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The BMA Culin tile set, courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum Of Art, New York. Collected in Shanghai in 1909. This tile set consists of the three Suits, the four Directions, three Honours and a set of both ‘Flowers’ and ‘Seasons’. This structure of the tile set and basic design on the tiles – a bird on the number one String of Cash/’Bamboo’ plus rods in that suit, an elaborate number one Cash/’Circles’ with multiple circles on each tile in that suit and ornamental plants on the four ‘Flowers’ and pastimes, in this case, on the ‘Seasons’ tiles – is what was and is commonly found in export tile sets from the 1920’s to the present. Examples of these are displayed in the Galleries below.
However, this tile set also has Winds/Directions tiles that have an engraving style found on Winds/Directions tiles in very early tile sets. This early engraving style is a Relict feature.
See a larger image of this set in the Bone and Bamboo section below.
Bamboo was most likely the earliest material used for thick cards, pái, that is, tiles, onto which were engraved the insignia or motifs that constitute the groups in what we now call the Mahjong tile set in the West, and commonly má jiàng pái or má què pái in the East. The earliest tile set so far documented was made…
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Introduction. Bone and Bamboo were by far the most common materials used during the height of Mahjong manufacture in China in the early 1920s. But even before the export boom, bone and bamboo were used for tile sets as early as the 1870s. These early sets can be seen in Gallery 1.0. Bone and bamboo tile manufacture in China was…
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This Gallery contains the contributions of many guest collectors and should be viewed as a continuation of the other Galleries in Category 2.0, so that the tile sets featured serve to provide a more comprehensive panorama of the diversity of the tile set Category. All the photos were taken by the collectors themselves. Captions to many of the new entries…
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