.xiangqi
Is .xiangqi a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .xiangqi, as of 7 October 2026. One applicant claimed it and is out. We keep the entry on the record either way.
- Journey To The West
A hobby address for Chinese chess sites and clubs; a real but tiny community, and most of it will stay on mainstream domains.
xiangqi clubs, federations, tournament organizers, teaching sites, and game apps serving the Chinese chess community worldwide, plus a small layer of enthusiasts wanting a themed personal or content site
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “Chinese chess, a battlefield of the mind.”
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet: the proper name of one specific game, owned by nobody and generic inside its own world, sold to federations, clubs, tournaments and fan media who would put their primary identity on the sport's own word.
Same bet as a single named sport whose player base is concentrated in one cultural sphere rather than globally distributed, so the registry is betting on a heritage community's institutions and content sites rather than broad commercial demand.
Same bet in that the string is a sport's name in the community's own language rather than the English term, so it lives or dies on that specific linguistic-cultural population adopting it as their identity marker.
What a .xiangqi domain is
.xiangqi is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. Nobody is chasing .xiangqi today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .xiangqi domain extension real yet?
.xiangqi is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .xiangqi domain?
You can’t yet. A .xiangqi name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .xiangqi was .rugby, delegated on 7 April 2017.
Is .xiangqi a real TLD?
Not yet. .xiangqi is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .xiangqi and is no longer in it. We keep the entry, and every entry on this page links to its source.
- Journey To The West · now abandonedICANN
- Journey To The West · first recordedJourney To The West Corporation
“.xiangqi · Martial & Strategy · “Chinese chess, a battlefield of the mind.””Journey To The West Corporation
- Band 10-29: this is a single-hobby string whose demand pool is a game community, not a commercial category. It is not in the 30-49 band because volume registration is implausible — the string names one pastime, and (by analogy with narrow hobby/sport gTLDs, which have generally seen thin registration bases and minimal aftermarkets) even successful sport TLDs struggled to become primary identities; .xiangqi is far narrower than any of those. It is not in the 1-9 band because a genuine global community of clubs, federations, apps, and teaching sites exists, so a modest number of sincere primary-identity uses is plausible over 5 years. A structural headwind, argued by analogy: xiangqi's core audience is in the Chinese-language market, where registrants have historically gravitated to established endings rather than Latin-script pinyin new gTLDs, so the string is romanized for an audience that may not want romanization. Main market uncertainty: whether Chinese-market buyers will register a pinyin gTLD at any meaningful rate, versus the TLD serving only the small overseas/English-language xiangqi scene.