Mah Jongg Cards:

"Mah Jong playing cards" Happiness, 148c. 

麻雀纸牌, 囍, 148 副

The present deck of cards is a deck of cards for playing the game of Mahjong. Cards of this make have evidently been around for a long time,  This post by the knowledgable Tom Sloper https://www.sloperama.com/mjfaq/cards.htm - perhaps well over a decade old now- shows decks of Mahjong Cards that are very similar in design to this present deck. The present dc

Decks of mahjong playing cards have been featured previously in this blog. (See This, This, This ). In any case the deck featured here seems pretty rare now; Most decks are of the wider, 'poker' format that the previously featured decks belong to. 

The Suit of Coins. The Maker's Name (happiness)囍  is found in the middle of each card

As you can see, the cards here resemble physical mahjong tiles,  One unique feature of these cards is the use of Arabic numbers in the indices. This feature is never found in actual mahjong tilesets, save those intended for export. We presume these cards were also made for export too. 

The Suit of bamboos 

In the above-mentioned post by Tom Sloper, he advises people to purchase several decks of cards, as they are inevitably misprinted. This does not appear to be true any more. Aside from the odd smudge, the cards are well-printed on nice smooth cardboard. The problems of length and misalignment are no longer evident. 

The Suit of Myriads. 

Nonetheless, these Cards, or Kards (as Sloper calls them to avoid confusion with a piece of equipment used in the American game of mahjong) are still fairly cheap.  The author purchased a ten such decks for 20 Chinese Yuan, which in 2020 is about 2USD. Evidently Mr. Sloper's supplier was making a huge profit off these decks. 

The 'Honours'.  The Three cards on the left are what are called in the west the "Dragons". Rather curiously their indices do not display the conventional western names of as Red, White and Green dragon (Left to right) , but rather romanisations of their Chinese names, viz:

中 = Chung (now usually spelt Zhong)
白= Pai (Now usually spelt Bai)
發 = Fa  (Still spelt Fa)

Even more interestingly, the four 'wind' cards ( the group in the middle,)are annotated in english, to whit, North, South, East and West. The card labelled "K" is a Joker; The Chinese character 皇 on it signifies "Emperor" or "King", hence the index. 

The flowers

Readers should note that despite having 148 cards, the present deck cannot be used to play Singaporean/Malaysian -style Mahjong. The Singaporean deck has 12 flowers instead of the 8 here; The extra 4 depict a cat, a rat, a chicken and a centipede respectively. 

The Box