Chapter 19. Long Hair Flowing: DC, Dong Can

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 十九 长发飘飘 DC

First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 9, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19633467

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

DC, whose Chinese name is Dong Can, was captain and coach of EHOME, the famous professional Dota team, in its most glorious period, and is now a well-known presenter at GTV. He was born on June 21, 1985, in Xiangtan, Hunan. The name DC comes from his full ID, DCLXJDC, which combines his own name with those of two close friends. Why that particular combination? He absolutely refuses to say.

Before 2011, DC was pale and plump with hair down to his waist, a round face, small eyes and kindly features, steady and quick to laugh, plus a pair of the moles Chinese tradition assigns to matchmakers. When the breeze caught it, his long hair streamed out behind him. That uncle-next-door warmth seemed to guarantee he would become a widely liked esports caster. (Heh. That is what you get for not telling me.)

Both of DC's parents worked at state-owned enterprises. He did well at school before junior high, so even though his interests ranged very widely, his parents did not rein him in. The usual progression through Famicom consoles, arcade machines and the rest needs no describing.

Then, moving from junior high to senior high, DC hit a major turning point. He scored a single digit in chemistry and suddenly discovered how hopeless he was at science. He lost confidence in study altogether and spent senior high escaping reality, playing games and reading outside books in class, an astonishing number of them, anything at all: martial arts novels, world classics, history books, even a licensed edition of Harry Potter. The books his teachers confiscated could be measured by the boxful.

DC preferred the humanities, and his combined score across the other subjects was often the same as his Chinese score alone. The national college entrance examination does not recognise that, so he had no real choice and enrolled at Hunan Metallurgical Vocational Technology College, whose programmes matched the factory where his father worked.

DC sounds regretful about that period but is entirely at peace with it. Without the past, he says, there would be no present. And he remembers vividly what he refused to accept back then. He refused to accept a fate already decided for him, refused to accept that graduating meant nothing more than the job at the steel works his father had arranged through a favour, refused to accept that this would be his whole life.

Yes. That refusal is what made DC what he is today.

In 2003, DC and several classmates wanted to play Warcraft III on Blizzard's battle.net, so they scrimped and saved and bought a few legitimate copies. Only two of the CD keys inside worked, so they shared the two accounts and took turns going on battle.net to play matches. (This touches on another subject. Why did Aomei Electronics, the early distributor of Blizzard's boxed games in China, have such a bad reputation? Because they sold the same Warcraft III CD keys over and over. This history will come back to that later. As a footnote, Aomei went out of business in October 2005.)

As early as the Reign of Chaos era of Warcraft III, from 2002 to 2003, DC was playing Warcraft III RPG, meaning the custom modes players built with the world editor, as distinct from standard melee matches. He joined the U9 forum, on the Uuu9 site, and became a moderator of the relevant boards. In the Frozen Throne era, from 2003 onwards, DC moved on to 3C, naval maps, tower defence and the like.

Since we are on the Warcraft III era websites, a brief sketch of the landscape from 2003 to 2010 will help set the scene. A later chapter deals specifically with the grudges among these sites, so this is only a summary.

Replays.net, or RN, was founded by Zhou Hao, known as Zax, on July 22, 2002. It began as the Classic Replay Download Site and concentrated on StarCraft replays. RN moved to Warcraft III as early as 2002 and still leaned towards match replays and match reports. Because RN, the WE team and GamesTV, the forerunner of the Youxi Fengyun channel, all belonged to the same company, and because that company also ran successful events such as StarsWar and RTB that reinforced one another, RN enjoyed exceptional advantages throughout the Warcraft III era from 2002 to 2007. After WE.SKY took his two WCG world titles, RN rode the wave and became the mainstream website of Chinese esports in the Warcraft III years.

Uuu9 (www.uuu9.com) began as the personal site of Huilin and was founded on August 19, 2004. Unlike RN, U9 leaned towards Warcraft III RPG and was the largest and most complete RPG map download site of the day, so its forum attracted and gathered large numbers of MOBA players, MOBA meaning multiplayer online battle arena games. That characteristic laid the ground for U9's rise in the Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang and Dota years.

Ouyou (www.ogame.net) was the predecessor of Sgamer.com, a long-established esports site that its founder Zhu Xuebao had been running since the Counter-Strike era. In the Warcraft III years Ouyou did not develop well, because it also concentrated on Warcraft III match replays and so collided head-on with RN, and SG did not have the timing, the ground and the people that RN had then. Later, with the rise of Dota, and with Feng Jida, who ran technology, returning from studying abroad in 2008, he and Zhu Xuebao formed the Sgamer company and turned to developing games. From that point Sgamer took a different road to success, and the online game they built is said to have been taken over by Tencent and to bring in ten million yuan a month. Unfortunately these events happened mainly in Wuhan, and after 2007 we rather lost touch with them, so there may be inaccuracies here. I hope to interview the people involved one day.

Put simply, for various reasons Warcraft III remained the mainstream esports title from 2003 to 2008. Plenty of people played Warcraft III RPG, but it never formed an esports structure. Dota was still gathering strength because of translation and version problems, and it only began to raise its head after Warcraft III started to decline in 2007.

Two games have to be mentioned before Dota took off in China in 2007.

One is Fujia Tianxia, an RPG game set in the Three Kingdoms period. The other is the Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang RPG map, made in imitation of Dota by lovemoon03, a mapmaker in Taiwan.

Around October 2004, players in the Fujia Tianxia section of the Haofang platform began to encounter Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang. Because it drew on the Three Kingdoms as well, people accepted it more readily than the still unstable Dota of the same period.

This has also left some people with confused memories. Many think that Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang came before Dota. That is not correct. It was simply accepted first.

To return to the story, the route many Chinese professional Dota players followed was Fujia Tianxia, then Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang, then Dota.

DC followed essentially that route. In 2005, because he had been doing a good job as moderator of U9's Warcraft III RPG board, he became moderator of U9's Zhen San board. By then U9 had gathered a number of moderately famous Zhen San teams, one of which was the Numbers team. The well-known Dota professional pairing 1177, meaning 820 and 357 added together, came out of that team, and that is where the name came from.

Because most esports enthusiasts of that period had their attention on Warcraft III melee, Zhen San drew little notice and had even fewer tournaments. In 2005 DC organised a Zhen San tournament of his own on the forum. The only reward was six months of Haofang VIP, but everyone was delighted with it.

Something rather regrettable happened around this time, in 2005. Lovemoon03, the Taiwanese creator of Zhen San, is said to have gone off to play World of Warcraft and given up updating the map, so Zhen San began its slow decline. DC, still an angry young man in those days, went all the way to Taiwan's Bahamut forum to curse him for abandoning the work halfway.

And it was at that same moment, in 2005, that Dota went through a major change of its own.

Looking back at the rise of Dota now, the only word that seems to explain it is fate. Why fate? Since many readers of this history are not familiar with the titles involved, here is a brief account of Dota's history first.

Dota began in StarCraft and flourished in Warcraft III. Very few people encountered it through StarCraft, so we will skip that part and start with Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.

The first to mention is eul, known in China as Fengzhang after the item Eul's Scepter of Divinity. He made the first Reign of Chaos Dota map while Warcraft III was still on that version, from 2002 to 2003. That name was not one he chose himself. The mapmakers who came after him named an item after him to commemorate his contribution, and that way of honouring a predecessor has continued to this day. Guinsoo's item, for instance, was named by IceFrog.

The second is guinsoo, who ran Dota from 2003 to 2005, a man of remarkable imagination. He not only drew on the hero designs of the various Dota versions of the day to assemble DotA Allstars, but also put together a Dota design team that included IceFrog, who would later take over from him. Because his thinking jumped around so much, though, and because he chased effects too hard, the Dota of that period was unbalanced and full of bugs. It carried a certain influence but was stuck just below the point where it would break out.

The third is IceFrog, who took over Dota in 2005. He came out of Blizzard, was steadier in character and far more systematic, and in his hands Dota became stable and balanced and finally began to look like an esports title. IceFrog also set up an official Chinese localisation group in June 2005, and through the efforts of Heintje, Aegis, Harreke and several others, Dota gradually climbed onto the stage of Chinese esports.

In other words, 2005 was exactly the moment when Dota was becoming stable while Zhen San and games like it stopped being updated. Large numbers of core MOBA users poured out of Zhen San and into Dota.

It is worth mentioning that eul is said to have gone on to work on HoN, guinsoo to have gone to League of Legends and IceFrog to Dota 2. If those rumours are true, it really is a small world.

Back to the story.

DC moved to Dota at this point as well, though he leaned towards organising things behind the scenes. He was a moderator of U9's Dota board and ran the occasional tournament, and also played online matches for a team called Mingfuju. They were forever fighting another semi-professional team for the title in grand finals, and that team later became famous everywhere as Godlike, or GL.

In 2006, CPL held a stop in Chengdu that included a Dota event. It is said to have been the first offline Dota tournament in China on any real scale, so it gathered many of the pioneers of the Dota scene.

GL's captains at the time were two university students from Wenzhou, Wanbaolu and Xiaoxiongmao. Before that tournament they wanted to enter two teams, so they recruited DC, whom they kept running into online, into the second team and called it Zhanguo Tianxia. GL's first team had 820 and Ni, the pair known as GL's Twin Stars. Unfortunately the two teams ended up meeting in the third-place match. The team that won the title that year was Nebula, which included someone everyone knows well and whose fate would later become much entangled with DC's, LongDD, known in Chinese as Zilong.

After CPL Chengdu, GL decided to merge the two squads. The roster was as follows:

820 playing position three, Ni, DC on support, Snoy, Sai and Xiaoxiongmao (captain)

Recognising a lot of those IDs?

In the blink of an eye it was 2007, and WCG added a Dota event to its Beijing regional. It was a strange year, because Dota was not an official WCG discipline. The Beijing regional was the Chinese national final, so the teams that took part got no prize money, no travel costs and no accommodation, only a certificate and a place at the WCG Asian Championship (ACG) in Singapore. Several GL players borrowed money to enter. DC borrowed 2,000 yuan. The roster that year was:

820, Ni, DC, LongDD, Snoy and Xiaoxiongmao (captain)

The matches themselves need no description. GL won, took the place at ACG in Singapore, and that was the first time DC had gone abroad to compete.

Before they left, though, there was a considerable upheaval. After the WCG Chinese competition, DC and LongDD had a fierce argument, mainly over tactics.

Looking back at that episode now, DC says, the plain truth is that they were all too young and too impulsive. There was no need for it to blow up the way it did, and he thinks more of the fault was his. He also mentions that some years later he took the initiative and apologised to LongDD.

History cannot be reversed, though, and the result of that argument was that LongDD left GL. DC and the others brought in DiviDust, also known as tossgirl, who was studying in Australia, at short notice.

To prepare for ACG, Snoy paid to bring everyone to his home in Shijiazhuang for a week of training camp. People had been worried about the last-minute substitution, but that week of offline training had an enormous positive effect and cleared the doubts from everyone's mind. The five days in Singapore that followed brought them the title almost effortlessly.

DC says the title came so easily mainly because none of the foreign teams understood how the Chinese team played. The only surprise came in the quarter-final against the host team.

GL had already destroyed two of their opponent's lanes and were about to win, and the other side had typed GG, so they assumed the match was over and began messing around, throwing away two or three team fights by diving the fountain. Suddenly they found they were losing, and yet the match had not stopped. Puzzled, DC and his teammates called a pause and asked the referee what was going on. The referee told them that under the rules there, typing GG did not count as a concession. GL's players drew a sharp breath, then seriously finished pushing the other team down.

This can fairly be called the first international Dota title won by a home-grown Chinese team.

After GL returned to China, though, they found that their semi-professional careers had not carried over smoothly into professional ones. Plenty of people came to discuss sponsorship, but most of those talks came to nothing.

So at the end of 2007, after GL beat the EHOME team led by LongDD at the first G League Dota event, GL broke up, and DC went home.

Back home, DC was at a loss. His effort to change his fate had turned into a dream, and now that he was awake, where was he supposed to go?

DC's father was a practical man. He put in the work and called in a favour to invite the head of personnel at the factory to the house to interview DC. But DC still refused to accept it, and it was at that turning point in his life that someone came looking for him.

That someone was 71, a legendary figure in the Dota scene. EHOME was being rebuilt at the time, and because they had played GL many times online and offline, 71 had a strong impression of DC's steady uncle-next-door manner. (Heh. That is what you get for not telling me.)

DC did not hesitate, because he had no other options left either. He accepted the invitation at once, came to Beijing in early 2008 and became captain of EHOME, on 1,500 yuan a month with accommodation provided.

After that, with 71 doing the choosing, EHOME signed 2009, that is Wu Sheng, then captain of avnc, the Zhejiang University team, along with Snoy, DC's old GL teammate, and two players from the previous EHOME roster, to form the new EHOME:

DC, 2009, LongDD, Snoy and GK

The rest of 2008 was truly EHOME's era. Even though they won 80 per cent of that year's Dota titles, prize money in Dota was low at the time, and DC still feels the loss of one tournament with 30,000 yuan on the line. It was run by Haofang at ChinaJoy, and EHOME lost to the Shanghai team CaNt, led by 820. CaNt had BurNing at the time, on temporary loan from TTi.

Talking about that defeat, DC says very seriously that he thinks the main reason was that LongDD and Snoy had been dazzled by all the pretty girls at ChinaJoy.

Since CaNt has come up, a word of introduction. It was a professional Dota team built in Shanghai by fashao, a Chinese student who had studied in Britain. They were very strong, and the Dota competitions of 2008 were essentially a struggle between EHOME and CaNt. The open and covert fighting between the two sides was quite extraordinary, and we will come to it in due course.

At the WCG Asian Championship (ACG) in 2008, EHOME took the title again without difficulty, after which 2009 retired. Everyone knows that story well, so we will not go over it. We will describe instead a serious incident that happened before it.

On the day everyone was leaving, all the players flew to Shanghai at one in the afternoon to catch a six o'clock flight to Singapore. Then LongDD suddenly announced that he was going to Hangzhou to see his girlfriend, and that he absolutely had to go. Nobody could stop him. There was no high-speed rail between Shanghai and Hangzhou then and the trip was nothing like as convenient as it is now. The round trip took well over four hours. The whole team was bitterly disappointed. LongDD did make it back in the end, but the episode became an important reason for EHOME letting him go after the tournament.

You can see from all this that LongDD at that point still put his feelings first. Objectively speaking, he simply acted too much on impulse back then. Fortunately, DC says, he has matured a great deal since.

After ACG 2008, EHOME took 820 and 357 from CaNt, while LongDD joined CaNt, and the war between the two teams escalated. Awkwardly for DC, in a match not long afterwards EHOME were blown apart by the CaNt team LongDD led, and LongDD took a pentakill on EHOME's high ground, humiliating his old club thoroughly and taking his revenge in the most satisfying way.

At the end of 2008, EHOME and CaNt travelled together to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia for SMM, the Sendi Mutiara Multimedia Grand National DotA Tournament. The whole of Southeast Asia was playing Dota at the time and the esports atmosphere was intense. First prize was 80,000 yuan, which made it the richest Dota tournament there was.

DC says EHOME were very lucky at that tournament and drew nothing but unknown teams, while CaNt were very unlucky and drew all the strongest teams of the day, including XCN from Indonesia and KS from Malaysia. CaNt fought their way through in the end and reached the winners bracket final, where they met EHOME, who beat them and went on to take the title. Looking back at it now, fate really does play tricks on people.

As 2008 ended there was some upheaval inside EHOME. Salaries were reportedly still very low, some of the promises made when the team was put together had not been kept, and there was no sign of any improvement to come, which left everyone dissatisfied. Snoy and GK retired outright. DC, as captain, stayed until the new players had been handed over in 2009, then retired as well.

A complete dream of life as a professional player had come to an end. Enough. DC went home for the New Year.

In 2009, after DC had rested at home for a while, Teng Linji, then operations director at GTV, approached him through 71 and invited him to join GTV as a Dota caster.

After thinking it over, DC came to Beijing again, became a caster at GTV and doubled as EHOME's coach. A new world opened up in front of him.

When he first started casting, DC still spoke from a player's point of view, which often left other people no way into the conversation. Later, after the practice of two hours of general programming every day, DC began to change from a caster into a more complete presenter.

At the Dell Alienware television league hosted by GTV at the end of 2009, DC's professional casting and precise predictions came as a revelation to viewers, and enthusiasts began calling him the finest Dota caster in China. He has worked at GTV ever since.

As for the story after 2010, we will leave that for the next volume of this history, a few years from now.

One thing only. In 2011, DC cut off the long hair he had grown for so many years.

Why did he cut it?

He still absolutely refuses to say.