The History of Mahjong — and How America Made It Her Own

The tiles on your table have been washed by a lot of hands before yours. Mahjong crossed an ocean, survived a craze, got itself a League, and became a Thursday-night institution. Here’s how.

Born at the card tables of China

Mahjong is younger than it looks. Its ancestors were Chinese card games — money-suited decks played for centuries — and sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the region around Shanghai and Ningbo, those paper games hardened into tiles. The suits on your rack still remember the money: circles of coins (the Dots), strings of coins (the Bams), and myriads — ten-thousands — of coins (the Craks, whose character 萬 means exactly that).

The new tile game spread through China’s teahouses and parlors in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was social, fast, a little bit gambly, and completely absorbing — qualities it has never lost.

1920s: America falls hard

An American businessman named Joseph P. Babcock, working in Shanghai for Standard Oil, learned the game there and decided his countrymen needed it. Around 1920 he began importing sets, published a simplified rulebook, and trademarked the spelling “Mah-Jongg” — the double-G that still marks the American game today.

What followed was one of the great game crazes in American history. Through the early 1920s, department stores could barely keep sets in stock, Chinese workshops carved tiles specifically for export, and newspapers ran mahjong columns. It was glamorous, faintly exotic, and played in living rooms from New York to Los Angeles — often by women, who made the game theirs from the very beginning.

The craze had a problem, though: everyone played by different rules. Dozens of competing rulebooks promised to be the “official” one, scoring was chaos, and by the late 1920s the fad had cooled almost as fast as it had flared.

1937: the League brings order

The game didn’t die — it reorganized. In 1937, a group of players in New York founded the National Mah Jongg League, standardized the American rules, and made a decision that still shapes every game you’ll ever play: the winning hands would be printed on a card, and the card would change every year.

That annual card is American Mahjong’s signature invention. It keeps the game fresh — every spring, every player in the country learns a new set of hands together — and it gives the community a shared calendar. The League also gave the American game its other trademarks: jokers, the Charleston (the tile-passing ritual named for the dance that was sweeping ballrooms when the game arrived), and scoring printed right on the card. If you’ve read our guide to how the game is played, this is why it looks so different from the mahjong played in Hong Kong or Japan — same tiles, different soul.

The game that women kept alive

From the 1930s onward, American Mahjong lived in living rooms, community centers, and card rooms — and it was overwhelmingly women who kept it there. The game put down especially deep roots in Jewish-American communities, where the weekly mahjong game became an institution passed from mothers to daughters: part competition, part social club, part standing appointment with friends. The League itself has run on that energy for generations, donating proceeds to charity nearly from the start.

For decades, while other fads came and went, the Tuesday game simply continued — the same four chairs, the clatter of the wash, somebody’s good dishes out for the occasion. If you learned the game from your mother or grandmother, you are part of the longest unbroken thread in American tabletop gaming.

The game today

A century after the first craze, mahjong is having another moment. New generations are finding the game, sets are beautiful again, clubs and leagues are growing, and the annual card still lands every spring like a small holiday. What’s changed is how far a table can reach: friends in different cities, different time zones, different stages of life can now keep the weekly game alive from a phone.

That’s the thread Sharp Sparrow picks up — the same game, the same rituals, the Charleston and the card and the calling, taught gently and played at whatever pace your week allows. The tiles have been traveling for a hundred and fifty years. They’re very good company.