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.