Many people know Mahjong as a Chinese game, which became popular in the Yangtze River Valley in the mid-1800s. American tourists in China began playing the game on their travels and lobved it so much they brought the game home.
The Chinese game was brought back to the United States in the early 1900s and was popularized in American circles by Joseph Babcock in the 1920s. Babcock is responsible for changing the tiles to include Arabic numerals and Western letters. Babcock is also responsible for the change in spelling to Mah Jongg, though the original spelling of Mahjong is making its comeback in the United States in recent years. No matter which way you spell it, Mahjong is certainly having a huge surge in popularity again, a century after it first swept the nation.
During Mah Jongg's first heyday in 1920s America, it seemed like everyone was playing it, from Hollywood starlets to President and First Lady Harding; Americans were so hooked on the game that Mahjong Sets became the sixth largest export from China to the US! Around this time, people were playing multiple different versions of the game, without standardized rules. In 1937, the National Mah Jongg League was formed by a group of Jewish Americans. The NMJL released (and continues to release annually) a playing card with rules and standardized hands for everyone to play from.
The National Mah Jongg League has been releasing new NMJL Cards every April. Each year, the standard hands for American Mah Jongg change. This is one way that American Mahjong differs from Chinese Mahjong; in Chinese Mahjong, there are certain hands/melds and they are all memorized by the players. Those melds/hands in Chinese Mahjong stay consistent always and do not change.
Another way that Chinese Mahjong and American Mah Jongg differ is in the tiles used. American Mahjong Tiles do have numbers and words on them, which Chinese Mahjong tiles do not. Instead, Chinese tiles have characters and symbols on them to differentiate between the tiles. The number of tiles needed for each version of the game differs too--Chinese Mahjong has 144 tiles, while American Mah Jongg plays with 152 tiles (or 160 if playing with Blanks, more on that here.) additionally, Chinese Mahjong Tiles have four tiles that are excluded from American Mahjong, representing the seasons.
For more information about the history of Mahjong and how it became popular in the United States, we love the following books!
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