Tag Archives: thick bone mahjong

•

lila

I have the good fortune to know Allan and Lila Weitz, two wonderful Mahjong collectors from Canada. They send out a card every year. This is the card I got this year. Of course it is always fun to see the two of them, and the lovely boxes and set really caught my eye. Needless to say, although hard to see clearly in the photograph, I knew the set was a beauty. Allan kindly sent me photographs, and the story of the acquisition is at then end of the post.

 

1-law_0005_bb

The box is one of the most deeply carved boxes I have ever seen, with a Foo dog handle and two doors. Already the piece is a stand-out.

 

1-law_0007_b

This is a very unusual One Bam crane. The other Bams are Bodhi leaves, from the Bodhi tree, important to Buddha. On rare occasions these leaves appear on Bam tiles in Mahjong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhi_Tree

Here is the One Dot-how delightful is this?!

dscn00031

 

1-law_0009_bThe other Dots are pumpkins, a gourd important to the Chinese. Each pumpkin has a lot of seeds, thus its associated with the wish for many children.

http://primaltrek.com/gourd.html

 

1-law_0008_b

The Craks are surrounded by garlands, with chrysanthemums at the top and bottom. Many of you eagle-eyed readers may also notice the Chinese numbers are different. This number system is the way numbers were written in the Chinese banking world, because the numbers could not be altered on checks and other banking forms.

 

1-law_0006_b

The Flowers are beautiful and delicately carved. The ones on the right are those plants associated with the seasons, chrysanthemum, bamboo, orchid and plum blossom. And look how thick the bone is! The creature on the Green Dragon looks to be a leopard.

dscn00041

The Red Dragon features a fabulous hawk. If you look closely, the bird is holding a ribbon which surrounds Chung, a symbol for Center, representing China. Many of you know that a hawk  on a globe means Chinese military strength, and I think that is what this means here too.

 

dscn00061

The winds have plants. The East looks to be a carrot or parsnip, West is a lotus root, North a Bamboo shoot and South a gourd.

 

Here is the story, written by Allan, about how the set got to the Allan and Lila Weitz collection.

Here is a brief history of set #1

The hallmark of a true collector is patience and knowledge.  For the last 19 years, I have been acquiring mahjong knowledge and am still learning facts every day. Patience was willed to me by my father. He was a perfectionist and in his retirement, built violins by hand from scratch. I observed him working on a front or back for weeks and if he was not satisfied, onto the scrap pile went the piece and he would start again.

 I source my sets from many areas. One area in particular is appealing. There are dozens of small auction houses with websites not associated with platforms such as Invaluable, or eBay. They do not send reminders on key words. Months of patient regular checking can go by without a hit. In November, 2015, a mahjong set poorly described and photographed popped up from a small company in Canada.  My knowledge told me that this was a special set.  If I was  correct, I witnessed two similar sets sell for $8000US and $12000US. I telephoned in my bid the day before and waited. Two days later, my phone rang and I was informed that I had won the set. My heart stopped and I asked the hammer price.   $650Can + 20% . I quickly paid by credit card and instructed the local UPS store to mail the package to me. I had previously done business with this store and they were very efficient. The same day, UPS sent out the box with tracking.  I was able to follow to follow the progress of the package and delivery was scheduled for two days before Christmas Eve. I stayed home all day waiting for the driver and at 5.00pm, the tracking site flashed "Package Delivered" I rushed to the front door and found........nothing. Patience went out the window. What was my next move? I decided to go and search for the box.  It was dark and freezing cold,  The plan was to search in concentric circles from my house. I live on a crescent with about thirty homes. I walked along the middle of the road and checked front doors from left to right. About six homes up I spied a large box in the shadows of the front door. I quickly scaled the stairs to the door and there was a large box. Before touching the box, I rang the front door bell-no answer, I rang a second time- nothing.  I picked up the box and read the address label. Allan Weitz  12.... from UPS.  As I walked down the stairs, I looked at the address of the house posted on a narrow column. It was number 21, But because there was little room on the plaque, the 2 was on top and underneath was the 1. The UPS driver was probably super tired and read the address wrong. I floated home and placed the box on the kitchen counter. Slowly I unpacked the set and my heart stopped again.  The set is magnificent and is listed in my top ten sets.  This is an example of what collecting is all about. 

So, this holiday season, in addition to the really important wishes and prayers we have for family, friends, our country and the world, maybe we can be hopeful something wonderful like this set can show up in our lives too!

 

 

 

 

 

•

IMG_4622

 

The set is wonderful, with tiles of great thick bone (75% the thickness of the tile is bone. In the 1920s, the heyday of hand-carved sets coming from China, the best bone and bamboo sets had the thickest bone, and only the most skilled carvers were involved with carving those sets.) You can see how fabulous the One dot is, with its brilliant blue slightly squared off interior. The center is the plum blossom, that five petaled flower beloved by the Chinese. The other Dots are flowers, but not plum blossoms. The Bams have the One Bam peacock, frequently seen in Bone and Bamboo sets, and the other Bams have  column-like shapes. (On some of these sets I often think the 8 Bams look  a lot like legs, don't you?)

The Craks are not unusual, nor are the Winds or the Dragons.

Ah, but then the Flowers!!

IMG_4720

 

When you look at all these different occupations seen on the tiles, you can see why Cari K. dubbed it "What's My Line?" after that great old tv show in the 1950s, a time when families used to gather around the black and white television set in the living room and watch game shows together.

But there is something more important going on with these images, and this is what we will look at now.

Ray Heaton has translated the Chinese characters on the tiles:

IMG_4752

Top row are 榮華富貴, rónghuá-fùguì, glory, splendor, wealth and rank (a Chinese idiom meaning high position and great wealth).

Looking at the men depicted, it is easy to see that the man on the left is in the military, and the next man is holding a fan (not a glass of champagne as many of us first thought!) We are not quite sure about the next man who seems to be holding a heart, and pointing at it. The furthest right man seems to be a banker.

IMG_4756

I haven't come across the bottom row before.

I think they are 紳商學界, shēn shāng xué jiè, meaning something like "the gentry, merchants and scholar society".  I'll need to look this up as I'm sure it must refer to some specific classification of the educated classes.

The far left man looks to be in business, the next man could be a merchant holding an abacus, then comes a student and a man in a religious order.

But Ray does not just stop at translating, he puts things into context, because so much of what we see on Mahjong tiles needs to be understood based on greater knowledge. So here is what he came up with:

Still a bit of a puzzle, so I took a different approach to finding the meaning and how it relates to the tiles.
I think it means, "The Officials Gentry and Business Circles"; the term is used in the following extract from a document (in Chinese) by Gao Pengcheng...
"At the end of the Qing Dynasty, there was unusually active awareness of political participation by a
variety of social organizations (including The Red Swastika) and the general public. One particular event was the campaign of repaying national debt. In 1909, Tianjin Chamber of Commerce called on to form repaying debt association to make advance payment and prevent outsiders from supervising China's finance, which was well received by the officials, gentry, business and literary circles. Although the Campaign was an important social event in the late Qing Dynasty, for lack of systematic historic records, scholars have rarely discussed it in detail"
The term is also used in describing the Red Swastika society, and it's this that I suspect is the association to the tiles. 
The swastika symbol had a very benign beginning.

According to Wikipedia: 

"It is considered to be a sacred and auspicious symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism and dates back to before the 2nd century BCE."

The Red Swastika Society (世界红卍字会simplified Chinese: 世界红卍字会; traditional Chinese: 世界紅卍字會; pinyin: shìjiè hóngwànzìhuì) is a voluntary association founded in China in 1922 by Qian Nengxun (錢能訓), Du Bingyin (杜秉寅) and Li Jiabai (李佳白). Together with the organization's president Li JianChiu (李建秋), they set up their establishment of the federation in Beijing...  The swastika (卍 wàn; "infinity", "all") in Chinese and other cultures is a symbol of the manifestation of God or its creation...

Generally, its mission was a broad based effort of philanthropy and moral education. It ran  poorhouses and soup kitchens, as well as modern hospitals and other relief works. It had an explicit internationalist focus, extending relief efforts to Tokyo after earthquakes and also in response to natural disasters in the Soviet Union. In addition, it had offices in Paris, London, and Tokyo and professors of Esperanto within its membership.[2]

And perhaps the Red Swastika Society solves the mystery of why the man seems to have a heart on his chest on tile #3 top line: he really is holding a symbolic heart and his organization was founded to help those in need. Adding to the good work of this charity, one should not overlook the attempts of the wealthy to pay back some of the Chinese debt, an unfair burden that China was carrying based on very poor treaty negotiations by inept and frightened politicians. Anyone who has read Empress Dowager CiXi is very familiar with these issues.

I thought you all, would like to see what a Chinese banker dressed like, not very different from what we see on these tiles. Dee Gallo, whom I celebrated in this post, helped out.

13239115_10208438334989124_636115288768592167_n

According to Dee, her great-uncle

...is the one of the right side of this pic, wearing the Chinese clothing. His name is Zung Pei-Con, he was a banker with the Bank of Shanghai (still in business in the same building on the Bund). He was also the Russian connection for the brothers' fur and Oriental rug import business to their store in NYC. He married a White Russian lady named Olga and they lived in the International Concession in Shanghai, which was mostly Russians and Germans. My Aunt (his daughter) grew up speaking Chinese, Russian and went to a German speaking school (where she learned English so she always spoke with a German accent!). Shanghai was truly the Paris of the East back in the 30's!

IMG_4623

Mahjong really can teach us so much about the world and its different cultures. Thank you Ray for adding this to our knowledge about China.

A lot of learning came from one small set of Mahjong tiles, didn't it?

And if you want to see a bit of What's My Line, click here