Fencer: The Chinese symbols from Alpine Electronics Beijing font, whose international set your current xiangqi pieces most resemble, has a nice set of traditional Chinese characters, as well as alternate internationalized pieces.

Would it be out of place, as you consider variants for xiangqi, to mention that Korean chess janggi is a lot of fun and is similar but not identical to xiangqi.

See http://www.chessvariants.org/oriental.dir/koreanchess.html
for rules and http://www.chessvariants.org/oriental.dir/koreanchess2.html for a nice set of piece characters.