Featured Mahjong

Pic of all the tiles
The winds and dragons have western letters and the tiles with a bonsai tree are numbered. The rest is unnumbered.

144 tiles, but is it complete? Bottom right are the joker tiles, right?

Are the flowers/seasons (not sure which tiles are the ones with the bonsai trees) missing? Or is it normal to have joker tiles and no flowers/seasons?

 

Today I found a "set" with a rate of around 50/50. Unfortunately it was incomplete ...
But I bought it anyway

 

Mahjong tiles were traditionally made by hand, by dovetailing bone tops and bamboo bases together.

The more BONE you have, the higher quality the set is, because bone is harder to get, and harder to carve than bamboo. Most sets will have approx 30/70, or 40/60 bone/bamboo ratios. A higher-quality set will have something like 50/50, or 60/40, 70/30, some rare cases have 80/20, or more. But sets were pumped out literally in their MILLIONS in the early 1900s, so the super-super high-quality sets are not excessively common.

A good quality set will have a bone/bamboo ratio of at least 30/70 or 40/60, or more. If it's smaller than that (10/90, 20/80), then it's a cheap set.

 

Cheap sets match my bank account better.
And is that last set I posted complete, @Shangas ?

 

u have more of a community....than a set !!

they may even be multiplying ......

 

And the community will be bigger soon.
2 new sets heading my way soon

 

ahhhhhh , the addiction takes hold !!!!
I hope they are 60 / 40 or better !!

 

Yes, looks complete.

 

Thank you for the good news.
What set is the one with the bonsai trees?

 

Nope, one set again with more bamboo than bone. But the set comes in a nice case. It looks like some of the newer retro cases, but based on the tiles and the story of the seller, it should be older.

The other set is bakelite again. Similar to the complete set I posted earlier.

I will probably post pics of the incomplete set I bought last week, and of these new sets, next week.

Yesterday someone was giving away a set with a 50/50 rate for free! But it had to be picked up at his place and it was too far away and I didn't have the time to get it I tried convincing him to send it, offering to pay for it, but he still refused to send it...

 

I once bought a vase from a guy..... 20 minutes away..... but he would not let me pick it up......... hermit !!!

 

That happened with me as well a few years ago! It would be a 10 minute walk for me, but it had to be sent!

 

As promissed ...
Set 1, complete:


Set 2, incomplete:

 

Set 3, complete:


Set 4 will hopefully be delivered tomorrow. That will be the bakelite set I mentioned Thursday/Friday.

 

Set 3 is almost certainly modern. They make them up that way to make them look older, but it's not very convincing.

 

That was my initial thought as well, but the seller story that he bought it many years ago at an antiques market in China, when he lived there, and the fact that this one is bone (?) and bamboo, while the retro sets with a similar case all have plastic/epoxy tiles, made me believe it would be older than those modern sets.

 

And now that I've checked it again, I am indeed also finding such modern sets with bone/bamboo tiles ...

 

Yeah, they're knocked-up cheaply in China, and sold overseas. I mean if you don't care what it is, then it's just a cheap, cheerful mahjong set, but if you're actively seeking antique ones, then...that's not what you want to buy, because there's really no historic or artistic value in them.

 

Definitely not old. Ask the seller when he bought it, and apparently 'many years ago' meant 2011
My bad for not asking for an actual year before I bought it But it wasn't super expensive, and if I resell it, I think I will be able to get my investment back, so no huge drama.

And today the bakelite set came in (and I didn't know/remember four racks were included in the deal):

 

That Bakelite set is beautiful, definitely vintage, and worth the price.