I was not aware of Murray's conclusions regarding Xiangqi, but he seems to
have found a way of saying that references towards Xiangqi are a different
game based on the constellations or something and that the new game from
India was simply given the same name.

By speculating that there were multiple games named Xiangqi, as it appears
in Chinese, the historical references to Xiangqi that pre-date 8x8 Chess in
India or Persia are essentially nullified from a literary perspective.

It's quite a devil's advocate argument because it means that references
to Xiangqi before 6th century essentially don't count because that could
be a different game whereas references after the 6th century to Xiangqi
mean the current game we call Xiangqi now. Seems convenient, but as far as
I know there isn't another kind of Chinese game that was named Xiangqi at
some point. I haven't seen anything in a museum or any kind of artifact of
a different kind of game that was called Xiangqi before the 'copied Indian
version' came to China.

As far as I know, the name of the game does not have anything to do with
constellations or astronomy. Until I had read Murray's theory, I have
never heard of anything like that from any Chinese historian with any
knowledge of Xiangqi.

The river in the middle of the board is most commonly interpreted as a
river of a key battle that took place between 2 armies just before the
founding of the Han dynasty.

Instead of looking at Chinese history, Murray seems to want to point at the
Milky Way as being the explanation of the occurrence of the river in
Xiangqi.

As far as I know, the river was put in later on (probably during the Han
Dynasty). That's the simplest explanation. I'm kind of surprised that
Murray did not or was not able to find out what the name of the river meant
to any Chinese historian or any Chinese person with a basic high school
education that would know about how the Han Dynasty was founded.

Or rather it seems to me, that Murray wants to attribute another game which
does not seem to exist to astronomy instead of a historical battle that
took place at least 600 or 700 years before 8x8 Chess appears in India.

Murray poses the possibility that there were different games in China
called Xiangqi, but as far as I know, there was nothing else called Xiangqi
from that period of time.

In my opinion, if he is going to make this kind of assertion, some kind of
clue as to what this so-called game(s) were like would be helpful. However,
it seems he just wanted to discredit China as a possibility when in fact
its the most obvious choice because its design is based on a battle that
took place several hundred years before Chess in India happens.

I also think its kind of surprising that Murray would make such strong
conclusions about Xiangqi without even trying to figure out what the
characters mean in modern Chinese. While the meaning of Chinese character
often change over a long period of time, and it can have multiple meanings,
I wonder why he came to the conclusion that it was based on astronomy and
not 'atmosphere' or 'live and moving' pieces as opposed to static in
Weiqi (Go).

It seems that Murray knows ancient Chinese better than Chinese people who
can actually read Chinese, because if I started telling people that Xiangqi
2000 years ago was based on astronomy instead of actual battles that were
taking place at that time, they'd think I was crazy because it's common
sense that a war game would be based on.... war.

A chariot goes straight forward. The ancient character for chariot is a
pictograph of a chariot with 2 wheels on it. In the Spring and Autumn
period, it was the strongest weapon in the battlefield.

These more common sense interpretations seem much more plausible rather
than pieces being based on stars, etc.

There seems to be a conflict in the reverse engineering of Xiangqi. Instead
of reverse engineering it to a very simple game with just a few pieces
based on actual people on horses or chariots fighting in battles, we are
supposed to believe that there's this other game that does not seem to
exist in China called Xiangqi, and then a modern version of Xiangqi was
developed quickly in the 6th century so that earlier designs of Xiangqi
which have only 11 pieces on each side to start with are discarded and not
considered.

Based on this logic, any reference to anything can be interpreted as being
something else without a plausible explanation to what that other thing
called the 'same thing' is.

I honestly feel the standards for a game being developed in India are
extremely flexible in terms of interpretation, while the standards for
China are extremely strict almost as if unless a very specific blue print
is presented, there's no way a game based on war could be developed from a
society that fought wars like that and liked to play board games also.