Chinese playing cards

[1][2][3] Chinese use the word pái (牌), meaning "plaque", to refer to both playing cards and tiles.

Many western scholars, like William Henry Wilkinson, Stewart Culin, Thomas F. Carter, and Michael Dummett attribute to the Chinese the invention of playing cards.

Michael Dummett also contends that the concept of suits and the idea of trick-taking games were invented in China.

By the end of the monarchy, the vast majority of traditional Chinese card games were of the draw-and-discard or fishing variety.

Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072) and Li Qingzhao (1084 – c. 1155) recorded that the leaf game's rules were lost by their time.

It refers to a 17 July 1294 case in which two gamblers, Yan Sengzhu and Zheng Zhugou, were arrested in Shandong along with nine of their paper playing cards and the woodblocks used to print them.

[9] Chinese dominoes first appeared around the Southern Song dynasty and are derived from all twenty-one combinations of a pair of dice.

[10] Though not visually apparent, they are divided into two suits: civil and military (originally Chinese and barbarian respectively until the Qing dynasty).

The Cash suit was also in reverse order with the lower number cards beating the higher.

Some cards, most commonly the highest and lowest of each suit, will have a red stamp mimicking banknote seals.

Jin Xueshi [zh] noted that the three-suited decks were ten times more popular than four-suited ones prior to 1783, a disparity which has since significantly increased.

[13] Another structurally similar deck was Bài Bất found in North Vietnam until the 1970s; its three-suit version is Tổ tôm.

These Vietnamese cards were redesigned by A. Camoin & Cie of Marseilles during French colonial rule to depict people wearing traditional Japanese costumes from the Edo period.

[14] Direct foreign derivatives include Bài chòi in Vietnam, Pai Tai in Thailand, and Ceki [ms] or Cherki in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.

[15] Ultimately, all four-suited decks (especially Italian and Spanish suited packs) are indirectly descended from the money-suited system through Mamluk playing cards.

Unlike other types of Chinese cards, they have not spread to other countries and are largely confined to southern China.

Stewart Culin observes:[18] “These [cards derived from Tseung k'i=Xiangqi] seem to be peculiar to the Southern and Southeastern provinces, notably Fuhkien [Fujian] and Kwangtung [Guangdong].” It was also confirmed by the German sinologist Karl Himly,[19] who said these chess cards were specific to Fujian.

In Taiwan, two-suited versions are used to play xiangqi mahjong [zh] while the four-suited ones are found in Malaysia.