Traditional Eastern Suits and Decks
Eastern cultures, particularly Japan, were introduced to playing cards with the arrival of Portuguese explorer Francisco Xavier in 1549 AD. With him and his sailors came a 48-card deck (12 ranks, four suits) that was popular for gambling games at the time. This 48-card deck was adopted by the Japanese for the same purpose. Increasing restrictions by the Tokugawa shogunate on gambling, card playing, and general foreign influence, resulted in the Hanafuda card deck that today is used most often for a matching-type game of the same name. The role of rank and suit in organizing cards became switched, so the hanafuda deck has 12 suits, each representing a month of the year, and each suit has 4 cards, most often two normal, one Ribbon and one Special (though August, November and December each differ uniquely from this convention).
In China and Southeast Asia, the game of Mahjong developed as the result of a similar introduction to playing cards and was combined with the Hindu-Chinese development of dominoes resulting in tiles instead of cards. These tiles are organized into the following groups: three major suits of nine unique values (Coins, Strings and Characters, derived from the ancient Chinese monetary system), plus four Honors (cardinal directions), four Flowers, four Seasons, and three Dragons (Red, Green and White). The full set has four copies of each value of each major suit, four of each Dragon and Honor tile value, and one of each Flower and Season tile, for 144 total tiles. They are used to play a game very similar to Rummy; players draw and discard in an attempt to form their entire hand into one or more groups of tiles. They are also used to play a solitaire game that is very popular in the United States in its electronic form. The Mahjong tileset is also available in the form of playing cards, making it more portable, but this is a relatively recent development.
In both Japan and continental Asia, the 52-card French-suited deck is also popular as are some of the games played with them.
Read more about this topic: Suit (cards)
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