Mah+Jong+Write+Up

The inventor of the Mah jong game, Chen Yumen was from Ningbo. He liked to play card games with the noble lords and while Chen Yumen was very good at playing card games, he felt that cards were inconvenient to play with and it was in 1864 that he first introduced bamboo tiles and added more contents to the playing tiles than cards. The game, Mahjong, was then created. Since then its integration and development were all closely linked with Ningbo. ‘Mahjong’ is from Ningbo dialect 'Maque’ (meaning sparrow), ‘He’ and ‘Ding’, 'Qian’, 'Peng’, 'Xiang Gong’, 'Cuo’ and other Mahjong terms are also evolved from the Ningbo dialect. One theory is that Chinese army officers serving during the Taiping Rebellion created the game to pass the time. Another theory is that a noble an living in the Shanghai area created the game between 1870 and 1875. The most popular theory states that mahjong was developed from this game in Ningbo around 1850. It is believed that two brothers recreated the deck on tiles of ivory and bamboo and created mahjong. The introduction to the western world is thought to have begun with two brothers named White, which in the early 1900's introduced mah jong to the English clubs of Shanghai, where it quickly gained popularity among the foreign residents.