![]() The experts classified the harvested pieces by selecting out those pieces that might warp or shrink or develop insect larvae infestation. The selection of bamboo was carried out by expert judges working for the ‘bamboo harvester’. Since the principal locale of manufacture was centred in and around Shanghai, most of the bamboo was gathered from the nearby “Yangtze belt”, mainly from the areas of Ningbo and Hangzhou. Bamboo.īamboo was a material sourced locally. Once drying was completed they were graded and then joined to cut and shaped bamboo pieces with a ‘female’ dovetail. The bone was cut up into as many thicknesses as it was possible to obtain from the raw material, the ‘male’ dovetail added, and the pieces boiled and treated to extract the fat until the required minimal content was acquired. Thus the imported shin bone was sold in ton lots by the importers to ‘jobbers’, who in turn sold it on in picul (133.33 lbs) lots to the first stage manufacturers. With the export demand came strict specifications – only cow shin bone was required, and only of a certain weight and no more than a certain minimal fat content. The front leg bones also provided the thickest material and, as a consequence, of the 180 tile sets made from a ton of raw front leg bone, only 10 sported bone and bamboo tiles with a maximum thickness of bone. In terms of the quantity and use of the raw material, a ton of back leg bones yielded enough material for 225 tile sets whereas, in contrast, a ton of front leg bones yielded enough material for 180 tile sets. Thus, as the export demand of bone and bamboo tile sets increased, the demand for cow bone outstripped the local supply and so cow bone sourced from the United States replaced local Chinese sources. The bone in early tile sets used by Chinese players, either in domestic surroundings or in brothels, was sourced locally from small cow populations since most land was used for agriculture, rather than given over to pasture. Where these industries were collated under one roof during this surge in manufacture, they were still nevertheless strictly segregated. These early sets can be seen in Gallery 1.0.īone and bamboo tile manufacture in China was the result of a chain of separate industries and these were utilised when the manufacturing upsurge began with the increase in the export market. ![]() But even before the export boom, bone and bamboo were used for tile sets as early as the 1870s. Bone and Bamboo were by far the most common materials used during the height of Mahjong manufacture in China in the early 1920s.
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