Ningbo Mahjong Museum
I finally got to visit the famed museum and want to share my impressions with you. It’s not a self-contained museum but a courtyard area within the popular Tian Yi Ge, an historic library and garden in Ningbo. When I say garden, I mean in the sense of a Southern China garden, so its a walled space with pavilions, gardens and a lake connected to each other by walkways, with gates or archways leading into a series of courtyard areas. Tianyi Ge was founded in the Ming Dynasty as a library, housing at its peak an estimated 70,000 volumes. When you enter through the main gate the first few courtyards you visit still house books, kept in their traditional book cabinets and chests, and preserved using techniques dating from the Ming.
The courtyard that contains the Mahjong Museum is at the back of the complex, beyond the lake, the bookshop and teahouse and is erratically signposted. It seems to have been located inside this complex as an example of ‘traditional culture’ rather than there being any historical connection between the site and mahjong. Once inside, however, the entire space is dedicated to the history of mahjong, from a Ningbo perspective naturally. Even the walls and floors of the courtyard are decorated with text and images about mahjong and its precursor dice and card games.
There’s a diorama of three men around a mahjong table, a literati figure, a foreigner (I assume representing Mr Babcock, the American who first exported the game commercially) and a Japanese man. The fourth seat is left vacant for visitors to join the game for a photograph.
The main event is the pavilion which contains many display cases with sets of mahjong tiles from China and around the wall. Each set is laid out in an acrylic box so all the tiles are visible and is labelled in Chinese, Japanese and English identifying the material and the place from which they came. Disappointingly, no date attributions were made on any of the sets. Almost all of the sets on display have 144 tiles and are made of bone and bamboo or various types of plastic.
The most surprising materials used for the sets on display were paper-covered wood and stone. None of the exhibits claimed to be ivory and very few had tiles that did not follow the standard sets we see today. This was something of a disappointment as it gave the impression that the history of the game was much more straightforward than it seems from the work mahjong historians. There was no sign of regional variations in the number of tiles, nor were differences in ‘flower and season’ tiles particularly evident, although one set had vegetables rather than flowers. Cute!
There were some variations. A few sets had official, cornucopia, fisherman (or cat) and fish tiles rather than flowers, but I was hoping to see much more variety. There were several sets from China and Japan that had four flower tiles and then four extra blank tiles, or four joker tiles or four ‘ting pai’ tiles, or seasons written as characters rather than with pictures. There were no sets where the ‘flower and season’ tiles formed four-character sayings or poems. No sets with five winds rather than winds and dragons. One or two sets did have dragon and phoenix tiles, but I have seen these included in revival sets too, so not so unusual. Most variations appeared in the sets exhibited from outside of China and made for export.
Overall, the display was very interesting to see and seemed to fascinate most of the visitors who were there. It did not, though, have any sets that were particularly early examples of mahjong, nor were there any sets that raised any questions about the game’s history. The story told by the exhibition is essentially that the game evolved from dice, to cards, to a 144 tile game that was exported from China around the world. The subtleties in that process and the influences upon it, cannot be seen in Ningbo.
There were several sets from Korea on display, as well as sets from Japan, Vietnam, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Before leaving Tian Yi Ge I tried to buy a catalogue for the exhibition or a history of mahjong in the bookshop, but neither were available in English or Chinese. It seems that the bi-lingual pamphlet on the Ningbo history of Mahjong produced by the previous home of the exhibition did not make it to this new location and no effort has been put into producing a new one.
