Origin Stories, Episode 1

In the Ningbo Mahjong Museum, Chen Yumen (1817-1878) is credited with creating Ma Jiang by amalgamating elements of previous card and bamboo tile gambling games with dice during the reign of Qing Emperor Xianfeng.

Chen Yumen, an Official and Minister to the Imperial Court was a prolific card player and in 1846 is said to have created a game using bamboo and bone tiles, preserving the Wan, Tiao and Bing suits from the popular paper card game Penghe. He transformed three cards in Penghe, the Red and White Flowers and Laoqian into “3 Arrows:” Fa, Baiban and Hong Zhong (now known overseas as the three dragons). He also added the four Wind tiles. He is also credited with introducing Ma Jiang to foreigners through his close relationship with the British Consul in Ningbo and, when he later spent time in Shanghai, through his social interactions there.

The museum claims that Ningbo’s dialect and fishing industry is in the game. The importance of the winds, the form of the suits (‘bings’ for the buckets used on the ships, ‘strings’ for the ropes essential to sailing, ‘wan’ for the fisherman’s thirst for riches), the use of Peng (pung) symbolising the sound of two ships striking each other, Ting (as in ‘ting pai’) as a nautical term for stop, and the name Sparrow itself, referencing the maritime symbolism of seeing sparrows as you come close to land.

This is only one story of the history of mahjong and its development and, whilst Nigbo was certainly an important site, crediting the creation and symbolism of the game to a single person remains unsubstantiated.