Welcome: Additions to this site and current News.

First up, I have added a picture of a four-suited ma diao deck to the section on ‘Money-Suited Cards‘. Just click on the green link button ‘Money-Suited Cards‘ at the top of the Home Page and then scroll to the bottom and click on the last thumbnail.

Secondly, I will be adding more pictures of tile sets from guest contributors. Together with the tile sets in the other categories, I hope these will illustrate that although the categories of tile set patterns is rather narrow (I list three – 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0), the variety of different symbols and iconography employed by Chinese manufacturers was very wide.

It is also interesting that a type of tile set that I feature in my co-authored article ‘Flowers and Kings‘ (under Tile Set History) – a tile set that had many extra tiles (called Flowers and Kings) – is very much under represented in known collections, even though it seems that there were many regional Mahjong games in China that used this type of set. This fact is illustrated if you look in the two Japanese Mahjong Museum books devoted to their immense collection of tile sets. The Flowers and Kings type of set was conspicuous by its near absence in both books.

This brings me to my last piece of news. The Flowers and Kings set type can be shown to have existed as far back as one of the first sets we know about – Karl Himly’s 1868 – 1876 ‘Bamboo Cards of Ningbo’, a reconstruction of which appears in my article ‘Mahjong(g) Before and After Mahjong(g) Part 1‘ (under Tile Set History).

If we use the ‘Dispersal Principle’ – card/tile decks far from their point of origin, in part, still retain features of the original deck, even though at the origin point that deck may have undergone substantial modification to a point where it does not resemble its original form – we can find card/tile decks that retain original features.

A case in point is a tile set used in Vietnam. Such a set was illustrated in the book ‘Le Mah-jong: guide complete. Jeu avec les 8 rois supplémentaires. [Haiphong] Nguyen Xuan Mai, 1950.’ The tile set has extra Kings and Flowers tiles. Soon to appear in the Tile Set Galleries section will be an example of such a Vietnamese set. Such sets can also be found in Thailand. The 1st Japanese MJ Museum book has some modern examples on Pages 128 – 133.