Everything You Need To Know About Mahjong

From a $62,500 Louis Vuitton trunk to queer club nights in Los Angeles, mahjong is everywhere in 2026. But for many, none of this is new. Here we explore why the Chinese game has become so popular and how and where to play it.

There is a sound. It is the sharp, clean clack of tile against tile that many who grew up in Asian households will place immediately – the sound of aunties hunched over a folding table on a Sunday afternoon, playing and shouting with intensity and ease. A ritual that simultaneously allows for fun, gossip and cut-throat strategy.  

Mahjong is a tile-based game for four players. Each player draws and discards a tile in turn, working to build a complete hand: typically four sets (either three of the same tile, or a run of consecutive numbers in one suit) plus one pair. When you complete your hand, you call it: in Cantonese it's “Sik”, in Mandarin it's “Hu”. In America, where the game is also known as Mah Jongg, it's simply “Mahjong”. The game is part strategy, part luck and part reading your three opponents.

Mahjong was invented in the mid-19th century, during the reign of Emperor Xianfeng of the Qing Dynasty (1851–1864), by a maritime official named Chen Yumen from Ningbo – now Zhejiang Province – in eastern China. He adapted an older card game called Madiao and replaced the paper cards with tiles made from bone and bamboo for a purely practical reason: cards blew away on the ship’s deck; tiles stayed put.

From Ningbo it spread through teahouses, wealthy households and eventually the diaspora routes that carried Chinese communities across Southeast Asia, Japan, and the Americas. By the early 20th century it had arrived in the US – and that is where the story becomes more complicated.

In the US, when most people think of mahjong, they often mean something quite different from the game played across Asia. The spelling indicates the distance: American Mah Jongg, as the National Mah Jongg League (NMJL) spells it, operates by an entirely different logic. Instead of creating hands from memory, players match tiles to patterns on a commercial card that changes every year and must be purchased from the League. It uses eight joker tiles not found in any traditional Asian variant aside from Vietnamese. Before playing, the tiles are passed in a ritual called the Charleston, which is also absent from the original Asian gameplay.  

The NMJL was founded in 1937 and its membership has historically been mostly Jewish-American women, a community with its own social history, rooted in a shared immigrant experience in mid-century New York. But the game it produced is, to a player from Chengdu or Taiwan, a different game wearing the same name. It helps to understand how that divergence happened. In Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture, historian Annelise Heinz documents the 1920s craze as a product of chinoiserie – the Western tradition of consuming Chinese aesthetic forms while keeping the people at arm's length. The game was desirable because it was Chinese and, at the very same time, Chinese Americans were subject to nativism and the Chinese Exclusion Act, in place since the 1880s. Basically: the culture was welcome, the people were not.  

By the time the NMJL formalised American Mah Jongg in 1937, it codified a version that had already been remade, without acknowledging or integrating the people it came from, into something new. This went largely unremarked upon until 2021, when a company called Mahjong Line launched a ‘modernised’ set: Chinese characters stripped from the tiles and replaced with abstract colour-coded symbols, marketed as ‘more accessible’. The pushback from Asian-American communities was swift. Removing the Chinese script is not simplification but erasure, and the incident became a flashpoint for a broader question about who profits from mahjong in Western markets, and what is lost when a cultural object is made legible by removing what marked it as belonging to someone else.  

It was Diet Prada – the fashion industry watchdog account – that famously called out that the pattern of the 1920s was essentially re-emerging in real time. In March 2026, the platform was forced to return to the same question, asking: “Wait, didn't we do this already back in 2021?” The most-liked comment pointed to a traditional Hong Kong tile manufacturer whose shop was closing as these new American brands thrived. It is, to many, devastating to see not just the pattern repeating, but the original being displaced by the copy.

Ruoyi Jiang, founder of Chop Suey Club, a design studio rooted in Chinese-American cultural identity, has been one of the clearest voices on why the tile’s visual language matters. “It’s a misconception that mahjong tiles have always been ‘fixed’. They actually evolved through industrialisation; if you look at antique sets, the characters vary wildly. But the ‘canon’ we use now carries fundamental concepts of Chinese culture. When you handle these tiles, they aren’t just game pieces: they are tactile reminders of a specific heritage. They carry a weight that a generic icon simply can’t replicate.”

“When you handle these tiles, they aren’t just game pieces: they are tactile reminders of a specific heritage” – Ruoyi Jiang, Chop Suey Club 

Ruoyi is not arguing that mahjong cannot be redesigned, as many Asian regions have developed their own rules and tiles for centuries. The issue is what is communicated when redesign requires first removing what was already there.

“When someone claims they are making the tiles ‘prettier’ by stripping away the Chinese patterns, it isn't innovation but erasure. It’s that same old American story of rebranding an existing culture and taking the credit, like Levi’s with denim jeans or Columbus ‘discovering’ America. Great design comes from deep fluency, not a surface-level ‘vibe’."

The current mahjong revival in the West is being shaped by a generation of Asian diaspora organisers, designers and cultural figures. Jo Xu, one of four co-founders of Green Tile Social Club in New York – which grew from a game in a friend’s living room to events drawing thousands of people – frames the stakes like this:

“There were many decades between our parents’ or grandparents’ immigration to the States and our generation’s coming of age where mahjong had not only receded from the public eye, but also within our own households and communities,” she says. “And with that, a lot of us grew up feeling a distance between ourselves and the game that was in many ways reflective of our broader relationship with heritage, lineage culture. Closing that gap and reclaiming mahjong in our own way now feels healing, restorative – like growth for the entire diaspora.”

What makes this moment distinct from a trend, Jo argues, is what the game actually unlocks: not just entertainment but access to identity. “What's beautiful about mahjong is the sheer amount of context you can absorb about your own identity, your parents, your family and your culture just by playing,” she says. “This moment feels in many ways like a collective homecoming for our generation – to claim and keep contributing to Asian culture in a way that feels true to us.”

In Los Angeles, Angie Lin’s East Never Loses takes a different approach, one that is explicitly queer and subcultural, played in traditional San Gabriel Valley parlours where the history is part of the point.

“I love playing mahjong in old-school places because it helps evoke a feeling of nostalgia,” she says. “When I first started throwing mahjong parties I wanted to bring the past back to the present in fun and authentic ways. Playing mahjong at a Chinese club that used to be a dim sum spot just hits different. Location is everything.”

Angie came into her own queerness through mahjong spaces – and met her now-fiancée at one. She is also direct about the game's gambling history, something many contemporary organisers quietly avoid: “Mahjong is a gambling game. There's no hiding from that. In the past it was centred around money, but now it's adapted to be centred around connection. I don't think mahjong's gambling past is something to hide from. Instead, it's something we can look back and learn from.”

Nicole Wong, author and founder of The Mahjong Project teaches using the exact phrases her parents used to explain the game. She even shares tips from her grandparents. For her, teaching is inseparable from the lineage. “Playing and now teaching is a practice that’s been passed down to me,” she says. “It’s become a way to honour and remember specific people in my family. For so many people across the Asian diaspora, these personal histories are very entwined with playing mahjong. We're writing a collective history of the game across the Asian diaspora.”

The Mahjong Project’s events reflect this. Nicole hosts quarterly gatherings that pair the game with other forms of cultural context: seasonal foods, community altars, Chinese character worksheets, visits to Chinatown businesses that new players might otherwise never encounter. The aim is to make the culture feel lived in: something you absorb by being present rather than by being taught.

“What gives me pause is seeing mahjong being treated like ‘the next big trend’ and the surrounding culture that emphasises a frenzied consumption of new expensive sets that do not seem to acknowledge the game's connection to Chinese culture,” she says. “Seeing the same game become a symbol of consumptive desire, wealth and insider status that doesn't ‘see value’ in keeping the Chinese aspects of the game – that gives me pause.”

Mahjong’s arrival in Western pop culture is impossible to miss in 2026. Across North America, Europe and Australia, Hong Kong-style and Riichi (Japanese mahjong) clubs in particular have cropped up everywhere. The American Riichi Association’s community portal now maps active clubs across dozens of US cities. The riichi.wiki lists hundreds of clubs playing Japanese-style mahjong outside Japan. In London, clubs teaching Hong Kong Old Style and Riichi are adding new weekly sessions and waiting lists.  

Louis Vuitton produced a monogrammed Mahjong trunk at $62,500. Hermès, Rimowa, Prada and Kith have all followed. A24's Everything Everywhere All at Once set, with 160 black tiles featuring hand-painted icons by illustrator Manshen Lo, sold out immediately.  

Celebrities have become part of the story, too, though the version they play is almost certainly American. Julia Roberts described her weekly game nights on The Late Show as “creating order out of chaos” – a clip that went viral in 2024. In February 2026, Blake Lively had her Oh My Mahjong set delivered to a Manhattan courthouse mid-mediation, having told Vogue she ends up gifting her set to friends “because they are obsessed and want to practice.” Meghan Markle coined “mahj squad” on her Netflix series. Sarah Jessica Parker has called receiving a vintage set one of her best birthday gifts. 

An exception to the American Mah Jongg trend is NBA star Stephen Curry, who learned to play the game in Chengdu and was suitably impressed by an automatic table that shuffles the tiles for you. An inflection point for all this visibility is often cited as the mahjong scene in Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Screenwriter Adele Lim fought to write it in. It sparked think pieces everywhere, suggesting audiences resonated with a previously underrepresented cultural accuracy.

While it has genuinely thrilled communities to see such attention around a game so central to many Asian childhoods, it is also complicated – a tension that Nicole Wong’s book captures precisely: the question is whether the sharing carries the context, history and respect for origin, or quietly discards it. 

Mahjong is not new. It has been played for more than 150 years. What is new is who is watching, and what story they think they are seeing.

A San Francisco-based community hosting open play events. Founder Nicole also released this book on the origins of mahjong and how to play different variations of the game, from Japanese to American styles. 

A New York-based Asian lifestyle boutique that also hosts regular mahjong events and offers lessons in Chinese/Cantonese, American and Japanese Riichi mahjong.

This mahjong community is based in New York, hosting pop-up mahjong events rooted in celebrating the Asian American experience.

A New York based  “group of friends” that come together to play every few weeks, also offering introductory lessons and practice play in Chinese mahjong.

A cultural producer of Mahjong events in the Los Angeles area, aiming to “authentically reclaim and revitalise the game of Mahjong for a new generation”, also offering lessons for beginners.

A social mahjong club that hosts teaching and playing sessions in Hong Kong-style mahjong at venues around the world, from New York and London to Bangkok and Singapore.

A Hong Kong-based group hosting mahjong games across the city.

A Google map spotlighting 85 organisations and locations where you can play Asian-style mahjong around the world.