The game of leaves: An inquiry into the origin of Chinese playing cards

This article discusses the extant material on the 'game of leaves' of the Tang and early Song period, and argues that it is most probably not a card game as assumed in influential works on the history of Chinese printing, but a board game of promotion and demotion. Using dice, it involves looking up instructions from a rulebook written on rapidly searchable 'leaves' or pages. The later Southern Song period is proposed as the likely date of the earliest Chinese playing card, and a Yuan date of 1294 is given as the earliest reliable recorded date. No rules for card games from this early period have been discovered, and no extant cards can be confidently dated to this period. However, the late Ming ma diao card game shares a similar feature to some early Indian and European card games, and provides tantalizing evidence for a consideration of the transmission of playing cards from China to the West.