The history of Mahjong, according to some legends, can be traced back to about 4,000 years ago. This could make it one of the first games in history. Some say that at this time the Chinese aristocrats were the only ones on the planet who played it and even kept the rules secret so that the peasants could not learn it. Other legends relate it directly to the Oracle used by Chinese fortune tellers in their predictions.
When astronomers began to record the progressions of the Sun, Moon, and planets, they used a simple device, a checkerboard, to calculate the positions of the heavenly bodies. Movement through the skies was tracked by moving counters around the board’s divisions. This, or another similar, It is possibly also the origin of very widespread games, such as Parcheesi, or goose.
But it is precisely in Mahjong that some remains of this origin are recognizable, such as the fact that the cardinal points are inverted since it is a question of representing a celestial map, not a terrestrial one, or that thirteen tiles are distributed, which are the months of the lunar calendar.
Another legend dates its creation to a more recent time, around the year 500 BC at the hands of Confucius. According to this legend, the tokens of the three dragons, Red, Green, and White (in Chinese, literally center, literally prosperity, and literally white) , would represent the Confucian virtues of benevolence, sincerity, and filial piety. The Red Dragon would refer to China (literally the Country of the Center ). Also according to this legend, Confucius would have been in love with birds, which would explain the name “sparrow” that the game also receives.
A game, more or less related to today’s Mahjong, was invented in the Tang dynasty, during the years of Emperor Tai Zong’s reign (626-649), for the amusement of the imperial household and the nobility. However, there is no evidence of Mahjong’s existence before the time of the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century.
The general consensus is that the game was developed around 1850 based on existing card and domino games. Many historians believe it was based on a card game literally called the shredded sheet game.(this is because at the beginning the tokens were made of cardboard like today’s playing cards) from the beginning of the Ming dynasty.
This game was played with forty cards numbered 1 to 9 in four different suits plus the spring tiles, similar to today’s Mahjong. According to some, the game was created by army officers during the Taiping Rebellion to pass the time. According to another theory, it would have been created by a nobleman who lived around Shanghai between 1870 and 1875. Others believe that it was the work of two brothers who lived in the city of Ningpo.
But in reality, Mahjong as we know it today has a much shorter history, dating back to the end of the 19th century, in the last years of imperial China. In fact, the oldest object identifiable as a Mahjong tile dates back to 1880.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Mahjong was not well known outside of its original region. However, when China became a Republic in 1911 it quickly spread throughout most of the country and supplanted chess in popularity. The Chinese gradually picked out the inelegant elements of the game and incorporated some rituals into the game’s methodology that have remained ever since. Most of these rituals take place at the beginning of the game and have to do with shuffling tiles, building the four walls into a square (the wall formation) , and dealing. These gradual improvements, which nominally ended between 1910 and 1920, produced a game of great mathematical as well as physically aesthetic beauty.
The first time Mahjong was mentioned in a language other than Chinese was in 1895, in an article by the American Stewart Culin. Stewart was an anthropologist who lived in Taiwan and in one of his articles, when recounting the customs and history of the area, he mentioned this unique game as one of the dominant pastimes of the time.
The game first began to spread among Westerners residing in Asia. Some British citizens living in China at the time played it in the most cosmopolitan cafes in Shanghai. A few years later, in the first decade of the 20th century, Mahjong was exported to Japan, where the first Mahjong clubs were created. In the United States, the game was introduced in 1920, quickly gaining popularity and spreading throughout the country. Because the rules came from across the ocean and had to be translated from Chinese, most Americans played by the rules they could understand and made up the rest.
As a result, various types of rules were created, and it was not until 1925 that the rules were standardized. Joseph Park Babcock, a representative of the Standard Oil Company, wrote a book called Rules of Mahjong which was known as “the red book”. From that moment on, the game had great success in England and the United States, where it became known under commercial names such as “ Pung Chow” or “ Game of Thousand Intelligences ”.”, forming part of the fashion for everything oriental.
It was played mostly by women. In the thirties, in the United States, several revisions of the rules were made until in 1937 the “National Mahjong League ” (NMJL) was created and the regulations were standardized with the book ” Maajh: The American Version of the Ancient Chinese Game ( Maajh: the American version of the ancient Chinese game). Although in the twenties it had been a game accepted by people of all kinds of races, from this officialization it was considered a Jewish game, because many of its players were; and even the NMJL was considered to be a Jewish organization. The western version of the game is called “new style”, although it seems that the origin of these modifications comes from Beijing and Shanghai, so this new style is sometimes called “Shanghai-style”.
Today, the game is very popular all over the world, being played in clubs and on online platforms. Despite the madness that occurred in the first quarter of the 20th century and its subsequent fall into oblivion in various parts of the world, it never lost its followers. During the 20th century, the game has spread throughout the world, with particular rules depending on the geographical area in which it was found, but without ever losing its essence.
In China itself, Mahjong was banned after the communist revolution in the late 1940s, as it was seen as a capitalist pastime that encouraged gambling. Until the Cultural Revolution almost 20 years later the game was not allowed again.
Be that as it may, the undoubted thing is that currently most of the players are in Taiwan and the United States, due to the decades that it was prohibited in communist China. However, with the political reforms undertaken in the early 1990s, Mahjong has become an official sport since 1998 in mainland China and, although it has never stopped being played in homes, the stamp of Mahjong players on the streets of Chinese towns.
Along with the decriminalization of its practice, the Chinese government published an official regulation that is the one that governs the official world championships, the first of which was held in Tokyo in 2002. In this way, it has been tried to recover a cultural heritage of China that was being usurped by other Asian nations.
Mahjong is so popular throughout Asia that many countries consider it their national game. There are many variants adapted to each country, such as the Japanese, the Korean, the Vietnamese, or the Filipino, and it is normal for any festive event, celebration, meal, or even business, to end with a few games of Mahjong.
In Europe the game enjoys little popularity, being more known as the solitaire 247 type variant that is played online, the Shanghai. Even so, both in France and in Holland the game is very popular, and the European Mahjong Association has even been created, which every day has a greater number of Federated.
I hope that this little journey through the history of Mahjong has been to your liking and that it will help you continue to delve into it if you still do not know it.