User:Donald Trung/Terminology of game suits (cash coins in art)

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 * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MobileDiff/1027532949&type=revision ✅. --Donald Trung (talk) 13:30, 8 June 2021 (UTC).

Terminology of game suits
A large variety of Chinese games incorporate terminology based on cash coins and related monetary terms. These include Chinese playing cards (see above) and Mahjong (see above), among many others.

List of game terms and their meaning and/or etymology
Cash coins themselves were commonly known as "Coppers" (銅) or "Copper money" (銅錢) in daily conversation. The Chinese playing card term "Tong" (同) is both a transformation and abbreviation of the Traditional Chinese character "銅". The German Karl Himly hypothesised that these terms were related in his 1901 paper on Chinese playing cards, this hypothesis is further backed by the fact the term "Tong" (銅) is used as a suit name for a playing card game named Madiao (打吊) in the book Honglou yuanmeng ("Completing the Dream of the Red Chamber") published in 1814, this book being one of the many sequels to the famous Chinese book Honglou Meng ("Dream of the Red Chamber"). The book further documents the cash coin-based terms Kongwen (空文, "Zero Cash"), Zhihua (枝花, " Spray Flower / Half Cash"), and Er Tong (二銅, "Two Cash").

Further references connecting the two characters come from the Hanyu Da Cidian.

The Hanyu Da Cidian entry for "Tong" (同) states that the character can alternatively be read as "Tong" (銅). This is further evidence that the term "同" in Chinese card games is a non-standard way to refer to cash coins.

Two other cash coin-based terms used in game suits is "Suo" (索, literally "a cord", referring to "String of cash coins") and "Wan" (萬, "Myriads (of cash coins)"). In this context a "Suo" refers to a string of 100 cash coins, 10 "Suo" is 1 "Guan" (貫, "To thread") or a string of 1000 cash coins, and a "Wan" is composed of 10 "Guan" making it represent 10.000 brass cash coins, in this understanding the term "Wan" becomes a likely abbreviation for either "Wanqian" (萬錢) or "Wanguan" (萬貫). During the 19th century packs of Chinese playing cards from the province of Fujian actually included money-suited decks that used the term "Wanguan".

Ming dynasty period period scholar Pan Zhiheng noted in his work Yezi pu ("A Manual of Leaves"), a playing cards manual, that the Myriad gets its name from piling up ten strings of 1000 cash coins. During the Ming Dynasty period the four suits of money-suited decks were called "Wenqian" (文錢, "Cash"), "Suozi" (索子, "Strings of Cash"), "Wanguan" (万貫, "Myriads"), and "Shi Wan" (十万, "Tens of Myriads").

In his 1901 description on Chinese playing card games the German Karl Himly noted that the term "Bing" (餅, "cake", often abbreviated to "并") in the Chinese playing card game Shi Hu Pai seemed to have been related to "Cash", as in his observations he noted that one of the ten, three-card combinations, or "Hu", was called "Wenqian" (文錢), he elaborated a connection between the "Bing" and the "Wenqian" by citing that in the Kangxi Zidian there was a quote that stated:

Another reference to "Bing" as a monetary accounting unit is found in the 1878 book Huifanglu ("A Record of Painted Fragrance") by Xi Ling Yeqiao which uses the term "Shi bing fan yin" which translates into English as "Ten cakes of foreign silver". In Shi Hu Pai the term "Wenqian" as the unit as well as a unit of the four and three suited money cards. Since both the terms "Bing" and "Wenqian" were used as units of money and both currencies bore similar round shapes, then this may be the reason why the word "Bing" which normally means "cake" could have been utilised as an alternative name for the units of the "Cash" suit.

"Tiao" (条) is another term that was used to mean "String of cash coins". The term "Tiao" was found in the 1848 book Feng yue meng ("A Dream of Wind and Moon") written by Han Shang Meng Reng. Later it also appeared in the 1908 – 1919 book Guang ling chao ("The Waves of Guangling ") authored by Li Hanqiu. In both of these books the authors used this term for both three-suited games that used tiles and paper cards, the other suits in these games were "Bing" and "Wan". Notably, both of these books were produced in Yangzhou, Jiangsu indicating that this might have been a regional usage of these terms. Even within the province of Jiangsu different terms were used regionally, for example the ~1817 book Jing hua yuan ("Flowers in the Mirror") by Li Ruzhen from Haizhou in Northern Jiangsu used the three suit names "Bing", "Suo", and "Wan". But as Haizhou is close to Yangzhou it can be tentatively proposed that the playing card game term "Tiao" may have appeared in this area of Jiangsu somewhere in the period between the years 1817 and 1848.

The game term "Tiao" might have been derived from the monetary term "Diao" (吊). The term "Diao" was already in use as early as the Ming dynasty, where it was used to mean a string of a thousand brass cash coins. The game term "Tiao" might have been derived from the monetary term "Diao" due to their similar pronunciation.

Alternative hypotheses for the origins of the game term "Tiao" exist, such as that the term was used to count fish but no known historical cards with fish figures from this era are known to exist making this hypothesis highly unlikely. Packs sporting Strings of Fish and "Tiao" (条), together with the abbreviated "Bing" (并), and the simplified Chinese character version of "Wan" (万), did begin to appear during the early 20 century, these packs of cards continued to be produced until the late 20th century, but none have been known to be produced before this century. Another hypothesis is that the term "Tiao" is actually derived from a game term "Diao" and was used due to their similar pronunciation. But no evidence exists that "Diao" was used as a game term during the early 19th century as the earliest reference to "Diao" as a suit term comes from 1890. This information was published in a memorandum by Henry Wilkinson in the year 1925 under the title "Extracts from my unpublished notes" from his 1890 work on Chinese playing cards where he also lists similar terms. For example, instead of "Suo" (索) he lists "Diao" (吊), and instead of the term "Tong" (同) he lists the term "Bing" (餅), and for the third suit Wilkinson uses the simplified term "Wan" (万).

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