The History of Mahjong

Mahjong is not, despite the stories, a game from the age of Confucius. It is younger than the telephone, older than the automobile, and stitched into the lives of more families than perhaps any other game ever invented.

It was born in a coastal Chinese city in the 1800s, carried across oceans in steamer trunks, banned and revived and reinvented — and along the way, it became something rare: a game beloved equally by Cantonese aunties, Jewish grandmothers in Miami, Japanese salarymen, and a new generation of players just discovering what their parents and grandparents have always known.

This is its story.

The earliest mahjong tiles that survive today date to the 1870s. They were made in the coastal cities of the Yangtze River Delta — Ningbo, Shanghai, Fuzhou — at a time when China was tilting between empire and modernity. They were carved by hand from cattle bone, dovetailed onto strips of bamboo, and engraved with the same three suits we still play with today: circles for coins, bamboos for strings of coins, and the character 萬 (wàn) for ten thousand of them.

Before tiles, there were cards. The Chinese had been playing money-suited card games for centuries — Madiao in the Ming dynasty, Peng He Pai in the late Qing — passing the same suits and the same melding logic down through generations of teahouses and family courtyards. Somewhere in the mid-19th century, someone had the idea to carve those cards into tiles.

That someone, according to the tradition kept alive at Ningbo's Tianyi Pavilion museum, was a Qing official named Chen Yumen (陳魚門, 1817–1878). Whether he invented mahjong outright or simply refined and popularized what others were already playing is a question scholars still argue about. What's certain is that he taught the game to a British consul named Frederick Harvey in the 1860s, and that Harvey's diary is the earliest Western record of mahjong's existence.

Mahjong, more likely, was a collective invention — refined across many tables in many cities, with Chen Yumen as one of its most influential voices. His statue stands in Ningbo today, in the ancestral hall where he is honored as the game's grandfather.

Every tile carries a story, and a player who knows the stories plays a richer game.

To hold a mahjong tile, then, is to hold a small piece of Chinese cosmology — a counting system, a moral system, and a poetic system, all in your palm.

In 1920, an Indiana-born Standard Oil representative named Joseph Park Babcock sat down at a mahjong table in Shanghai and recognized something. The game had structure that Westerners could grasp, drama that Westerners would love — and rules so ornate and regional that no Westerner could possibly learn them. So he simplified.

Babcock streamlined the rules. He added Arabic numerals to the character tiles and English letters to the winds, so Americans who couldn't read Chinese could still play. He invented the now-iconic double-G spelling, Mah-Jongg, and trademarked it. And in September 1920 he published a slim red booklet — Rules for Mah-Jongg — that would go through eleven printings in three years.

In 1923, Babcock and his wife Norma boarded the S.S. President Lincoln in Shanghai bound for San Francisco. In the hold were 170 tons of mahjong sets.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary commercial crazes in American history. Abercrombie & Fitch, then a sporting outfitter, sold twelve thousand sets in a single year and sent buyers across China for more. The Saturday Evening Post put a mahjong scene on its January 1924 cover. Eddie Cantor recorded "Since Ma Is Playing Mah Jong" in 1924 for the Ziegfeld musical Kid Boots; George Gershwin wrote a mahjong song for Sweet Little Devil; Jerome Kern wrote one too. Chorus girls in George White's Scandals danced in oversized headdresses shaped like Dot tiles. Women in Newport and Beverly Hills threw mahjong parties in silk pajamas.

The fad burned brilliantly and burned out. By 1925 it was over. But the game itself stayed — and slowly, quietly, it found a second life.

By the late 1930s, American mahjong was a mess. Babcock's rules competed with three or four other rulebooks; no two living rooms played the same way; arguments could end friendships. So in the fall of 1937, two New York women — Dorothy Meyerson and Viola Cecil — convened a meeting at the Essex House hotel on Central Park South to settle things.

They expected a hundred people. Nearly four hundred showed up.

That meeting founded the National Mah Jongg League. Cecil became president, Meyerson her vice president. Both were Jewish. And their innovation — published every spring on a small folded card — was a list of every winning hand a player was allowed to make that year. The hands change annually. The card is sacred. The League calls it, simply, "the Card."

Today, the National Mah Jongg League has over 350,000 members. Its 2026 card contains 72 hands across nine sections. And for nearly a century, on Tuesday afternoons in Florida condominiums and Wednesday evenings in suburban basements, four women have sat down at a folding table, opened their cards, called the Charleston, and reminded one another why they keep doing this.

The League, from its founding to today, has used its proceeds to fund philanthropy — Jewish refugee relief in the 1940s, Israel in the 1950s, the American Heart Association, Alzheimer's research, and dozens of other causes since. The Card has built more than community. It has built a kind of grace.

In 1924, a former soldier named Saburo Hirayama opened the first mahjong school in Tokyo. Within a generation, Japan had embraced mahjong with the same intensity it brought to chess and Go — and had begun to transform it.

Japanese players stripped out the flowers and tightened the rules. They added a betting mechanic — the Riichi declaration, a thousand-point wager that you'll win on your very next chance. They added dora, hidden bonus tiles revealed only at the end of a hand. They added red fives, a single red-painted tile in each suit that doubles your score if you catch it.

The result is Japanese Riichi mahjong, arguably the most strategically refined version of the game ever devised. By the 2000s, Japan had more than 22,000 mahjong parlors — jansō — where salarymen and students played late into the night under the slogan "No Gambling, No Drinking, No Smoking." In 1981, Takeo Kojima founded the Japan Professional Mahjong League. In 2018, CyberAgent CEO Susumu Fujita launched the M.League — Japan's professional team-sport mahjong league, sponsored by some of the country's largest corporations and modeled on the J.League and Nippon Professional Baseball. It has its own Olympic ambitions.

And in 2018, a small Chinese studio called Yostar launched a free-to-play online mahjong game with anime aesthetics. They called it Mahjong Soul (雀魂, Jantama). It became the gateway through which millions of Western players, most of them too young to have grandmothers who played, fell in love with the game for the first time.

In China itself, mahjong's twentieth century was not so gentle.

After the 1949 revolution, gambling was banned. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), mahjong was condemned as one of the "Four Olds" — old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas — that the new China was meant to sweep away. Tile sets were broken. Players were denounced. To play at all was to play in secret.

The ban relaxed slowly as Deng Xiaoping's reforms took hold. By 1985 mahjong was legal again. And in January 1998, the General Administration of Sport of China formally classified mahjong as the country's 255th recognized sport. The same year, China promulgated Mahjong Competition Rules — a unified, codified, 81-pattern scoring system designed to make international tournaments possible.

The first World Mahjong Championship was held in Chengdu in November 2007. The winner was a Tsinghua University student named Li Li. Five years earlier, in Tokyo, a Japanese woman named Mai Hatsune had won the first international championship and earned the nickname Dragon Lady. The era of competitive mahjong had begun.

If you've watched a film about Asian American family life in the last forty years, you have probably watched a mahjong game.

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club — the novel in 1989, the film in 1993 — is built around four immigrant women who meet weekly to play. The mahjong table is the literal stage on which mothers and daughters reckon with what was carried across the ocean and what was lost on the way.

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007) opens at a mahjong table. The actress Lisa Lu, who played one of the women at that table, also played the Empress Dowager Cixi three separate times. (Cixi, by tradition, was an avid player — though historians caution that the evidence is more lore than ledger.)

Crazy Rich Asians (2018) climaxes in one of the most-analyzed scenes in modern Asian American cinema: Rachel Chu sits across from Eleanor Young at a mahjong table, holds a winning tile in her hand — the eight of bamboo — and discards it. She lets Eleanor win. It is a gesture of refusal, of dignity, of love for a man she will not fight a mother to keep. Screenwriter Adele Lim has said she fought to include it. A real mahjong expert choreographed the moves.

In Japan, the manga and anime traditions have built whole genres around the game: Akagi, Saki, Tetsuya. And in 2022, Mahjong Soul Pong☆ brought animated mahjong to streaming services worldwide.

In the 2020s, something quietly remarkable has happened. Mahjong — long associated with grandmothers and retirees — has become a game young people are choosing on their own.

In Brooklyn, four college friends founded the Green Tile Social Club in 2022 to play Hong Kong-style mahjong with their generation. In Los Angeles, East Never Loses and Mahjong Mistress, founded by the queer Taiwanese American organizer Angie Lin, host mahjong nights at galleries and warehouses. The Bay Area's Mahjong Project, founded by writer Nicole Wong, has helped revive Cantonese house rules across the Asian diaspora and published a book on them.

The new generation is not just playing — they are reclaiming. After a 2020 controversy in which a Dallas company redesigned mahjong tiles with palm trees and flour sacks in place of Chinese characters, calling the game "in need of a refresh," the response from Asian American players was immediate and unforgiving. Mahjong, that response said, is not a kitsch object to be reskinned. It is a living tradition, a kitchen-table inheritance, a way that families across a hundred and fifty years have said we are still here, sit down, draw a tile.

Mahjong, in the end, is not really about winning. Ask any player who has been at it for more than a few years. They will tell you it is about the four of you. The Tuesday night that became thirty years of Tuesday nights. The grandmother who taught you to build the wall. The friend who finally stopped passing you jokers across the Charleston. The sound — that clack — that means everyone you love is in the same room.

It is a game that survived an empire's fall, a revolution's ban, a craze's exhaustion, and a century of crossings. It survived because four people sat down, every time, and shuffled the tiles.

We make accessories for that table. The mats that quiet the clatter without muffling the joy. The bags that carry your grandmother's set safely into the next generation. The small things that say, this is worth keeping. This is worth doing well.

Honoring tradition · Elevating every game

A short reading list for the curious: