Our Story
Mahjong Madame is the result of an obsession. Our Shanghai store, Madame Mao’s Dowry, was established by us more than 20 years ago to promote design in this city through an appreciation of Mao Period aesthetics. Our engagement with culture brought us in contact with mahjong and its intriguing and ubiquitous sets and became a distinct and expanding fascination.
Our Shanghai Lane house Mahjong Studio
Our studio is in a lovely Art Deco lane in the Former French Concession. It serves as my office as the founder of Madame Mao’s Dowry and is now full of the world of mahjong, with sets, artworks and themed objects from all over China.
Our exposure to Mahjong sets was sparse and intermittent until early 2020 when I was invited to join with friends to play the game. I had played in Hong Kong but I left that place in 1995, but I was persuaded to join. Since opening Madame Mao’s Dowry in 2000 I had had little contact with mahjong sets as the most desired were difficult to find and, more importantly, firmly rooted in the Republican Period. Mahjong had been the subject of campaigns more than once during the Mao Period and appeared nowhere on the news photographs and posters that form the core of our collection. I had no reason to be interested, but that was because I had not appreciated the significance of Mahjong to Chinese culture throughout the 20th century.
This casual invitation to play mahjong became a weekly appointment and the more we played the more fascinating the game, its history and its sets of tiles became. The writings about mahjong in English all concentrate on the game as its played outside of China, and the sets that were made for export. My interest was in mahjong made in China and the sets produced for domestic use, and so I set about collecting as many examples as I could, and reading everything I could find. In November 2021 we put on an exhibition in Shanghai, presenting the story of mahjong in China, to share a snapshot of the breadth and depth of this game which is an obsession of a nation.
Over the last few years mahjong has experienced a renaissance. There have always been mahjong clubs in Shanghai, usually smokey and noisy places, but now the game is played in much more fashionable haunts by both local people and foreign residents. We now host workshops by Shanghai Joy Luck Club (formed by three of the women, including myself, at that first session back in 2020) teaching the rules and guiding play. SJLC has published a rulebook making the International Mahjong Rules more accessible to beginners and has a strong social media presence in Shanghai.
Here you will find the sets I have collected and continue to collect and pieces of information I have learnt to make your engagement with the game even more compelling. Welcome to Mahjong Madame, Shanghai.