Anatomy of a Frankenstein
Over the years I have seen many Frankenstein sets, where tiles have been taken from other sets to replace lost pieces. As we all know bamboo and bone tiles were made in huge variation, not only different carving styles on the face, but also the size, colour, patina, shape, thickness of bone and bamboo grain all varied. I recently came across this set and thought it a good example of how difficult it can be to merge tiles successfully, and decided to share.
It arrived in an old tin, perhaps useful to conceal the set from prying eyes during the Mao Era when mahjong fell foul of anti-gambling policies
The main part of the ‘set’ are old tiles, hand carved in a naive style, on thick yellowish, waxy bone. Some pieces have more Haversian lines than others, and some show wear and discolouration on their face. The colour and texture of the bone suggests its Chinese rather than imported bone, unbleached when turned into tiles. There are many tiles missing!
The owner added 51 tiles from a similar set, but the bone is not as thick and the size and shape of the tiles is a little different.
We can take a closer look to identify these differences.
Adding in these tiles, however, still did not make the set complete and it was necessary to add 4 further lone pieces, 3 Bai Ban and 3 jokers. The additional Hong Zhong is very similar in bone thickness to the main tiles, but its shape is slightly squarer, the joint is shorter and it stands slightly higher. The back is a very good match to the other tiles so it would be hard to identify it during the deal and play.
A single 1 Tiao and a 9 Bing are also needed. The 1 Tiao is stylistically a very good match, but again there are slight differences in the sizing of the tile and the colour of the bamboo. The 9 Bing is quite clearly a different shape from the other 9 Bings.
The 3 Bai Ban that were added clearly came from the a single set, but again are different from the main set and the 51 tiles. The same can be said for the 2 jokers, to which was added a cornucopia (season) tile to act as the 4th joker. This cornucopia tile is very similar in structure to the 51 tiles and could be from the same set.
Despite these structural differences the matching between individual tiles is not too bad, although differences in size of the tiles and the thickness of bone clearly identify this as a Frankenstein set. When arranged all together these discrepancies stand out.
The biggest problem of all is the final addition of a wooden Hong Zhong tile. It seems the owner ran out of bone and bamboo options!
