Gambling Games
2 min readMahjong
Chinese gambling arts have a distant resource and a long stream through ages. They aresynthesized and brought to a highest realm,i.e. the almost everyone known “the game of square city”-playing mahjong. Mahjong is also known as sparrow pieces or horse pieces. It grew out of Yezige game-a card game and evolved into a new game of bone cards in the Song Dynasty and was imperially named Xuanhe Cards by Gaozong of the Southern Song Dynasty.
Until the Ming Dynasty, it adopted a new rule that the game should be played by 4 people.
Because of this, it got the name of madiao with the meaning that a horse could not walk without 4 legs. As the father-in-law of Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming Dynasty, Tian Hongyu was the very No. One madiao veterinarian. In the Qing Dynasty, besides “tong”,”suo”and “wan”,”north”,”south”,”east”and “west”were added. What’s more,”yaotou”was changedinto “zhong”,”fa”and “bai”. Thus a new gambling art-mahjong-eventually took shape.
Cricket Fight
A cricket has many alternative names, among which “qiong”is a comparatively refined one. Because cricket produces sounds like quick weaving, it gets other names of jizhi, quzhiand cuzhi(hurry weaving). It is absurd that history saw high officials Jia Shidao, the Cricket Prime Minister and Ma Shiying, the Cricket Xianggong. Their craziness about cricket fighting often resulted in their dereliction of duty.
In the Qing Dynasty, government had once supervised cricket raising. In addition, special cricket fighting venues were established and managers made profits by taking a percentage from the winnings. Influenced by the Han culture, the royal family of the Qing Dynasty and the Eight Banners descendants also took to playing this game. Later, even Empress Dowager Cixi was listed among the players.
The earliest historical records about cricket can be found in the Cricket Classic by Jia Shidao in the Southern Song Dynasty. It was called the encyclopedia of cricket, which has long been lost.
