Mahjong is a game that is somewhat similar to the opposite of dominoes. Laid out the pyramid of bones with a variety of images. The goal of the Mahjong game is to remove all the bones from the field. Only pairs of bones with identical images on empty ends of lines at different levels of the pyramid are removed.

According to the famous Chinese legend, a thousand years old for a thousand BC, a fisherman named Jie lived on the shores of Lake East Chien near the village of Ning. Among all the inhabitants of the fishing village, he was the most adventurous, as he realized that more fish could be caught in the open sea, and not on the shore. And then Sze bought several boats, hired hundreds of fishermen from other villages, and went to the sea. Do not have time to blow the wind, as all the fishermen were forced to go back, because they started having bouts of seasickness. All of them are accustomed to fishing on the beach and could not stand the sea roll.

Then Jie held the family council, which decided that seasickness was nothing more than an illusion of human consciousness, the so-called play of imagination. Jie and his brothers thought for a long time and decided to create a certain method for diverting the consciousness of fishermen to work while at sea. This is the cure for motion sickness and the game of mahjong. According to legend, the fishermen were so carried away by the new game that they instantly recovered from seasickness. Sze’s family became incredibly wealthy and gave rise to a well-known and respected Chinese family, whose members live in modern China.
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Originally created by the Jie family, the game consisted of 108 cards that could be played by 4 people. Each player was dealt 13 cards. This tradition has been preserved to this day in Shanghai, New York and Washington.

The story has retained information about another Chinese who made an important contribution to the development of mahjong: this is the general of the Chinese imperial army, Chen Yu Mun, whose army occupied positions all in the same province of Ning-po. The main duty of the Chen detachment was to capture the local gangsters, but the officers of this unit did not cope well with this task, as they constantly fell asleep on night duty. And then Chen decided to offer the soldiers to play at night in the then popular mahjong. For a while, the game held the attention and interest of the soldiers, but soon they all fell asleep. After much deliberation, Chen came to the conclusion that the consciousness of modern man had become more sophisticated, and decided to complicate the game. He introduced new cards denoting colors and directions of the world (north, south, east and west). Since then, the soldiers of the night have been playing mahjong.

Over time, mahjong completely lost its original purpose to hold the player’s attention for a long period of time and became an extremely gambling game. The gambling community of China has made its additions to this game: cards with seasons, plants and flowers have been added. The game became very bright and entertaining and eventually went beyond the limits of the Celestial Empire.

In the modern world, like many centuries ago, mahjong remains the main gambling entertainment of the military and representatives of the higher strata of society. In China, this game was also the hallmark of many mafia clans: for example, among the gangsters of Paozuki, it was decided to silently transfer bamboo bones to the players at the table.

With the increasing popularity of Mahjong in China, game cards for this game (dice) were produced by industrial means. They were made of bamboo, and the front or tip of the bone, in memory of the white caps of the soldiers of General Chen. Game sets were exported on cargo ships. Surprisingly, mahjong was sold by whole steamers.

Chinese industrialists did not even know what a Mahjong boom would begin in America and Europe in a few years. The volume of orders for the game began to grow rapidly, and Chinese bone makers, producing them in the old-fashioned way with hand engraving, could no longer meet the demand for a new hobby for the world gambling community.

The fact is that the bones for the game were made at the same time in several factories, each of which performed one function in making bones: one cut out forms from the bamboo, the other engraved, etc. Conservative Chinese could not be convinced of the need to improve the production process. Another problem manufacturers faced was the need for a huge amount of high quality bone. Only bones of a cow’s tops were used for making game cards, and only a piece of it was no larger than 7 inches in size. In this regard, in China, a large number of poachers, hunting only for cows. At this point, America and entrepreneurs from Chicago, Kansas City, and Omaha enter the world gambling market by regularly supplying dice to Chinese manufactories. Many US beef barons abandon famous bone-in-the-bone steaks in favor of mahjong. Even India’s elephants had to be rescued from poachers who wanted to make a fortune on a massive passion for this game.
Source https://www.mahj-ong.info/nile-tiles/

The enterprising Americans could not accept the existence of scattered factories for the manufacture