History of Playing Cards

Chinese, European, and Indian Origins

The oldest known playing cards are thought to date back to the Tang Dynasty (618–907). These cards, found in China, may have been used for playing “The Game of Leaves,” but although there is mention of the game in writing from that time, the rules are unknown. Andrew Lo argues that this game was actually a board game of promotion and demotion, using dice and a series of reference pages (“leaves”) to determine scores. However, Ouy-ang Xiu (1007–72) writes that card games were developed simultaneously with the use of sheets of paper instead of rolls, which occurred during this same period.

In 1895, W.H. Wilkinson proposed that these first cards may have also served as money, and thus were both the instruments of play and the stakes themselves. Early Chinese cards had four suits, all related to increments of money: coins, strings of 10 coins, myriads of string (representing 10 strings of 10 coins), and tens of myriads. Another way of looking at the values is 1 (coins), 10 (strings), 100 (myriads), and 1,000 (tens of myriads), which are common monetary denominations; it is further speculated that the card designs were originally created as copies of the paper money of the time.

There were two different types of early Chinese cards: Kwan P'ai and Lut Chi. Kwan Pa'i playing cards contained only the first three suits, with each suit containing nine cards, again suggesting an attempt to use the cards to generate numbers from 1 to 999. Each suit additionally contained an “honor card,” the earliest ancestor of today's “face cards” or “trump cards.” Lut Chi, found in the South of China, added the fourth suit.

It has been proposed that the early European suits, which included “wands” or “batons,” might have evolved from a misinterpretation of the images of strings of coins from the Lut Chi cards. However, there is no direct evidence of a link between the development of cards in China and Europe; it is only known that Chinese cards were developed much sooner.

...