest from chinoiserie like mahjong and tea sets. This is thanks to several competitive advantages on their part.

Unlike other retailers, Yellow Mountain doesn't rely on third-party suppliers or vendors. The founders shuttle between warehouses in Los Angeles and Shanghai, overseeing a staff of eight. Products arrive in their 250,000-square-metre warehouse in Shanghai, where they are inspected for defects, photographed in their studio for customers, and finally packed into containers and shipped to Los Angeles. Twelve days later, the products arrive in California and are unpacked and mailed to individual customers.

This set-up means Yellow Mountain can buy from Chinese suppliers, who are cheaper than Japanese and Korean manufacturers, without fearing shipments full of damaged or defective goods, which other retailers, like Yutopian's Sidney Yuan, say are common.

"Having a warehouse in Shanghai is a quality advantage, [because] once [Chinese goods] get to America, you're kind of stuck with whatever the third party gave you in China," Shershow says.

Yellow Mountain's other advantage is product differentiation. They sell yunzi stones, which are made from a closely guarded recipe that originated in the Tang dynasty (618-906 AD). "Grade A yunzi stones have a special feeling. In the winter they feel slightly warm. In the summer, they feel cool. They have a glow that doesn't hurt the eye," says Wang Zhi, manager of the Yunnan Weiqi Factory, which remains the sole source of top-grade yunzi stones in the world.

Still, Yellow Mountain will not be getting too comfortable in its niche. The internet, once a boon, has become a bane. "The barriers to entry are getting lower. Tools like Alibaba make getting into China quite a cinch now. Even our own supplier is on there, it's that easy to contact him," Yen says.

EBay, once Yellow Mountain's main sales channel, has raised its fees significantly over the years, making sales there less profitable. Yen says he is relying on it less now, instead moving his sales to Amazon's online marketplace and the Yellow Mountain website. Local Chinese sellers are also cropping up on eBay, he says. They sell low-end boards and stones, so Yellow Mountain now focuses on high-end products instead.

For now, Yen and Shershow are happy to keep building their business. They already plan to lease another 200 square metres of warehouse space next year to cope with more orders. For Shershow, it is a vindication. "When I was studying Chinese back in high school, nobody thought it was worth a damn. We were supposed to study Japanese. Everyone told me I was wasting my time - but boy, were they wrong!"