Love mahjong? There are 40 versions of the game to consider

See how a key variant was born in the US, to be played in elite drawing rooms and in the homes of Hollywood stars.

What made mahjong a global phenomenon? To understand this, let’s take a step back to the fascinating roots of the four-player game of luck and skill.

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Invented in China in the 1800s, most likely in a port city by the Yangtze river, it started out as a gambling game played by Chinese men.

As those traders and exporters travelled, the game, with its intricately designed tiles and unfamiliar rules intrigued the West, where it acquired the nickname of “game of a hundred intelligences”.

By the 1900s, imported sets had begun to appear at posh department stores.

An American version of the game was born, featuring cards and a point system in addition to the tiles.

By the 1920s, the fad had driven white women to dress in elaborate Chinese costumes to play the game. And Chinese-American instructors began to offer training classes. “Critics of the game recoiled from the social mobility of both white women and Chinese Americans,” American historian Annalise Heinz writes, in Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture (2021).

Meanwhile, even as the game was played in elite drawing rooms and in the homes of Hollywood stars, with the game appearing in films made there from the 1930s onwards, it was also being played by the Chinese men detained at Angel Island as part of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and in later World War 2-era internment camps for Japanese Americans.

By 1937, a group of German-Jewish women formed the first National Mah Jongg League in New York with 32 members, in an attempt to standardise the rules of American Mah Jongg. Today, more than 40 iterations of the game are played around the world.

Its complex cultural journey has spanned continents and communities: American expats in Shanghai, socialites of modern America in the 1920s, the urban Chinese-Americans, and post-war wives of defence personnel. Today, as youngsters take to the game, as a screen-free alternative that is neither too dull nor doo demanding, it turns out it is still reshaping ideas of leisure.