Ann M. Israel - Mah Jongg: The Art of the Game: A Collector’s Guide to Mah Jongg Tiles and Sets

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, thank you to Linda Feinstein who opened up the world of Mah Jongg to us. Without her guiding hand, we never would have dreamt of this project.

This book could not have been written without the collectors, including Katherine Hartman, Bill Price, and the people at MahJongmahjong.com. We are grateful to them for letting us into their lives to photograph their treasured collections. Their patience with our emails and repeated inquiries has been wonderful. Thanks also to two great Mah Jongg scholars, Michael Stanwick and Tom Sloper, who kindly agreed to write chapters for this book, and to author and playwright Milton Stern for his delightful Foreword for the book. Many thanks to Ray Heaton for his indefatigable translations, research, and cross-checking of Chinese history.

We would be remiss not to recognize Ruth Unger and the staff at the National Mah Jongg League. Their hard work and dedication to the game has brought enjoyment to millions.

We also want to thank CHarli, Nancy Fox, Dee Gallo, Gaye B, Pawel Kaminski, Patricia Kukes, Howard Litwak, Mary Paynter, Susan Roberts, Joanne Schechter, Kerima Swain, Kate Wight, and all our Mah Jongg friends, especially our wonderful Wednesday Mah Jongg playing group, The OMs.

We send heartfelt thanks to our wonderful literary agent Jane K. Creech for her help, support, and great efforts to teach us the art of writing a book. And, of course, our deepest gratitude to our brilliant photographer Michel Arnaud for making this the sensational book that it is.

And, finally, we thank Woody Swain whose creativity, sense of design, and patience made it possible for us to write this book.

BIOGRAPHIES

Dee Gallo is a Mah Jongg enthusiast who has played the game since childhood with her family and spent most of her life either making art or teaching it. She decided to combine the two and began refurbishing sets in need of paint or repairs, carving joker sets and replacement tiles and eventually starting RedCoin Mah Jongg, making limited edition customized sets.

Katherine Hartman is the daughter of a US Air Force pilot. She found her passion for Mah Jongg at the age of eight while living in Okinawa where she first learned how to play from her mother. Married with grown children, she lives in Virginia with her husband Rick. She successfully juggles an interior design career and Mah Jongg, and her family shares her love of the game.

James Hou , a retired investment banker born and raised in Taiwan, received his higher education in the US. James loves the arts and practices Chinese calligraphy even during his hectic career days. He runs a financial advisory firm.

Mahjongmahjong.com The people behind this site have put together a world-class collection. Some of these treasures can be seen online at http://www.mahjongmahjong.com

William Price is originally from Tranmere, England, and spent most of his working career in Africa as a banker and executive. He has lived in Swaziland, Lesotho, the Seychelles and South Africa. When William retired in 2004, he became a serious collector of Mah Jongg sets and ephemera. He currently resides outside London with his wife Pauline.

Michael Stanwick has had an interest in Mah Jongg since he began playing during his childhood in New Zealand. While researching the origins of tile sets, he collected various sets that reflected the games evolution. His research was published in six articles in The Playing-card Journal . These are now reproduced on his website (http://www.themahjongtileset.co.uk) together with examples from his collection.

Tom Sloper became active in the online Mah Jongg community from its outset. Writing the Mah-Jongg Newsgroup FAQs and a regular column in the newsletter of the American Mah-Jongg Association, Tom soon became widely regarded as an international expert on the game. He has lectured on Mah Jongg at the Smithsonian Institution, Learning Annex, Cricket Club of India, Pacific Asia Museum, and American Jewish University. He wrote new material for the classic Tuttle Publishing book Mah Jong, Anyone? , and authored his own book on Mah Jongg, The Red Dragon & The West Wind. His website, Sloperama.com, offers free information, bulletin boards, and a weekly column about Mah Jongg strategy.

Milton Stern , originally from Newport News, Virginia, is now residing in Jessup, Maryland. His many books include On Tuesdays, They Played Mah Jongg ; Michaels Secrets ; and Harriet Lane, Americas First Lady. Milton also writes a humor column for a national car collector magazine.

Woody Swain worked on Madison Avenue as an award-winning Art Director and Creative Director.

Mah Jongg is not the ancient game some people believe it to be. Evidence places the origin of the game squarely in China in the early to mid-19th century. At this time, the game was not called Mah Jongg. The earliest name we know of was Beating the Sparrow. Later, the game had two more common names, Ten Points and Sparrows. To Western ears, the Chinese regional dialects of the name Sparrows may have sounded like Mah Jongg.

Mah Jongg is basically a card game played with tiles instead of cards. The suits on the tiles closely resemble those found on a deck of cards.

The early tile set suits were taken from a late 18th to early 19th-century Chinese deck of cards using money symbols. The three suits were called Cash, Strings of Cash, and Myriads of Cash.

Joseph P. Babcock, an American businessman who was working for an oil company in China, became fascinated with the game. He was an entrepreneur who seized an opportunity to develop and export the game to the West. He claimed he was responsible for naming the modern Mah Jongg suits, probably based on the inscriptions on the tiles.

Although the pictures on the cards were detailed, their designs became streamlined and more abstract by carving them on hard bone. To the Western eye, two of the suits may have looked like circles and bamboo rods. So Cash became Circles, Strings of Cash became Bamboo Rods or Bamboo, and Myriads of Cash became Characters or Craks.

The Winds/Directions tiles can be seen at the earliest in three sets from the 1870s. They also had many additional Jokers (Flowers and Kings tiles). The three dragons made their first appearance in the next early set, collected in 1889. But the Flowers and Kings that had served as Jokers in these earlier sets were no longer included.

Wealthy Chinese women playing Mah Jongg towards the end of the last Imperial dynasty in China, c. 1912.

It is not until Stewart Culins set from 1910 (now in the Brooklyn Museum) that we have what looks basically like our Western tile set, with the three Dragons plus the Flowers and Seasons. By then the Red and Green Dragons were also being shown in other sets using the Chinese characters Dragon and Phoenix. It was tile sets with the Culin set combination (three suits and Dragons, Flowers, and Seasons) that Joseph Babcock began exporting to the West in 1920. From then on, Mah Jongg became a huge craze.