everyone always assumes all chess is based on Indian variants because of the elephant. Yet the chang (xiang) character in changgi and xiangqi means elephant, which were once native to Western China, where the border is shared in modern times with India. It is unlikely that border was sacrosanct through the ages, and in fact, having visited there, the Chinese there are of blood so mixed that they mistook me for one of them. The mongolian empire pushed the border much farther West than modern days, so who really knows? I am content to call Jungle and all Asian chess a Sino-Indo mixture. If I'd only asked around more when I was there, I could have some good third-hand information.