CHINESE GAMES WITH DICE AND DOMINOES. 



By Stewart Culin. 



" The earth hath V)ubhles, as the water has, and these are of them." 



This paper,* of which a preliminary study was printed in 1889,t is the 

 first of a series on Chinese games, to be continued by similar accounts 

 of playing cards and chess. It has been considerably extended, through 

 recent studies in connection especially with the collection gathered by 

 the author in the Anthropological Building in Chicago, and that in the 

 National Museum. | 



The games described are chiefly those of the Chinese laborers in 

 America, a limitation found as acceptable as it is necessary, since even 

 among these people, who all came from a comparatively small area, there 

 exist variations in the methods of gambling, as well as in the termi- 

 nology of their games. The latter is made up largely of slang and col- 

 loquial words and presents many difficulties. The gamblers are usually 

 men of the most ignorant class, and those most familiar with the games 

 are often the least able to furnish correct Chinese transcriptions of the 

 terms employed in them, so that the task of interpretation would have 

 been extremely difficult but for the assistance received from Chinese 

 and Japanese scholars.§ 



' This paper lias been prt-pared at the request of the authorities of the U. S. National 

 Museum, to illustrate a portion of its extensive collection of games. 



t Chinese Games -with Dice. | By Stewart Culin. — Read before The Oriental Club 

 of Philadelphia. | March 14, 1889. | Philadelphia. | 1889. 8^. pp. 1-21. 



tThis collection, though the author modestly refrains from mentioning the fact, 

 owes much of its completeness to Mr. Culin's own generous contributions. 



G. Bkowx Goode. 



§ The Chinese words printed in italics are transliterated according to Dr. Williams' 

 "Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Cauton Dialect," Canton, 1856. 

 Dr. Hepburn's Japanese-English Dictionary has been followed for Japanese, and the 

 Korean words, in the absence of any native standard of orthogra])hy, and for the 

 purpose of convenient reference, have been made to accord with that admirable work, 

 the Dictionnaire Coreen-Fran^aia, Yokohama, 1880. 



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