Fortune Teller's Mah Jongg

Derek Walters is the English-language authority on Chinese divination systems, and this large set with Amanda Barlow's artwork applies that scholarship to the mah jongg tiles: over 140 cards translating the game's suits, honors and flowers into an oracle, the tile vocabulary read the way Chinese fortune-telling tradition actually used it. Mah jongg divination is not an invention; the tiles carry established symbolic meanings, and Walters's documentation separates this set from the general run of orientalist decoration. The count makes it one of the catalog's largest instruments, a full symbolic language rather than a compact oracle, and learning it is learning a genuine parallel system with its own grammar of bamboos, circles, characters, winds and dragons. It suits students of Chinese divination who want documented method, mah jongg players curious what their tiles once meant, large-system readers, and collectors of cross-cultural oracles done with homework. Buyers wanting a quick exotic-flavored deck should respect what this actually is: a course.