Mahjong’s clacking tiles were named for chittering sparrows
Mahjong seats two to four players with a 144-tile Chinese set and wind seats—East, South, West, North. Born in nineteenth-century China, it spread worldwide in the twentieth. Southern Chinese still call it “sparrow,” hearing shuffle noise as bird chatter.
Guidebooks point to Ningbo or Fujian origins; Shen Yifan’s 1914 illustrated guide put Ningbo invention about thirty years earlier. The game descends from money-suited draw-and-discard card games—cash, strings, myriads—kin to rummy and Conquian per David Parlett. Conversion to tiles likely mid-1800s; surviving sets from about 1870 come from Fuzhou, Shanghai, and Ningbo.
In 1933 the scholar Yaquan Du wrote that fishermen in Guangdong and Fujian played it first and merchants in Ningbo took it up early in the Guangxu reign, while Zhixian Xu dated its surge in popularity to after the First Sino-Japanese War ended in 1895. The ancestral card decks had three suits of nine ranks plus three wild cards, the Red flower, White flower and Old thousand, and the likeliest direct forerunner was pènghú, played with 120 or 150 cards and used interchangeably with máquè in the late 1800s. The oldest tile sets lacked flower and green dragon tiles, carrying king tiles instead.
Play begins with thirteen tiles each. Going clockwise from the prevailing wind, players draw and discard, and may claim another player's discard under set conditions. A winning hand usually combines four melds and a pair, though special hands break the pattern, and scores carry over between rounds. Luck, skill and strategy all matter, which is why it is sometimes called mahjong rummy to separate it from the solitaire tile-matching game. Mandarin, Shanghainese and Sichuanese now say májiàng, Thai calls it sparrow cards, and sparrow warfare is a Chinese term for guerrilla tactics. Online versions have spread it further.
Source: Mahjong
