Chinese Playing Cards: A Short History, From the Tang Dynasty to Today

Every deck of cards on every table in the world descends from China. Playing cards are one of the oldest Chinese inventions still in daily use, and the story of how they travelled is one of the stranger journeys in the history of games.

The beginning: the leaf game

The earliest records of card games come from Tang dynasty China, around the ninth century. A game called the leaf game (葉子戲) is mentioned in writing from that period, and it is generally taken to be a card game played with slips of paper — possible only because China was already making paper, and printing on it, centuries before Europe.

Money cards

Early Chinese cards were often money-suited: the suits were coins, strings of coins, and larger units of money. Some cards looked very like the paper money of the time, which China was also the first to print. Many Chinese card games that survive today still use these suits, on long narrow cards quite unlike a Western deck.

From cards to tiles

Chinese card games and tile games grew up side by side. Mahjong, which took its modern form in the nineteenth century, shares its suits with the old money cards — circles (coins), bamboo (strings of coins) and characters (larger units of money). A mahjong set is, in a sense, a deck of cards made solid.

The road to Europe

Cards travelled west along trade routes. By the fourteenth century they had reached the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt, whose decks had four suits — cups, coins, swords and polo sticks — and from there they crossed into Italy and Spain in the 1370s. The European suits we know grew out of those: cups and coins and swords survive in Italian and Spanish decks, and the French hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades came later.

So a standard 52-card deck is the descendant of a Chinese invention, by way of Cairo and Venice.

Chinese decks today

Two kinds of cards are made in China now:

• Traditional Chinese cards for regional games, still money-suited and long and narrow.
• Western 52-card decks with Chinese art, playable with any game you know but illustrated with Chinese subjects — Peking Opera characters, koi, dragons, landscapes. These are the decks collectors and gift-givers look for: the familiar game, with a culture's own artwork on every card.

A Chinese deck as a gift

A deck of Chinese playing cards is a natural gift for Lunar New Year, for a card player with an eye for design, or for anyone with a connection to China. It plays as an ordinary deck and looks like no other on the table.