The Chess Master is a story of escape and salvation, and the clue for both is chess. The protagonist, Wang Yisheng, undergoes a gradual transformation from "chess fool" to "chess master" — from an alienated young man obsessed with the material needs of life to a spiritually enlightened transmitter of the Chinese tradition. By reversing the pervasive anti-traditional trend in modern Chinese literature and eschewing any overt influence from Western literature, Ah Cheng has created in the The Chess Master a radically new fiction that is both thoroughly modern and deeply imbued with the Chinese tradition.