History Of Mahjong

Mahjong is a Chinese gambling game played with 3-4 players. While luck does play a part in the game, skill and intelligence are also required. Alternate forms of the word mahjong include mah-jong, mah-jongg, mahjongg, and majiang.

There are various stories about the origin of the game. One of them says that a game similar to mahjong originated around the time of Confucius, about 500BC.

There was a beauty living in seclusion in the court of King of Wu. To keep herself entertained, she had invented mahjong on her own. Another story says that Confucius himself invented the game.

The game was then played by giving 34 tiles to each player, then players created a wall with the tiles. The exact rules implemented then are not known. We do know that the lowest possible score was 22 points and the highest was 389,928 points.

At one time, the game was exclusive to the royal class, and it was against the law for commoners to play the game. In fact, commoners who dared play the game faced a punishment of decapitation. Eventually the penalty was lifted and all classes of people were permitted to play mahjong.

With this lift on the ban, the game was introduced to many people that had never played before, and it spread throughout China. It was Joseph P. Babcock, who was a resident of Shanghai, China, that introduced the game mahjong to America in the year 1920.

Babcock is the person who coined and copyrighted the term 'mah-jongg' for the game, with a list of rules he had compiled. And to help promote the game in the US, he provided English translations to the tiles and added index letters and numbers that were familiar to card players.

It was also Babcock who was responsible for importing the first mahjong sets to the US. The popularity of mahjong reached great heights by 1923 where mahjong sets were being shipped to US by the thousands. In fact at that time, mahjong sets stood sixth in the list of exports from Shanghai to the US.

The demand for mahjong sets was so great that a man was sent to China with a bag of gold and instructions to buy all the mahjong sets he laid his hands on. In fact, the Department of Commerce even reported that there was an increased export of bone from Kansas and Chicago to China to produce more mahjong sets.

However, the late 1920's saw a tapering in the popularity of mahjong. Its popularity faded as quickly as it came, and it left importers with about two million dollars worth of unsold mahjong sets. Many considered mahjong to be one of America's list of fads while its enthusiasts continued playing the game, in the hope of rejuvenating its craze.

It was the depression of 1930s that brought the revival of table, card and board games, including mahjong. The resurgence of mahjong during that time is considered to be due to the mental agility it offered, as unemployed people were seeking mental challenges. However, the game never reached its initial popularity. It was revived (after 1935) to become one of the leisure activities Americans engaged in during the depression.

Today mahjong is gaining popularity in the USA and other countries partly because of solitaire mahjong played on computers. Although solitaire mahjong is not played the same way the gambling version is played, they both use the same tile set. The gambling version of the game can be found online in an atmosphere that allows players to challenge their luck and intelligence, for real money.