Dal Negro Mah Jong

Dal Negro Mah Jong set - Bonded leather box with wooden backed tiles

The Origins of Mah Jong

No evidence for the game of Mah Jong exists before around 1880.  The history of the game is straightforward and can be viewed in two parts - "until the early 1920s" when the game was almost exclusively played by the Chinese and "after the early 1920s" when the game was discovered and immediately popularised by other nations. 

There is good evidence from Chinese researchers that Mah Jong originated in the provinces of Kiangsu, Anhwei and Chekiang near Shanghai because no records of Mah Jong are found in any other part of China before 1900. 

In 1905, Mah Jong was not really known outside its original area but over the next 15 years it spread incredibly quickly across most of China and in doing so supplanted Chess as the most popular Chinese game.  The ritual of shuffling the tiles at the start of the game, is known as "The twittering of the sparrows", presumably because of the accompanying noise.   Since Mah Jong means "the game of the sparrows" or "Sparrow tiles" in Chinese, it seems likely that this is the source of the game's title.

Numerous aficionados of the game regard the variety of Mah Jong of 1920 as the "perfect" Mah Jong and look upon all future modifications and evolutions with great disdain. 

Post 1920 Mah Jong History

When the West "discovered" the game around 1920 the Mah Jong craze enlarged by another factor again to encompass much of the world.  Many regions in the Far East play a game akin to the classical Chinese form but in particular, the British, the Americans and the Japanese all grabbed Mah Jong and ran with it in their own direction. 

Mah Jong first hit Japan in 1907 and, like North America and the British Empire, became a fad in the 1920s.  The initial game was simplified and then complicated again with new rules.  Unlike other variants, each Japanese round is an all-out race to be the first to go Mah Jong as opposed to a more careful campaign with the long term objective of amassing the greatest number of points over a series of games.

Mah Jong was taken to America by Joseph P. Babcock who began importing sets in bulk to the USA in 1922.  In order to make it a commercial success, Babcock heavily simplified the rules, much of the interesting intricacies of play being removed.   Americans were not satisfied for long with this version and began to embellish it, by the addition of an array of weird and wonderful "special hands" that allowed one to go Mah Jong and other new rules supposed to increase the enjoyment.  In 1935, The National Mah Jong League further complicated and pushed American Mah Jong even further from the original form. 

In Britain and across the British Empire, especially in India, an explosion of interest occurred about the same time. Nowadays, although the usual proliferation of rules exists, the British Mah Jong Federation publish a set of rules that are a distillation of the way that Mah Jong has been played in Britain during the 20th century and these rules are closer to Chinese Mah Jong than the Japanese or American varieties. 

You can learn more about Mah Jong from The Online Guide to Traditional Games from The Online Guide to Traditional Games.