History & Culture

The game is younger than the legends about it. The mainstream account puts its origin in the Yangtze delta in the middle of the nineteenth century; the story about Confucius is folklore, and honest sources disagree about the rest.

These pieces follow what can be traced: the export boom that put sets in American living rooms in the 1920s, the bans and returns in China, the automatic tables of postwar Japan, and the scenes where a film uses the tiles to say something no dialogue does.