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I am delighted to share this set with you. This is a one-off set: designed by a group of male friends, celebrating their friendship. (You'll see why I write this in a future post.) The bit of research I've done indicates that eight friends were together in China, between the wars. I'm pretty sure they played mahjong and at least one of them had a wonderful sense of humor. I'd like to think these men all had a great time when they were playing mahjong with these tiles. In addition to the many wonderful images, each type of tile has a saying, some we can understand today, but others remain a bit of a mystery.

I imagine this group had a lot of fun coming up with some unusual visuals and sayings for each kind of tile. Knowing what they wanted, they commissioned this high-quality set, with thick bone and thin bamboo. The bone to bamboo ratio is about five or four to one, and the set of tiles is one of the heaviest I've ever lifted. The tiles are not only deep, they're long and wide. The carver did a magnificent job. He might not even have known how to speak English or write the Roman alphabet (some of the letters are charmingly a bit off) but it's very clear what many of the tiles "had to say."

Let's start with the above group of tiles. The Bam suit has stylized Bamboo stalks, shaped something like barbells. The saying under the 2 Bams, PLAY WITH YOU, rings truer this year than it would have before, and makes me a bit teary. What we've all been missing during this Covid time is being with friends. Those of us who play mahjong have particularly missed being at the table with friends, playing the game with real mahjong tiles.

The caption under the One Bam is quite fun. Yes, the One Bam is usually a bird, but the line in place of the bird One Bam brings a smile. The phrase "IT'S A BIRD" reminds me of Superman's opening lines "It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's Superman." Superman first "appeared" in 1938.

And how do you like the "Soap," (the nickname a lot of us have for the white Dragon), this time a bar of soap, still in its wrapper. I didn't realize that two ingredients of early Palmolive must have been derived from palm and olives. Who knew that nickname "Soap" has been around for so long? Here's a bit about Palmolive's history.

https://www.milwaukeemag.com/story-behind-this-bar-of-palmolive-soap/

The Bam suit
The Bams

The 3 Bam has "BOY CATCH ORDER" and I have no idea what that means. 4 has"GET OFF MY SUIT" maybe a take on "Get off my seat" or a reference to getting into comfortable clothing in order to relax. 5's "WHO'S STUCK" doesn't seem to have any easy explanation, but I'll go out on a limb here and say I don't know anyone who wants to be stuck back in 2020. With #6, "TIME" can you see the "font" on the tile is the same as on TIME magazine, or as close as they could get it? The magazine was first published in NYC in 1923, so this set dates to 1923 at the earliest.

The Time Magazine logo

In the game of Craps, a roll of 7 or 11 is a natural. That must be what the 7 Bam is about "NATURAL BONES" (bones is a nickname for dice). 8's "GARDEN GATE" may refer to some of the "named" hands in some other forms of mahjong. Although I haven't been able to find the exact hand, there are Gardens (Greta's Garden), and Gates (Heavenly Gates). I like the way "8" and "gate" rhyme too. The 9 Bam's "GIMME A POOL" remains a mystery. Perhaps a reference to a betting pool?

More on this wonderful set to come in future posts.

By the way, there's a lot to be said about playing mahjong with different types of tiles. Some friends and I played with this set –years ago of course– and it gave us a lot of pleasure and a real mental workout. I encourage you to try different sets: it may be a bit harder but it's really good for you. And fun. And isn't that what mahjong's all about?

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It never ceases to amaze me how wonderful some of the German carved sets can be. The companies certainly hired some of the best talent around to come up with designs. Wood sets, typically thought of as the low end of the product line, were not ignored. Designers came up with wonderful interpretations.  This set would be a delight in anyone's collection. We saw another set a while ago, owned by Mim. This one is just as special.

 

The Bams still have their vibrant colors, but take a look at the unique design images. The Evens have Horizontal and Vertical orientations,  but the Odds are diagonals. To me, the 7 and the 9 look a bit like Peacocks. The One Bam bird looks a bit like a pigeon, with a rounded tummy.

 

These Dots make me smile. From 1-9, no Dots are the same pattern. They are all unique, varying from elaborate stars on the One Dot to simple circle with a dot center on the 8 Dot.

 

These Craks tho are just fabulous. Look at all of the energy they radiate. Each one has great style: the wan characters, and both Arabic and Chinese numbers. It is not often I fall for a set because of the Craks, but this is one such set. The style is very German as well.

 

 

The Winds carry on with that wonderful flair we saw on the Craks. You will note the letter "O" on some of the tiles: in German East is Ost. The Dragons are a bit difficult to make out tho it is clear their heads are up at the top of the tiles. The blank ones are the White Dragons. The Flowers are surprisingly simple (The bottom right one is upside down, which I think makes it look a bit like an alien creature with two big eyes!) You will see the Orientation points here as well, because one of the styles of play gives points for Flowers if they are the same for your seat or the round being played.

 

It came in these little cardboard drawers, with counting sticks and dice.

 

Notice how tiny the tiles are compared to the Chinese Bakelite one on the rack in the top of the photo: the tile on the right is the one for this set.

 

Here is the maker of the set, certainly not a company I have seen before. Look carefully at the box top and you will see a sparrow to the left of the label-this is "the game of sparrows, of course!"

Most of you see how the designs on the tiles are not truly centered. Our tiles expert Tony Watson weighed in with how they designs were done: a metal tool was dabbed with a paint-soaked pad and then pressed onto the block of tiles, which are then sawn to size. You can sometimes see how they didn't get the registration correct, either in the stamping or the sawing (or both).

I wrote this back in 2018, and cannot remember where the images came from. Apologies for not giving credit.

 

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Coin from a Chinese New Year Coin set. Photo courtesy of William Price

Happy New Year. It's the Year of the Pig, which runs from Feb 5th 2019 until Jan 24 2020, according to China highlights.

https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/chinese-zodiac/pig.htm

CNN gives us information about how to celebrate.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/lunar-new-year-2019/index.html

Because for some of us, no celebration is complete without mahjong, here's a tile featuring a pig at the bottom from a fabulous fully carved Chinese Bakelite set:

Tile courtesy of William Price

The dog on the top looks a lot like mine. Here's a photo of my dog contemplating a toy bought to celebrate the Year of the Pig.

 

Five minutes later, for a really "durable" toy:

And now a step back in time to 2002 where mahjong is part of a Chinese New Year celebration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAZQ04ZzAyg

Kung Hei Fat Choi   Happy New Year!

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Fully carved sets are rare, as are ivory ones, so it was amazing to get an email about one. The owners were curious about it. Their set is a true Mahjong Treasure, and I am delighted to share the images with you. We'll start with the box.

It's made of pigskin, painted in red and gold and embossed. Note there's a keyhole for a lock toward the top of the front.

People who have tiles that are a combination of a white material and bamboo often think their sets are made of ivory and bamboo, but usually their sets are bone and bamboo. This set is pure ivory. You can see the criss-cross chevron pattern, known as Schreger lines, on the top two tiles.

 

We'll go to the One Dot, the inspiration for the Joker pattern of many of the newer sets. Here the Dragon is pretty easy to decipher, although he is way too big to be entirely on the tile. He's curled up, and we see three parts of his body. If you think of the circle as a clock face, his head is in the center of the tile, his neck at 4:00, the middle part of his body (upside down) from 11:00 until 1:00, and his tail at 8:00. Fabulous!

 

Now we will see how the craftsmen designed all the suits.

The One Bam is a hawk on a globe, a symbol of Chinese military strength. I love that MJ is carved into the tile. The other Bams are bamboo shoots. Dots 2-9 are lovely delicate flower heads. The Craks are floral garlands. But look at the Chinese numbers on the Craks. Those of you with sharp eyes, or those of you lucky enough to own Dee Gallo's Money Set, will notice the numbers are not those we normally see on tiles. Instead they are the ones used in Chinese banking: the numbers are different so as to make it more difficult to change a number into a higher one. Think about Arabic numbers-it's pretty easy to change a 1 into a 7; the Chinese banking numerals made altering numbers impossible.

The other numbered tiles continue with the same patterns.

Onto the Winds, Dragons and Flowers. The Winds, normally quite dull in appearance (except in a Dee Gallo set) are garlands with different squash. In Chinese culture, squash or gourds are symbols of wishes for lots of children, because they have so many seeds in them. And I think the garlands are really vines. (per Primal Trek)

From Primal Trek http://primaltrek.com/gourd.html

The Chinese language has a large number of written characters but a smaller number of spoken sounds so many Chinese characters share the same or similar pronunciation (please see Hidden Meaning of Symbols).  The Chinese have a strong propensity to associate similar sounding words. For example, trailing gourd vines are described in Chinese as man (蔓}. This same character can also be pronounced as wan and has the exact same pronunciation and meaning as 万 which means "10,000".  Because the gourd contains many seeds, the Chinese associate the gourd with "10,000 children".  In ancient China, parents hoped for many sons and grandsons so the gourd became an important charm symbol for a large family with many children.

We have a Dragon with the Red Chung symbol (The Chung represents China, as does the Dragon) and the Phoenix with the Green Dragon. (When the Dragon and Phoenix are paired together, the Phoenix represents the Empress. ) The White Dragon is the abstract frame we often see on newer tiles. And of course we have the always delightful children at play, this time some are playing with firecrackers. You will see the #1 tile at the bottom shows a boy holding his ears: he does not want to hear the explosion!

Thanks to Ray Heaton, we have a translation of the characters on the Flower tiles:

皆大歡喜, jiēdàhuānxǐ, to everyone's delight and satisfaction.
逍遙快樂, xiāoyáo kuàilè, unconstrained happiness.

 

The full set, in all its glory.

From the owner of the set:

I have a vintage Mah Jong set brought from China by my grandmother who was in Shanghai with the U.S. Navy in 1936. She enjoyed Mah Jong very much and had three sets when she died, but this one, an ivory set in a beautiful decorated pigskin box, I kept. The tiles are 1' 3/16 x 7/8" x1/2".
I have ascertained the tiles are ivory, not bakelite or any other substance by examining them with a 10 power lens and comparing them to the photos of ivory that you placed on your web page.
In thinking more about it, my father was about 5 years old when he was in China, because he talked about his mischievously pushing his "Ama" (nurse) over very easily as she had bound feet. That would put the family there in 1928 which I think is a logical date for acquiring the set.
The other thing is that the Flowers, or as my grandmother called them "Pretties", are a set showing a boy lighting doing all sorts of play things, such as lighting firecrackers, standing on his hands or playing an instrument. 
A later email: 
But I am extraordinarily pleased to discover that it is such a superb example of Mahjong sets, and possibly one of a kind. My grandmother shipped it out to me when I was first married in 1965, along with some oriental carpets and a Chinese pillow box that had been presented to my grandfather by a "mandarin". U.S. Military men were held in high esteem back in the 1920's and it is possible that the ivory set was a gift to him as well. I think it is interesting that the chest/container is relatively unremarkable, and I wonder if that was to "hide" the ivory so that it was not so tempting to steal. Just speculation on my part. 
I think its interesting the box has a real lock on it. (There were many ways to secure mahjong boxes to try to keep their contents safe. Opening panels with tricky ways to open them were all the rage.) Thieves could just have been picked up the box and stolen it, so the lock was probably just to keep people from opening it and taking out pieces to play with, perhaps losing them.
I think I "speak" for all of us with a big thanks to this reader. What a beautiful way to start the new year.
Here are a few additional images of the box, and the dice holder which reminds me of one of those  chops used to stamp characters at the bottom of documents or letters.

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Snapshot of Michel Arnaud's photograph in Mah Jongg The Art of the Game

Colorful metal counters

 

This is a relatively rare set, and I took an iphone photo of the photograph by Michel Arnaud in Mah Jongg The Art of the Game, published by Tuttle.  The caption in the book, page 90, reads: "The Chinese Game Company in Baltimore made this rare set of hollow tin tiles. The tiles are conservative in design, but the counters are very colorful. The box lid is a typographical triumph."

The visible Flower tiles are the four callings: fisherman, wood cutter, farmer and scholar. You can see Bams, a few Dots, and the Craks. There's a mystery in the Craks-and who will crack it open? What's wrong? One eagle-eyed reader pointed it out to me the other day.

And the answer is: The 6 Crak has the Chinese number for 9, and although you can't see it, the 9 Crak has the number for 6!

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Many of us come across interesting handmade sets, and most of the time we have no idea where they came from, or their story. This time we are lucky: we can see the set and know how it came about 55 years ago! The tile suits are unique in design, as are the Jokers and Flowers, but I think we could all be ready to play with it with only a few seconds of "which tile is which."

A while ago I gave a talk, and afterwards a woman approached me to tell me that her husband had a set made of ceramic tiles. Of course I was intrigued, and I asked her to email me photos of the set. I received them the other day. So here is the story, from the tile set's artist.

"My wife and I enjoyed your recent talk about the art of mah jongg.  The variety of styles and designs of the tiles is amazing.  My wife mentioned that I had made a set of tiles in the early 1960s, and you told her that you would like a picture of the set.  Well, here you go . . .  This is the first time that the entire set has been out of the box in I don't know how many years.  I don't think I've ever actually played a game with it.

You talked about how so many mah jongg designs tell stories.  My set doesn't tell a story, but, yes, it does have one.  I had a friend in high school whose family played mah jongg.  I joined them several times and enjoyed the game.  They recommended a book about how to play - I know I still have it packed in a box somewhere.  I started making myself a set out of ceramic tiles, and I finished it probably around 1962. 

The designs are painted with enamel and then sealed with nail polish.  

 

The "cracks" feature a stylized F - for Foreman.

The white dragons are blank tiles.  If I were making them today I would probably have painted black flame shapes to match the green and red ones. 

The eight tiles with the shape designs may be the "jokers".  The shapes are copied from Corps insignia of the Union army in the Civil War.

From Wikipedia

I don't remember the purpose of the four small tiles with E, S, W, and N.  (ED: These would be the Wind indicators, to convey which Round is being played. In some versions of the game, the first four games are the East Round, the next four the South Round, etc. These are important for many reasons, including getting the right Flower or wind can give you extra points in a game.)

The other small tile, with the design, was intended to be passed to whoever is "East."

(Seen just under the ESWN in the 2nd photo. You will notice that the E is a different color from the other Winds, and the case in the Wind tiles as well. Having the East be a different color can also be the case with racks: you will get a set with four racks, one being a different color. This helped to indicate who was the first person to start off being East in the round of four games.)

(ED: Many of us who are East pass the dice to indicate who will be East the next game) 

I’m glad you like the set.  It was fun to make, and it certainly brings back memories.
 
I have attached scans of the face tiles (I think we called them “pretties”).  Notice that there small chips on some of the tiles.  They have survived surprisingly well over the years, but . . .
 

The wonderful portraits on the Flowers!

Do go ahead and show the set on your blog and it may help bring other homemade sets "out of hiding."
 
    
The artist was living in New York State at the time he made the set. He drew the likenesses of his friends on the tiles.
I know some of us are particularly wild about these hand-made one of a kind sets: they prove how important the game was in the lives of the people who played it, then as is true today.

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Those of us who play the game love the activity itself. But some of us like to set the scene by having a beautiful table. And, you know, it does make a difference: playing on a lovely table adds to the enjoyment of the game.

Some tables are antiques, and skillfully carved. The drawer you see in the middle can hold the player's winnings.

 

Some tables have carving and incredible inlay, such as this one. Notice the different colors used for the inlay. Although this is called a mahjong table, I doubt it was designed for playing the game. It lacks some of the drawers one often sees on special MJ tables.

 

Here's the top of the table. I don't know about you, but I would have a hard time concentrating on my tiles if I were playing on this beauty!

 

Some people have taken their affection for the game and inserted their beloved tiles into a tabletop. It certainly would be impossible to play on this table! I'd guess this is used as a side table or coffee table.

 

There are other fun tables, such as this one on etsy:

Isn't this adorable?

And then we have a table that is a work of art, beautifully painted, and that's practical for learning how to play:

Photo by Ann Sherman

Look carefully at this beauty. (If you click the photo you will get a better close up.) You will see a rack to lean the tiles against, just above those oval shaped indentations intended for the long bone counters used in the early days for keeping score. I guess those round indentations are to hold the dice. Scoring the game, which was quite complicated back in the days, became a lot easier with all the scoring information around the outside edges. Flower tiles, used as bonus tiles, could be placed in little squares on the sides (see lower right.) Your exposures: Chows, Pungs and Kongs, go in the little boxes further to the right. (BTW: in some versions of the game, a run of tiles is called a Chow.)

 

Photo by Ann Sherman

The center dragon is fabulous. This table was made for Chinese play, or at least for the variation of game that only needs 18 tiles per wall. Notice how the rectangles around the edges of the center of the table tell players where to place their tiles.

Lucky owner Rod Limke has this beauty where it can be admired:

How wonderful is this?!

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It will not come as a surprise to any of you that I love many different types of sets. I have a special place in my heart for one-of-a-kind ones, perhaps made for children to enjoy. I came upon this special little set, briefly on ebay, and I had to share it with you.  These tiles are hand-painted, not carved, and the set must have been loved.

How adorable are these Dragons? They might have even been painted by a child. Each one is different. They each have their own distinct looks: some look like caterpillars, others like dogs, and even T-Rexes.

 

 

The Wind characters have been painted with élan and enthusiasm. I like that the Western letters are on the top and bottom of the tiles so that they can be read both right-side up and upside down. I suspect that someone older must have worked on these tiles, if I am right about the Dragons.

 

These Craks are delightful, and the energy on the Chinese numbers and Wans radiates out from the tiles. Once again, the designs are much more sophisticated than those of the Dragons.

 

The Bams have their own unique designs, so likely done by someone with great creativity (unless they were copying some other set I have yet to find and identify).

 

The Dots have their own special style as well.

The more I think about it, the more I feel this set was made by several people, working together to make a set to be played with and enjoyed.  I imagine a scene around a table, with perhaps a parent or two, and a child, collaborating on a game  which would be a wonderful way to pass the time together as a family.

Certainly these tiles brought a smile to your face, as they did to mine.

A set does not have to be a masterpiece to be a treasure.

 

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Who doesn't love Dragons? In Mahjong Dragons are Honors tiles, sometimes helping to increase point totals (in certain ways of play). On tiles they can be figural images of that creature (the MOST fun!) or Chinese written words (characters), or sometimes the letters C, F, P or B. The term "Dragon" was not the original one for these special tiles, rather these Honors began as references to the game of archery, as described in the link below.

http://www.mahjongg.com/dragons.htm

We all grew up hearing stories about these fantastic creatures, although the tales were different depending on where you grew up. If you lived in the U.S. or Europe, you were sure to hear stories of fierce Dragons burning up the countryside with their breaths of fire,  terrifying the countryfolk. But in Asia, Dragons were kind and benevolent.

 

Below is an image of St George killing a Dragon, clearly one of the European kinds.

St George killing a Dragon by Martorell in 1435 from Wikipedia

 

No one in China would ever kill a Dragon.

The flag of the Qing Dynasty, 1889-1912

Above is the flag of the last Dynasty in China. Chinese Dragons only appear when times are good, so perhaps this Dragon represents a bit of wishful thinking on the part of the government, given what was going on then! (Read Jung Chang's Empress Dowager Cixi, if you have not already done so, to find out the terrible situation that existed in China during those years.)

People in China have always loved Dragons, and they are everywhere. Dragons decorate everything, including Imperial building walls, as seen below.

 

Chinese wall dragons from Wikipedia

 

The great marketers of the Mahjong companies took advantage of the world's fascination with Chinese culture, bringing bits of it into the lives of Americans and Europeans in the 1920s. Some companies went so far as to link the game to Confucius, who marketers claimed invented Mah-Jongg. Trouble was, Confucius had already been dead for over 2,000 years by the time the game came about!  But there actually might be a tie to Confucius, other than the inspired thinking of the Mah-Jongg Sales Company:  the three different colors of the dragon tiles represent the cardinal virtues taught by Confucius:  red is benevolence; green sincerity; and white filial piety.

In the early 1920s, people really got into the game. (Some of us still do!)  When gathered around the MJ table, people dressed in Chinese-themed clothing, and ate Chinese food.

 

Mahjong was everywhere, and MJ themes often appeared on magazine covers. On this copy of Judge, a young lady wearing Chinese-themed garb is sharing the cover with a Dragon, a somewhat subtle reference to MJ. You can see that the Dragon is Chinese, because he's lacking the wings we'd see on a European one. And the young lady doesn't look scared either, adding to the Asian origin of the fabulous creature. (But what's going on with her left foot? )

These next Dragons are from my book: Mah Jongg The Art of the Game. Photos by Michel Arnaud

Waterbury Button Company

Aren't these fun, skinny little Dragons? And look at the dive-bombing crane!! Interestingly, we don't know much about this set. Even the Waterbury Button Company doesn't have any information about it. But given that a button company made a set of mahjong tiles, I'd venture to say that there must have been a reason. The Dots look like buttons. And those Bams: toggles you'd see on coats. Subtle advertising, right?

Below we see a Phoenix on the top row, nothing like our Phoenix either, and a Dragon on the bottom. Chinese Dragons like to fly in the clouds, so you can only see part of this one's body. He's also playing with a pearl, seen in red on tile 3, as Chinese Dragons do,, although the meaning of the pearl is not clear.

Exquisite Phoenix and Dragon, from the mahjongmahjong.com collection

And next is one of my favorite game accessories, a delicately carved ivory wind indicator, about 2" across, in three pieces. The top nub, holding the three pieces together, is the pearl the dragon plays with. BTW: this photograph clearly shows the cross-hatching only seen in ivory.

 

This is a beautifully colored set with wonderful designs, featuring fabulous Dragons:

Chinese Game Company

These Dragons are really different. Want to guess why? The set was made by the Chinese Game Company out of Montreal!! Montreal has emotional and cultural ties to France, so we have European winged dragons here, looking like they are ready to be placed on shields carried  into battle.

Dragons have long held a place in our thoughts.  A man in Pennsylvania was intrigued enough by Dragons to make a bellows into this charming piece, recently sold by American Primitive Gallery. Although there are no wings here, the artist, a blacksmith working with fire every day, must have been thinking about Dragons breathing fire right? Clearly this would have been the European version of the creature.

19th Century Dragon made by a blacksmith in Pennsylvania.

Dragon with mouth open

There are theories as to how the idea of Dragons came about, and Smithsonian Magazine covers some:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/where-did-dragons-come-from-23969126/

I love the idea that dinosaur fossils were identified as Dragons. "Speaking" of dinosaurs, here's up-to-the-minute news about T-Rex, now an essential part of another game many of us love.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-monopoly-token-pieces_us_58cad9a3e4b0ec9d29d9eca0?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

 

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This is what I would call a pretty nondescript box. Years ago I would not have bothered to open it, thinking there would not have been anything of interest in it. But wrong!! I have learned that there is not necessarily a relationship between the ornate nature of the box and the quality of the set: often great sets come in simple boxes, and wonderful boxes can house simple sets.

I found these images while looking at sets up for auction on ebay. The set itself is incomplete, but the tiles that are left are stunning. It is interesting to note that many sets can have  all the tiles (Suits, and Winds and Dragons) "fully carved" but not all do. Here we have a mix of fully carved and (somewhat) plain although beautiful.

The Bams are lovely. I love the slightly rounded edges of the stalks. The One Bam is the Phoenix, the King of the Birds, holding a peony, King of the flowers. Notice the finely carved details on the bamboo stalks.

 

The Dots certainly have lovely details, especially the One Dot with the floral center. Obviously six tiles are missing, and replacements will have to be found or blanks located and carved.

 

But look at the normally drab Winds. Here butterflies surround the Wind characters. These tiles are somewhat similar to the White Dragons we saw on the ebony set. When sets are incomplete and tiles have to be located and subbed in or carved, my dear friend Katherine Hartman designs beautiful White Dragons to be carved instead of the plain white tiles often seen in old bone and bamboo sets. Given that tiles are missing, this embellishing does not interfere with the integrity of the set.

 

Stylized frames surround the Craks.

 

The colors are lovely. You have to look carefully, but the Green and Red Dragons have bats at the corners, with longevity symbols on each edge. The Red # flowers probably were all children at play. I have seen that #2 one before, and I never can quite figure out what that child is doing- perhaps he is a contortionist??!! (If you click on the photo you can see it enlarged, to take in all the lovely details.) There are enough blanks to have the missing four Flowers carved, and these are groupings of Flowers that are seen from time to time, so the right Flowers could be carved to add to the set.

So, worth taking a peek , right?

BTW: The set sold for over $3,000. Let's all remember to open any boxes that might contain a  MJ set!!