Vintage Mah Jong
Posted in Antiques on 07/19/2010 11:52 pm by admin
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WHAT do the vintage MAH JONG?
symbols mean. Not the new or newer ones but the as I stated the Vintage .
Could you please list each symbol you know and maybe a definition.
Mah Jongg (it is correctly spelled with two Gs, and means "Big John" in Chinese) is a Rummy-like game played with tiles. There are 144 tiles in a complete set, broken down as follows:
- three suits of 36 tiles each, 4 each of ranks 1 (low) through 9 (high)
- four each of the four Winds: East, South, West and North
- four each of the three Dragons: Fire, Earth and Spirit; or Red, Green and White
- one set of four Seasons
- one set of four Flowers
The three suits are as follows:
- Bamboo (sometimes shortened to "Bam"), depicted by a number of short bamboo stalks equal to the rank, except for the bird on the One Bamboo tile; the species of bird varies from set to set, but is most often a toucan
- Circle (also called "Dot"), characterized by a number of circles or dots equal to the rank; the single dot on the One Dot tile is often decorative, similar to the Ace of Spades on a European deck of cards
- Character (also called "Number"), characterized by two Chinese characters on their faces; the top characters are the numbers 1 through 9 in Chinese; the bottom character is the number 10,000, so the One Character tile is sometimes called "ten thousand", the Two Character tile is "twenty thousand", and so on
The three dragons are as follows:
- the Fire Dragon (also called "Red Dragon") has a red Chinese character that means "fire"
- the Earth Dragon (also called "Green Dragon") has a green Chinese character that means "earth"
- the Spirit Dragon (also called "White Dragon") is completely blank; these are NOT Jokers
The Seasons and Flowers often have no symbols on them that indicate their rank. Those that do may either indicate the numbers 1 through 4 or the names of the seasons and flowers depicted on them. The seasons are loosely tied to the seasons we know of as Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. I don't know about the species of flower shown on each Flower tile, as I am not a Chinese botanist. However, I do know the flower species do not correspond to the seasons in any way.
The blue-bordered tiles in most modern Mah Jongg sets have no meaning in classic Chinese Mah Jongg. They were added later for the perverted modern rules for Mah Jongg, which I will never play.
Hope this helps. - LJS
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