Akbar the Great reigned as the emperor of a large part of India from 1556 until 1605.
Akbar often amused himself by playing chess, but he didn’t use ordinary chess equipment. Akbar liked to do things in a big way! The monarch used an entire garden as his chessboard, and dancing girls were his chess pieces.
While these living chess pieces stood on the squares of the garden chessboard, Akbar sat in a tower above the board and called out his moves!
An eighteenth-century ruler from the Madras region of India used chess pieces 25 feet high, mounted on wheels. It took 50 men to move a single one of these chess pieces!
