Shang Da Ren cards 2 - Hubei

"Shashi Excellent Shang Da Ren cards" , Shashi, 96c.
《沙石精品上大人》,沙石, 96 副

These cards are popularly used in Wuhan, a place in Hubei. Unlike the cards featured previously These cards have a variant form of the text. The text is identical to the standard version, except the last line/ This reads Fu Lu Shou 福祿壽 "Fortune, Rank and Longevity" instead of the usual Ke Zhi Li 可知禮 "And hence understand courtesy and manners" . Decks that possess such an alteration are called 'Fu Lu Shou cards"; indeed, a game bears this name

The altered text thus reads as follows:

Ch	Pinyin	Translation, after Hans Steinmüller
上大人	Shang da ren	His greatness,
孔乙己	Kong Yi Ji	Confucius,
化三千	Hua San Qian	has taught three thousand children,
七十士	Qi Shi Shi	of which Seventy became virtuous scholars.
爾小生	Er Xiao Shen	A young scholar like you,
八九子	Ba Jiu Zi	should study from eight or Nine sages,
往作仁	Wang zuo ren	should learn to be benevolent,
福祿壽	Ful Lu Shou	Fortune, Rank, Longevity"

N.B. The author has altered The last line of Hans Steinmüller's translation to reflect the Deck's composition. 

It is tempting to read the altered last line, as describing the benefits of being benevolent. Or it could be an attempt to inject an added layer of auspiciousness to the cards.

N.B. The numbers are ordered from Right to Left 

1:上   2:大   3:人   4:孔  5:乙   6:己

The First Six cards. The most notable feature of the cards, is they are coloured. The colours follow a consistent pattern-- Red for the first character of each line, Green for the second, and black for the third. 

The other notable feature of this deck in particular are the 'indices' In the top left-hand corner, rendering the cards in a more legible font. This is rather helpful. Note the great variance on the way the character on card 4 ("Confucius")  is written, and its standard form 孔. 

 7:化   8:三   9:千 10:七   11:十   12 :士   

The next six cards. Note card 8 ("Three"), written in a manner that suggests brushstrokes. 

13:尔(=爾) 14:小 15:生   16: 八   17 :九  18 :子

Card No. 13 ('You') is written using the cursive form of the character 爾. 

19: 佳 20: 作 21:仁 22:福 23:祿  24:壽

The last two lines. Cards 22-23 are particularly stylized. 

As mentioned above, the last three characters read "Fortune, Rank and Longevity" instead of the usual "And hence understand courtesy and manners“。 

The box contains the delightful inscription

严禁賭博

仅供娛乐

Yan Jin Dubo
Jin Gong Yu Le

Gambling strictly prohibited;
For leisure only

Chinese domino cards

[Chinese Domino cards], Anon, 84c. 

紙骨牌，無名，84副

 Now we come to another sort of Domino cards, These cards are made by an anonymous manufacturer, and purchased from a shop in Hubei, China. This particular deck contains 21 subjects. There are 4 copies of each subject, thus 84 cards. 

The most notable feature of the cards is their central character. Rather than histoical figures, we have simple doodles of men, engaged in various martial poses. 

The [6-6] card (First from right) depicts an image of a youth in a red robe, carrying a staff. This figure is the only one printed in two colours, reflecting the card's status as the highest in the pack. 

Meanwhile, the two next highest cards [1,1] and [4,4] (2nd and 3rd from Right) Each contain a Chinese phrase. On the [1,1]is .祝你好运," Wishing you Good Luck"

  On the [4,4] is 恭喜发财,the ubiquitous Chinese New Year Greeting " Gongxi Facai", or in Cantonese, Kung Hei Fat Choy. It literally means "Congratulations; may you prosper"

You may notice that subjects which possess red and black pips, have the figure printed in Red. Those that possess only black pips have the figure printed in black. 

The balds heads of the characters remind one of the Monks of Shaolin Monastery, celebrated for its "Fighting Monks"  Only one of the characters, [on the 4,2] has a sort of heddress. 

恭喜發財/祝你好運

Kung Hei Fat Choy/ Wishing you good luck

The author wishes all his readers a prosperous Chinese New Year

Shang Da Ren cards 1

"Shang Da Ren" cards, Taizhou Luqiao playing-card factory ,96 c.
[上大人牌]，台州市路桥商海字牌厂  96副。

We now turn our attention to a sort of playing-card that is hardly known in the west-- the Shang da ren cards. These cards pop up occasionally in the literature, but to my knowledge,nothing substantial has been written about them.

These cards are based on an old Chinese text, that is 24 characters long. It was much used in former times as a penmanship exercise. It goes:

Shang Da Ren, Kong Yi Ji, Hua San Qian, Shi Qi Shi. Er Xiao Shen, Ba Jiu Zi, Wang Zuo ren, Ke Zhi Li. 

"His greatness, Confucius, has taught three thousand children, of which Seventy became virtuous scholars. A young scholar like you, should study from eight or Nine sages, should learn to be benevolent, and hence understand courtesy and manners" 

The first translation is by  Hans Steinmüller, in Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China, p.189. Pages 188-194 contain a fascinating discussion of the game involving the cards ( called Shaofo in the book).  Another translation is found in the 1901 Catalogue of the collection of playing cards bequeathed to the Trustees of the British museum by the late Lady Charlotte Schreiber page 193. In my opinion, it is slightly less accurate than Steinmüller's. 

For the reader's convenience,the table above shows the characters of the text. The characters are numbered and have the pinyin Romanzation added to them. The two translations are also presented, broken down line-by-line. 

The cards are named after the first three characters of the text, Shang Da Ren- "His greatness" 

Each of the playing-cards bear one character of the text. This unit is repeated a number of times, to form the whole deck. In the deck below, the basic unit is repeated 4 times, yielding a 96 card deck.

 There are a huge variety of Playing-cards bearing this 24 character text. Some of them alter the phrasing of the text, others omit large sections of it. In all cases, the characters used are  heavily stylized, almost illegible except to the initiated. There are a variety of games played with these decks, which I hope to explain in a subsequent post.

This particular deck comes from Hubei, a province in Northern China. The cards are popular there.

1:上 2:大 3:人 4:孔（邱?）5:乙 6:己 7:化 8:三 9:千

The first three lines of the text. Cards 1, 2 and 3, "His Greatness" are printed in red. The inscriptions on cards 4, 5, and 6,(孔乙己) show barely any resemblance to the standard forms of the characters. 

[ The author suspects the card 4 does not depict the word Kong 孔, Confucius' family name, but a highly stylized version of Qiu,邱 his given name] 

10:七   11:十   12 :士   13:爾 14:小 15:生   16: 八   17 :九  18 :子
The next three lines of the text.  Note that the middle card of each trio is marked with a red spot. Card No. 13, I think is 爾, but cannot say for certain. 

19: 佳 20: 作 21:仁 22:可 23:知  24:礼

The last two lines of the text, in their glorious illegibility.

Below is a very brief and general summary of the games played with this family of cards. 

The game played with these cards is similar to Rummy or Mahjong, which it more closely resembles.
Players are dealt a hand of cards. In each turn, a player draws a card from the stock, forms melds with it (if possible) , and then discards a card from his hand. The subsequent player may capture the previous player's discard to form a meld of their own.  Players win by successfully melding off their entire hand.

 There are several types of meld. the first form is multiple copies of a single card, as for example three copies of the card 大 ( No. 2).  The second form is three cards that constitute a sentence of the text, as for example 化三千 ( cards 7,8, and 9).   Melds involving certain cards are reckoned to score higher than others.