The Invention of Playing Cards: A Shivering Shaman and the Concubines of Invention

She'd come away from a broken home, had lots of strange affairs

With men from every walk of life which took her everywhere,

But she'd never met anyone quite like the Jack of Hearts.

- Bob Dylan, Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts





Anthropologists such as Stewart Culin have traced the lineage of playing cards back to Korean divinatory arrows. Fired into the air by a shaman, these shafts of bamboo fletched with cock feathers literally and theologically pointed the way – to where game would be grazing or an enemy would attack from, or to choose the best young soldier to receive the hand of the warlord's daughter in marriage. Archery must also have been considered more manly and regal than squatting on the ground with some bones. Even so, sometime during the sixth century A.D., divinatory arrows were miniaturized – and some would say feminized – into strips of oiled silk unattached to any shaft. What was the tipping point?



One possibility is that it gradually dawned on one of the shamans that the random fall of sacred arrows – arrows unguided, the Koreans believed, by human will – could be achieved more efficiently by mixing up pieces of silk marked with the same insignia the arrows bore, then turning over the silks one by one. This would save him the steps of going outside, launching arrows skyward, and scurrying around to read and interpret which one had landed where, at what divine angle, and so forth. One frigid January morning, our shivering but imaginative soothsayer must have returned to the hearth of his cozy shelter, set down his quiver and bow, shuffled some previously marked pieces of silk, and dealt them out on a table. "Stay inside, fool," he might have interpreted them to advise. "Transfer fletching design onto silk. Convince warlord new prognostications will be even more accurate . . ."



Like fletching, Korean silk cards were about 8 inches long and half an inch wide. To further emphasize where they came from, their backs were etched with feather-like patterns. Eventually they were standardized into packs of eight suits – men, fish, crows, pheasants, antelopes, stars, rabbits, horses – of 10 cards each, numbered 1 through 9. The only court card was a general, not surprising in a martial society that had recently launched arrows to learn what its gods had in mind, and whose word for cards, htou-tjyen, means "fighting tablets." Modern military R&D continues to generate both useful and lethal inventions, from ambulances and radar to supersonic aircraft and nuclear technology. Replacing 3-foot arrows with 8-inch strips of silk is one of the first steps toward what we call nanotechnology.



Around 700 A.D., just to the north and west of the Korean peninsula, cards of an altogether different provenance began to appear. In the T'ang capital Chang'an, imperial courtesans were said to be the creators of dotted cards, a thinner, cheaper version of dominoes, a progression that seems confirmed by the Chinese word p'ai, which means both "dice" and "playing cards." Having descended from six-sided dice, dominoes were carved from ivory and ebony, neatly fitted for storage in lacquered sandalwood boxes and probably kept under lock and key until the emperor wanted to play. With roughly 3,000 members in his household and harem – including the empress and her handmaidens, along with his hundreds of concubines and even assistant concubines – a busy emperor could hardly find the time, let alone summon the energy, to keep them all entertained. How pass the weeks and months between sessions with him, then, especially for the underemployed beauties who developed a taste for dominoes but had none to play with? Boredom and affordability thus become the mothers, or perhaps the concubines, of invention.



One avid domino-card player was Wu Chao, China's only empress, who began her 15-year reign in 690, eight and a half centuries before Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne of England. In 750, Emperor Ming Huang played cards with his "precious consort" Yang Kuei-fei, the Jade Beauty who had been his son's wife; the young woman was so stunning, in fact, that she distracted the emperor from affairs of state and led to his downfall. And on New Year's Eve 969, the official chronicle of the Liao dynasty records a game of cards played by the more uxorious Emperor Mu-tsung and his wife.



The Chinese historian Ou-yang Siu believed his nation's cards evolved from dominoes near the middle of the T'ang dynasty (618-907). The northeastern border of the T'ang Empire extended well beyond the Great Wall to abut the Korean peninsula, so it's reasonable to assume a variety of decks migrated back and forth across the border. Whether East Asian playing cards were originally inspired by arrows or dominoes, divination or boredom, by the eighth century, the most advanced peoples on earth had progressed well beyond rolling dice across flattened dirt for their pleasure or edification.



What made Korea and China such fertile territory for the gaming revolution? The ground had been prepared by their high degree of civilization. It was under T'ang rule, for example, that the first canals were dug, the first precise tax and legal codes written, the first organized cavalry deployed, the first reliable censuses taken. Bows and arrows were used to fell enemies or prey at a safer remove than spears could afford. Singer-poets such as Wang Wei and Li Po had begun performing in distant cities, a cultural expansion leading to both opera and popular music. Perhaps most important, the tools and craftsmanship of their artisans had reached a level of sophistication capable of producing functional and elegant cards.



As the great historian of games David Parlett makes clear, the most salient characteristic of cards is their two-sided nature. One side is marked uniformly, the other individually. Once a deck has been adequately shuffled, the order of the individual sides is random, and after they're dealt, the uniform sides keep the values of the facedown sides a secret. In addition to the greater complexity a hand of cards can generate, the combination of randomness and mystery is what elevates a card game over one played with dice.



The human brain has a fondness for categories, hierarchies, and intricacy, so people of advanced intelligence and learning tended to find card games more satisfying than dice-throwing. Psychological acuity, educated guesswork, and a lively imagination were required to play these games well. A people also equipped with fine inks and brushes, with a productive economy spinning off leisure time, with precise legal codes on the books and intricate poems in their hearts were likelier to fall for a card game than were primitive nomads drifting across bone-strewn landscapes.



The Chinese historical dictionary Ching-tsze-tung described a variety of card games being played by 1120. Most decks had been streamlined by now into three suits or categories: money, strings, and men. Cards used in the imperial court were still painted by hand, a labor-intensive operation only royalty could afford. By 1131, however, functional decks were being mass produced by woodblock printing on cardboard. Their faces were primarily red and black. Red represented fire, good fortune, and joy, while black was considered the king of colors, representing water, heaven, and yin (to white's yang). On a more practical level, the corners were rounded to keep them from fraying. And because the Chinese fanned their cards from the top, the lower right quadrant was left blank so that a player could spread his hand without losing sight of the numbers and suits, which were printed on both ends to be readable without having to flip the cards over.



Now that more people had access to them, playing cards began to spread along trade routes, particularly to cultural centers in which literacy rates were higher. Once priests, scribes, and warriors took up cards, they were further disseminated via military conquest.



Cards continue to be used in both psychological and blood-and-guts warfare – during the Vietnam conflict, for example, when the U.S. military tried to intimidate the Viet Cong by festooning casualties with decks consisting of nothing but the Bicycle ace of spades as a "calling card," on the theory that VC soldiers believed it predicted their death. One GI recalled: "The story we heard was that the Vietnamese were inveterate card players – and that was true; I saw mamasans playing cards many, many times in any shade that was available – and that some of the common superstitions about certain cards had penetrated Vietnamese culture, by way of the French. For instance, the ace of spades was a death card. The queen of hearts was a love card. The jack of spades represented an enemy." I'll write more about this when we reach the role of poker during the Vietnam War. In the meantime, while the success of the tactic seems to have been rather limited, those facing check-raises today from Liz Lieu, J.C. Tran, or any of the hundreds of other Vietnamese maestros often get the feeling that the tables have been effectively turned.



Since Asians first produced them, the faces of cards have shown sacred or worldly images, spoken to tribal concerns, and functioned as memory aids (as in flash cards) or a means of condensing knowledge. Their subjects have ranged from chrysanthemums to the 10 incarnations of Vishnu, from long-bearded Civil War generals to the 52 members of the Ba'ath Party most wanted by the United States military.

On April 11, 2003, that deck was officially designated the "personality identification playing cards" by Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks of the United States Central Command, whose largest order was requisitioned from the Liberty Playing Card Company of Arlington, Texas. Cards with a similar purpose had been deployed by both sides during the Civil War and in every important American military campaign since. So it seems rather telling that no deck depicting members of Al Qaeda has been requisitioned by President Bush.



A parallel factor in all this was the invention of paper by the artisan Ts'ai Lun of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 104 A.D. This had triggered a cultural leap forward at least as momentous as those brought about by Gutenberg's printing press in the 15th century or by the Internet at the dawn of the 21st. Along with portable money and materials for drawing and record-keeping, numbers and images printed on thicker "card board" became fundamental byproducts of the paper revolution. Unfortunately, the fact that cards are made of paper allows fewer of them to survive a millennium intact than do the much older bones, dice, and dominoes.



In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond writes that the transfer of Chinese papermaking techniques to the Islamic world was "made possible when an Arab army defeated a Chinese army at the battle of the Talas River in Central Asia in A.D. 751." (Besides Chapter 13 of Diamond's great book, also see Chapter 1 of Parlett's The Oxford Guide to Card Games, and Chapter 3 of David Schwartz's Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling.) Two papermakers among the prisoners were brought to Samarkand, the Persian capital on the ancient Silk Road between China and Europe, where they were encouraged to share their secrets. As the prisoners began their nervous demonstration, the arrival of cards in the Christian and Islamic worlds became a foregone conclusion, though it would be another six centuries before Middle Eastern decks made their way to Europe. Evidently, news traveled slower in the days before video cellphones.



The first Islamic cards were oblong, with decks divided into 10 suits in keeping with the Arabic decimal system. Shariah law frowned on reproductions of the human form, so Islamic and Persian decks had no court figures, only symbols to indicate rank. The highest cards were the malik (sultan), na'ib malik (viceroy), and thani na'ib (vice-viceroy). And because Islamic women took no part in civic life, the decks had no queens. The dancing girls at the bottom of the sultan's hierarchy were chastened to Arabic tens.



Indian cards, called ganjifeh, derived from Persian decks introduced sometime before the Mughal conquest in the 16th century. Schwartz tells us the Mughals "were Islamic, though not strict adherents to the letter of Koranic law. In addition to allowing Hindus latitude in the practice of their religion, they apparently tolerated cardplaying." The Mughal emperor Babur (1483-1530) loved to play cards with his daughter and often gave handpainted decks as gifts to his subjects. The exquisite, almost perfectly round cards were called kridapatram, "painted rags for playing." A typical 96-card set had eight suits ranked in descending order – slaves, crowns, swords, gold coins, harps, documents, silver coins, and supplies – which made it a revealing guide to the social strata and morality of the subcontinent. Musicians were valued more highly than clerks, for example, but outranked by soldiers and kings, while the most prized possession of all was a slave. Or, if not a slave, your brother's wife greeting you with her breasts exposed, as featured in another ganjifeh deck. As Seinfeld's girlfriend Sidra might fairly appraise those of the Hindu Queen Tara, "they're real and they're spectacular."



Throughout their long history, the faces of cards have provided small canvases for artistic embellishment. Their themes have ranged from military and social rank to the religious and frankly erotic. The Persian miniature painting that inspired ganjifeh artists had itself been inspired by the Chinese courtesans' domino cards. As human cultures continued to develop across the globe, Persian decks found their way to a strange, remote continent on which, when people played at all, they were still rolling primitive dice. After the glories of its Greek and Roman civilizations, it had relapsed into a long Age of Darkness but was poised now on the brink of a Renaissance.



The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has just received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and it seems relevant to mention that the grisly murder of a sultan's chief miniaturist in 16th-century Istanbul drives both the plot and the painterly themes of Pamuk's masterpiece, My Name is Red. The miniaturist was apparently killed by a more devout Muslim for daring to adopt Renaissance Italian pictorial styles in his work.



Modern Istanbul, of course, is the point at which the Islamist Middle East and the Christian but increasingly secular West continue to meet – or collide, especially over issues like artistic representation, the role of women in society, and playing cards. Just last year, to take a particularly heinous example, an Islamist judge in the Indonesian province of Aceh sentenced four women to be publicly beaten for participating in a card game involving 65,000 rupiah – about $7. More than a thousand people gathered after Friday prayer sessions to watch the women receive seven fierce blows apiece across their backs with a long rattan cane. Another judge blamed the tsunami, which took 25,000 lives and destroyed much of the Acehnese economy, on women who didn't wear the chador.



Next issue: Persian cards come to Europe.