A nineteenth-century game
Despite legends of great antiquity, there is no reliable evidence of mahjong before the mid-nineteenth century. The earliest surviving sets and the first written descriptions date from the late Qing dynasty, roughly the 1870s to the 1890s. By the turn of the twentieth century the game was well known in Shanghai and along the coast, and by the 1910s it was played across much of China.
Historians reach this conclusion by tracing the game's ancestors. Its suits, its claims and even some of its vocabulary appear first in card games, and only later on tiles in the familiar form.
From cards to tiles
China had a long tradition of playing cards with money suits: coins, strings of a hundred coins and myriads (ten thousands). Games of collecting matching sets with these cards were widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Card games such as madiao, and later drawing-and-discarding games, already had three suits numbered one to nine.
Mahjong took these three suits — which became dots, bamboo and characters — and transferred them to bone-and-bamboo tiles similar to domino pieces. It added the winds and dragons and the flowers, and fixed a set of rules around them.
The Ningbo story
The city of Ningbo in Zhejiang province has a strong claim to be the birthplace, or at least an early centre, of the tile game. Local tradition associates the game with a Ningbo man, often named as Chen Yumen, who is said to have refined the rules in the mid-nineteenth century. The city opened a mahjong origins exhibition in a Chen family ancestral hall near the Tianyi Pavilion.
Scholars treat the Chen Yumen story cautiously: the evidence is partly oral tradition, and other cities in the region have their own claims. What is widely accepted is that the game took shape in the Ningbo–Shanghai area and spread from there along trade routes.
Legends worth knowing — and doubting
Popular stories credit Confucius, a Ming dynasty general, or bored soldiers of the Taiping era with inventing the game. Some say the dragons represent virtues, others that the game was used to keep troops alert on night watch. These tales are entertaining but have no historical support.
Many of them were spread in the 1920s by Western promoters who wanted the game to seem ancient and exotic. Knowing the real history makes mahjong no less remarkable: a game barely 150 years old that conquered the world in a few decades.
