Mahjong is a tile-based game for two to four players. Though regional variations may exclude certain tiles or add unique ones, it is typically played with a set of 144 tiles based on Chinese characters and symbols. Players hold one of four "wind" positions referred to as the East, South, West, and North. Once each player draws a hand of thirteen tiles, in clockwise order beginning with the "prevailing wind," each player draws a tile, then discards that tile or another from their hand. Players may call to use another player's discarded tile under certain conditions. The object of each round is to complete and score a legal hand using a drawn tile or another player's discarded tile to form four melds (or sets) and a pair (eye.) Players may also score with special hands that do not follow the typical pattern. Players hold a persistent score across rounds until the game ends.
Mahjong was developed in the 19th century in China and has spread throughout the world since the early 20th century. The game and its regional variants are played throughout the Sinosphere in East and Southeast Asia and have also become popular in Western countries. The game has been adapted into a widespread form of online entertainment. Similar to the Western card game rummy, mahjong is a game of skill, strategy, and luck. To distinguish it from mahjong solitaire, it is sometimes referred to as mahjong rummy.
While mahjong typically follows a common set of rules for the order of play, how tiles are dealt, how a piece is drawn and discarded, what melds are allowed, and how suits (numbered tiles) and honors (winds and dragons) are used, regional variations and house rules may differ moderately to radically on criteria for legal melds, winning hands, and scoring systems, and may feature additional rules.
Etymology The game was originally called ()meaning which is still used in several Chinese languages, mostly in the south, such as Cantonese and Hokkien. It is said that the clacking of tiles during shuffling resembles the chittering of sparrows. It has also been suggested that the name came from an evolution of an earlier card game called Madiao from which mahjong tiles were adapted. In Chinese, denotes a form of guerrilla warfare tactics colloquially called 'sparrow warfare (tactics)'. Other languages, such as Sichuanese, Shanghainese and Standard Mandarin, now call the game (), which is a nasal erhua form of the original name. Its name is similar in other languages, except in Thai, where it is called (), a calque meaning .
History There are two disputed origins of mahjong, namely Ningbo and Fujian. The author of the first mahjong guidebook, Yifan Shen, wrote in his book "Illustrated Mahjong Guide" (1914) that the birth of mahjong was roughly thirty years earlier in Ningbo, which is around the late 19th century. 沈一帆 時務書館, 1914年(上海遊藝社1924年重印) In the book "Endless History (博史)" written by Chinese scholar Yaquan Du in 1933, he believed that "mahjong was originally popular among fishermen in Guangdong and Fujian. Later in the early years of Guangxu, it spread among the businessmen in Ningbo. Roughly speaking, mahjong started in late Qing, around the 19th century, with different scholars debating its actual year of invention. Late Qing scholar, lecturer of the Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zhixian Xu wrote in the book "Folklore of the Ten Leaves" 許指嚴, 1917 that the popularity of mahjong grew in the last years of Guangxu (after the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895). One can conclude that the decades between the late 19th century to the early 20th century were the infant years of mahjong.
Mahjong is based on draw-and-discard card games that were popular in 18th and 19th century China, some of which are still popular today. They were played with a stripped deck of money-suited cards. Each deck is divided into three suits of Cash or coins, Strings of cash, and Myriads of strings. There are nine ranks in each suit. In addition, there are three wild cards: Red flower, White flower, and Old thousand. Depending on the game, there are multiple copies of each card.
Games scholar David Parlett has written that the Western card games Conquian and Rummy share a common origin with Mahjong. All these games involve players drawing and discarding tiles or cards to make melds. Khanhoo is an early example of such a game. The most likely ancestor to Mahjong was pènghú which was played with 120 or 150 cards. During the late 19th century, pènghú was used interchangeably with máquè in both card and tile form.
It is not known when the conversion from cards to tiles took place precisely but it most likely occurred in the middle of the 19th century. The earliest surviving tile sets date to around 1870 and were acquired in Fuzhou, Shanghai, and Ningbo.In 1875, George B. Glover, a commissioner in the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, donated a set Mahjong tiles to American Museum of Natural History and the other set to the Long Island Historical Society. They are the two oldest set Mahjong tiles found in the world. These sets differ from modern ones in several ways, there were no "flower" and fā ("green dragon") tiles. In their place were "king" tiles for heaven, earth, man, and harmony and also for each of the 4 "winds" which may have acted as bonus tiles. In the contemporaneous Himly set, there were no zhōng ("red dragon") tiles either. Instead there were the wild cards known as Cash Flower, String Flower, and Myriad Flower plus an additional tile, the king of everything. These early jokers are still found in Vietnamese sets. They may have been removed as the tiles share the same titles as the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). For example, Hong Xiuquan was the self-styled "Heavenly King of Great Peace" and his top subordinates were called east king, south king, west king, and north king.
The ban on gambling after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 led to a decline in playing. The game itself was banned during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Today, it is a favorite pastime in China and other Chinese-speaking communities.
Mahjong in the West
The first Western records about mahjong seem to correspond to the papers of British Consul General F.E.B. Harvey, around the time when he served as consul in Ningbo, during the 1860s. He mentions in his papers making the acquaintance of an English-fluent, rank-three official under the Daoguang Emperor, Chen Yumen, who taught him the game. In the same writings he details the rules he was taught by Chen.Unfortunately, Harvey's 'papers' and 'detailed' description of the game have never been found. This story is probably forged. In 1895, British sinologist William Henry Wilkinson wrote a paper which mentioned a set of cards known in central China by the name of ma chioh, literally, hemp sparrow, which he maintained was the origin of the term Mahjong. He did not explain the dialect of the originator or region specific etymology of this information. By 1910, there were written accounts in many languages, including French and Japanese.
The game was imported to the United States in the 1920s. The first Mahjong sets sold in the U.S. were sold by Abercrombie & Fitch starting in 1920. It became a success in Washington, D.C., and the co-owner of the company, Ezra Fitch, sent emissaries to Chinese villages to buy every Mahjong set they could find. Abercrombie & Fitch sold a total of 12,000 Mahjong sets. Mahjong became a central part of cultural bonding for Chinese Americans in the 1920s and '30s in Chinatown, Manhattan and was part of community building for suburban American Jewish women in the 1940s and 50s.
Also in 1920, Joseph Park Babcock published his book Rules of Mah-Jongg, also known as the "red book". This was the earliest version of Mahjong known in America. Babcock had learned Mahjong while living in China. His rules simplified the game to make it easier for Americans to take up, and his version was common through the Mahjong fad of the 1920s. Later, when the 1920s fad died out, many of Babcock's simplifications were abandoned.
The game has taken on a number of trademarked names, such as "Pung Chow" and the "Game of Thousand Intelligences". Mahjong nights in America often involved dressing and decorating rooms in Chinese style.Bill Bryson, Made in America. Harper, 1996, ch. 16. Several hit songs were recorded during the Mahjong fad, most notably "Since Ma Is Playing Mah Jong" by Eddie Cantor.
Many variants of Mahjong developed during this period. By the 1930s, many revisions of the rules developed that were substantially different from Babcock's classical version (including some that were considered fundamentals in other variants, such as the notion of a standard hand). Standardization came with the formation of the National Mah Jongg League (NMJL) in 1937, along with the first American Mahjong rulebook, Maajh: The American Version of the Ancient Chinese Game, written by NMJL's first president and co-founder, Viola L. Cecil.Tom Sloper, The Red Dragon & The West Wind: The Winning Guide to Official Chinese & American Mah-Jongg, HarperCollins, 2007. In 1999, a second organization was formed, the American Mah Jongg Association.
In the United Kingdom, British author Alan D. Millington revived the Chinese classical game of the 1920s with his book The Complete Book of Mah-jongg (1977). This handbook includes a formal rules set for the game.
Current development
There are many governing bodies which often host exhibition games and tournaments for modern and traditional Mahjong gaming.
Mahjong, as of 2010, is the most popular table game in Japan.Pakarnian, John, "Game Boy: Glossary of Japanese Gambling Games", Metropolis, 22 January 2010, p. 15. As of 2008, there were approximately 7.6 million Mahjong players in Japan and an estimated 8,900 Mahjong parlors did ¥300 billion (converting to US$2.8 billion according to exchange rates for 30 April 2020) in sales.Matsutani, Minoru, "Mah-jongg ancient, progressive", Japan Times, 15 June 2010, p. 3. There are several manga and anime (e.g. Saki and Akagi) devoted to dramatic and comic situations involving Mahjong.Schodt, Frederik, Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Kodansha, 1986, Chapter 5. Since the 1980s, hundreds of different Mahjong arcade machines in Japanese video arcades have been created, including strip versions. Newer units can connect with other arcade machines across the Internet.
Mahjong culture is still deeply ingrained in the Chinese community. Sam Hui wrote Cantopop songs using Mahjong as their themes, and Hong Kong movies have often included scenes of Mahjong games. Many gambling movies have been filmed in Hong Kong, and a recent subgenre is the Mahjong movie. Although the popularity of the game in China is still broad, since 1949, mahjong was frowned upon by the government because it is seen as a means of gambling addiction, an issue that the government always sought to tackle.
Prolonged playing of Mahjong may trigger epileptic seizures according to a 2007 study. To date there are 23 reported cases of Mahjong-induced seizures in the English medical literature. Some doctors speculate that this may be due to stress and complex manual movement correlated with intense brain function similar to playing chess or card games such as poker.
Studies by doctors have also shown in Hong Kong that the game is beneficial for individuals suffering from dementia or cognitive memory difficulties, leading to the development of Mahjong therapy. Many elderly in Hong Kong actively and regularly go to Mahjong Schools as a form of leisure and entertainment activities. As the Government has not allowed gambling since the end of World War II, the Government issued 144 licenses to these "schools" in 1956 in order to legalize the operation of places that provide Mahjong entertainment.