Hu Shi’s Discussion on Mahjong
Hu Shi learned both Chinese and Western knowledge and traveled all over the world. In his eyes,
The national opera of the United States is Basketball, and the national opera of Japan is It’s Jiaodai, and China’s national opera is Mahjong.
Regardless of whether you are rich or poor, regardless of whether it is cold or hot day or night, playing mahjong is a major undertaking in the lives of Chinese people.
From this introduction, we can see that Mr. Hu Shi’s research on mahjong is quite profound.
In the past few years, mahjong tiles suddenly traveled overseas and became an export item. In European and American societies, many people learn to play mahjong; later the disease was also spread to Japan. For a period, mahjong became the most fashionable game in Western society: almost every table in the club was occupied by mahjong; bookstores published many pamphlets on mahjong, and Chinese students abroad had no money. You can earn money by teaching mahjong. Europeans and Americans are crazy about mahjong.
No one would have dreamed that the vanguard of Eastern civilization’s conquest of the West would be the one hundred and thirty-six generals!
This time I traveled from Siberia to Europe, from Europe to America, and from America to Japan. In ten months, I only once saw someone playing mahjong in a club in Kyoto, Japan. Mahjong is almost invisible in Europe and the United States. I once asked friends in Europe and the United States, and they said, "In women's clubs, you can occasionally see two tables playing mahjong, but that is rare." I often see mahjong in American homes. The boxes of the cards—with exquisite carvings and decorations—are displayed indoors, and sometimes a family has two or three pairs. But I never see the hostess talk about mahjong; they never ask me, the representative of the mahjong country, for the secrets! Mahjong has become an antique on the shelves in the West; its craze has subsided.
I asked an American friend, why did the mahjong craze pass so quickly? He said: "The ladies like mahjong, but the men are opposed to it. In the end, the men won."
This is what we expected. The hard-working peoples of the West will never become believers in Mahjong, and will never be conquered by Mahjong. Mahjong is just a patented product of the "spiritual civilization" Chinese nation like us who love leisure and do not cherish time.
In the later years of the Ming Dynasty, a kind of playing card called "Ma Diao" became popular among the people. There are only forty tiles in Ma Diao, ranging from one to nine, one thousand to nine thousand, ten thousand to ninety thousand, etc., which are equivalent to the tubes, ropes, and ten thousand zi of mahjong tiles. There is also a "zero", which is the ancestor of the "blank board". There is also a "ten million" card, which is the "ten million" of Huizhou playing cards. Each horse tag has a character from "Water Margin" painted on it. The "Wang Ying" on the Huizhou playing card is the relic of the short-footed tiger Wang Ying. The complete collection of Wang Shihan, a native of Qianlong and Jiaqing, contains horse tags of several celebrities. (In "Cong Mu Wang's Series".)
Ma Diao was very popular in that day, and the scholar-bureaucrats beat Ma Diao all day and night, neglecting all official matters. Therefore, after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, Wu Meicun's "Sui Kou Chronicle" said that the death of the Ming Dynasty was caused by Ma Diao.
Over the past three hundred years, the forty-card mahjong tiles have gradually evolved into five-card playing cards, and in the past seventy or eighty years, they have become four-card mahjong tiles. (There are three people playing Ma Diao against one person, so it is called "Ma Diaojiao" and the provincial name is "Ma Diao"; "Mahjong" is the pronunciation of "Sparrow", and "Mahjong" is the pronunciation of "Ma Diao".) The changes become more and more complicated. It is clever, so it can confuse people's hearts even more, making men and women in the country, no matter rich or poor, no matter whether it is cold or hot day or night, waste their energy and time on these one hundred and thirty-six cards.
The "national opera" of the United Kingdom is Cricket, the national opera of the United States is Baseball, and the national opera of Japan is Jade. What about China? China's national opera is Mahjong.
On average, every four rounds of Mahjong takes about two hours. To put it bluntly, there are only one million tables of mahjong in the country every day. Each table only plays eight rounds, which takes 4 million hours, which means a loss of 167,000 days, money won and lost, and energy wasted. Still outside.
When we travel around the world, have we ever seen any advanced nation or civilized country willing to waste time and night like this? A friend who studied in Japan said to me: "The Japanese people are so hardworking! At night, when you climb up and take a look, every wooden house is full of lights. Under the lights, either young people are jumping and reading, or old people are kneeling and flipping through books. , or old women kneeling to do their work. At dawn, the streets and trams are full of children going to school. This kind of hard work alone can conquer us.
In fact, it’s not just Japan? All progressive nations are like this. Only an unmotivated nation like ours regards "leisure" as happiness and "recreation" as an urgent matter. Men regard playing mahjong as a leisure, women regard mahjong as a daily routine, and old women regard playing mahjong as a big career for the rest of their lives!
In the past, reformers said that China had three evils: opium and stereotyped writing