Sho

A game older than its records

Tracing sho through time

Honest history here is short, because Tibetan literature rarely wrote down the pastimes of ordinary people.^[1] What survives is suggestive rather than certain. A mural in the white palace of the Potala shows aristocrats at a picnic, and at the lower right three men playing sho — one about to throw, another listening to the thrower’s dice-prayer. It is usually dated to the Qing period, though the Potala’s murals were repeatedly refurbished, so the scene attests to sho in roughly the nineteenth century rather than earlier.^[1]

Folk memory reaches much further. The life of the yogi Milarepa (1052–1135) describes his grandfather as a sho addict who gambled away the family fortune — though that account was written down in the fifteenth century.^{[5, 1]} In the thousand-year-old Epic of King Gesar, the hero wins a game of sho by the impossible feat of throwing thirteen on two dice. And it is solid fact that the Tibetan Empire (c. 600–850) used oblong four-sided dice to draft laws and cast divinations.^{[4, 1]} Whether the gambling game we know today existed a millennium ago, though, is speculation — its form may have been very different.^[1]

Popular tradition gives the dice a mythic inventor: the Masang, a clan of demigod brothers from Tibet’s tribal dawn. In one telling a Masang spirit, later subdued by Padmasambhava, both invented the dice and helped players win when his name was invoked. Comparative scholars note close cousins to sho across East Asia, placing it less as a uniquely Tibetan invention than as one branch of a long Asian family of dice games.^[1]

The set

What you play with

A sho kit is small enough to carry to a teahouse or a meadow, which is part of why it travels so well.^[1] A traditional set holds:

• Two dicesho / cho lo

  Six-sided. In a proper set the 1 and 4 spots are painted red; the rest black or blue.

• A leather padsho gdan

  A round pad of yak leather, often stuffed with wool — the dice are slammed down onto it at the centre of the ring.

• A wooden cupsho phor

  Shaped like a butter-tea cup, with a tiny hole in the base so air can escape as it’s brought down.

• Sixty-four shells’gron bu / rde’u

  Cowrie shells (or pebbles) laid in a loose ring; the sixty-four spaces between them are the track.

• Nine coins eachlag khyi / dgu mig

  Old coins of two or three kinds — or “nine-eye” iron talismans. Nine signifies protection in Tibetan symbolism.

How a game unfolds

Crossing the mountain

Two or three play, or two pairs as partners. Each holds nine coins and tries to move them all clockwise — the auspicious direction — around the sixty-four shells and off the far end. This circuit is called la rgyag, “to cross the mountain pass.”^[1] You move by the sum of the two dice. On a turn you either bring a new coin onto the board at the shell matching your throw, or advance a coin already running.

The texture of the game is in stacking and killing. Land on your own coins and they pile into a stack that moves as one — and a stack can grow but never shrink.^[1] Land on a rival stack that is no larger than your own and you “kill” (gsod) it: those coins are sent all the way back to their owner’s hand. Pile up, or kill, or throw the lucky pa ra (double one), and you keep the dice and throw again. Heap all nine of your coins into one stack and you hold dgu mo — “nine women” — the strongest position on the board, which nothing can knock home.^[1]

The rules “vary in accordance with different localities,” as the anthropologist Daisuke Murakami cautions in the fullest account of sho in English; the version here follows the one he recorded in Lhasa in 2010, with two widely-told flourishes kept for play — three pa ra in a row as an outright win, and the dgu sna kyog rescue, where a player swept off the board can bring all nine coins back at once on a throw of 3 + 6.^{[1, 6, 7]} Skilled players reckon all this at speed; one folklorist argues the game so sharpens the mind that letting children play “opens the gates of their intellect.”^{[3, 1]}

Calling the dice

A language for the throw

Players never count plainly. As the cup comes down they call for the number they need, in a game-language quite unlike ordinary Tibetan numerals — and often weave in a riddle playing on the number’s name.^[1] Some throws carry their own custom: on sug (3) the opponents must drink; on ’jang (12) the onlookers drink; pa ra (2) is the lucky throw that buys another roll.

After Murakami 2014, Fig. 4 (collected in Lhasa). Spellings vary by region and player.

Sho bshad — prayers to win

The soul of the game

The dice-prayers — sho bshad (“shobshey”) — are what lift sho from a gambling game into a performance. As a player shakes the cup they chant short, fast, often funny verses willing the dice to fall their way. They are improvised and endlessly varied, and their subjects run from butter and meat to monks, mountains, satire and the frankly bawdy. One editor of the genre calls them a literary art with “intimate relations to actual life.”^{[1, 3]} A family-friendly few:

There is a final, glorious prize. If the two dice happen to land stacked one atop the other — sho rtseg — a thrower who can rattle off the lucky formula on the spot wins the entire set: “…the dice, the coins, the shells, the cup and the pad — I have won them all!”^[1]

Luck, fate and the unseen

Why the bold win, and women don’t play

Sho is never quite only a game. A player on a hot streak is said to be touched by a the’u rang — a mischievous, arrogant spirit fond of dice and play, who can grant any number you ask. To draw his luck you must transform yourself: “you need to become nga rgyal — proud, arrogant — to win,” a veteran gambler told Murakami; “without it, it’s no fun, but with it the luck of the dice comes to you.” The boast and the bravado are not bad manners; they are how the spirit is summoned.^[1]

The same dice are sacred tools. In sho mo, dice divination, monks read the future through the wrathful protector goddess Palden Lhamo — two dice hang from her image — to find the cause of an illness, judge a dispute, or even help locate a reincarnation.^[1] That sacred charge shapes who may play. In Lhasa it is thought improper, even evil, for women to play sho, while they freely play mahjong. The deeper reason Murakami offers is striking: men say that “if women play sho, they always win.” Women are held to be especially open to possession by Palden Lhamo — herself the supreme, victorious guardian of Lhasa — and a woman so charged could not be beaten. The taboo, in this reading, is less contempt than awe.^[1]

Time matters too. It is gravely unlucky to play on Tibetan New Year’s Day: bringing the cup down upside-down (kha bub) echoes the upturned cup of the dead during a family’s mourning, and the gesture carries a whiff of the funeral. Throwing dice, then, quietly stages a contest of life against death — part of the game’s strange and lasting pull.^[1]

Where it lives today

A living game

You can still hear sho before you see it — the slap of the cup, the shouted calls — in teahouses, pubs, streets and the summer picnic grounds (gling ga) of central Tibet.^[1] As imported games like Sichuan mahjong have spread, sho has taken on a second life as a marker of identity; Murakami noticed more and more young people taking it up, some pointedly dismissing mahjong as “a Chinese game.” To play sho has become, quietly, a way of being Tibetan.^[1] It is a game worth keeping — and now worth playing, wherever you are.