Mah Jong

BILL and SUE-ON HILLMAN: A 50-YEAR MUSICAL ODYSSEY
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A TOUCH OF CHINA

MAH JONG

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This is a set that Sue-On's father, Soo Choy, gave to a friend in Newdale many many years ago.
That friend's granddaughter, Mrs. Campbell called us this morning to see if we would like to have it!
Her grandfather passed away in 1973, and she's had this set since they moved into their Brandon home 23 years ago.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Campbell didn't have any information on this gift.

click for larger images

The front of the box with the name of the game and where it was made - China.

The front panel slides up, revealing two drawers with beautiful pulls.

This in the TOP of the box.

These are the drawers, the top one not as deep as the bottom drawer.

Opening up the top, we found the "counters" -- made of ivory (real or imitation).
The "spool-like" item is for tossing the dice.

The second drawer holds all the "tiles" and a tiny wooden box with the dice.

This is one of the tiles and a counter placed on a Canadian loonie for scale.

The dice on the Canadian loonie.

The complete set with the four tile racks in the front.
The set is sitting on our regular-size game set.

A stack of index cards with typewritten rules.

One of the sheets of handwritten playing instructions.

Back in the '70s we bought our first Mahjong set when Sue-On's brother
Kenny Choy had a small Chinese furniture shop next to Soo's.
Her Mom helped us write the values on the tiles... 80,000, etc.

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MAH-JONG HISTORY
Mah Jong (in its modern form) was actually the creation of Joseph Park Babcock (1893-1949), an executive of the Standard Oil Company. In 1912 Babcock was sent to Soochow, China, where he learnt to play a version of a Chinese tile game. Inspired by this, he created a new, simplified game, took out a trade-mark "Mah-Jongg", and exported it back home to America.
The first Mah Jong sets were sold at Abercrombie & Fitch in 1920. The game took off and soon became a massive craze across America, Britain and Europe. In a sense, Babcock was lucky- his new game co-incided with the craze for Chinoiserie (a Western interpretation of all things Oriental) which flourished in the years after the First World War. Have a look at the extraordinary Grauman's Chinese Theatre, built in 1926 on Hollywood Boulevard:
Mah Jong was especially popular with fashionable young women such as in the photo below.
But if you're interested in buying a vintage Mah Jong set, where to start? First, don't believe anybody who tries to sell you a 19th century Mah Jong set. The genuinely old sets will date to the 1920s and are most likely to have been made in Shanghai for export to the West. With the huge popularity of the game, many new Mah Jong factories were set up in the environs of Shanghai (then an international city more-or-less under control of the Western Powers), and local children were employed to paint the tiles.
Most Mah Jong tiles are made from either cow bone or 'ivorine' (an early form of plastic) which is then mounted on bamboo - with rarer and more expensive tiles made of ivory. or jade. The American Mid-West exported huge quantities of cow-bone to China, which was used in the manufacture of Mah Jong sets and then re-exported back to the United States.
More elaborate sets came in carved boxes, often featuring dragons, plants and Chinese characters. Boxed sets with the sliding front panels tend to be better quality.