Ma Diao (馬吊) — Chinese Money-Suited Cards (the Deep Root)

At a glance

The deepest root of the playing-card form itself — and, deliberately, not a direct ancestor of tarot. Paper playing cards are usually traced to Tang-dynasty China (618–907 CE) — though the famous 9th-c. 'leaf game' reference is disputed (it may describe a book or board game), and the earliest unambiguous paper playing cards are Yuan-era, c. 1294; by the time of the Song and Ming they had developed into money-suited packs whose suits are denominations of currency. Ma Diao (馬吊, 'hanging horse') is the best-documented of these games, codified in the late Ming (16th–17th c.) and described in period manuals. This library includes it to show where the idea of a suited pack of cards begins, several removes upstream of anything European.

The money suits

Four ascending money denominations: cash → strings of cash → myriads → tens-of-myriads (文 · 索 · 萬 · 十萬). The suits are not abstract pips but units of money — the structural signature of the East-Asian tradition. The myriad (萬) suit was, in many sets, illustrated with the 108 bandit-heroes of the novel Water Margin (水滸傳), so painted 'Water Margin cards' (水滸牌) are a famous money-suited variety still made in folk workshops today.

Relationship to tarot — a deep root, not a parent

The standard scholarly thesis (Wilkinson, Needham, Lo) is that the playing-card form diffused westward out of China, reaching Europe through the Islamic world, where the Mamluk pack (Egypt/Syria) is the deck Europe directly copied. So the line to tarot runs China → (centuries, many intermediaries) → Mamluk → Italian/Spanish suits → trionfi/tarot. Ma Diao is a cousin and a deep root, like Ganjifa — it shows the origin of the form, but no card here descends by a clean line into a tarot trump. The detail of the transmission is genuinely debated; what is not debated is that paper cards are a Chinese invention.

Game, never divination

Ma Diao is a trick-and-draw gambling game for four players, played with a 40-card money-suited pack. There is no cartomantic tradition attached to it — it sits in this library purely as the upstream of the object, not of any reading practice.

Provenance & evidence

The cards shown are the public-domain holdings at Skokloster Castle, Sweden (high-resolution museum scans on Wikimedia Commons), a European collection of an East-Asian pack. Twelve items survive there. Individual suit/value identification is left open rather than guessed.

Sources

• W. H. Wilkinson, 'Chinese Origin of Playing Cards' (1895); Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5; Andrew Lo on Ma Diao and Water Margin cards; Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980), and Dummett & McLeod, A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack (2004) (on the China→Islam→Europe diffusion). Card images: Skokloster Castle / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

RESEARCH NOTE (2026-06-13). The money-suited form is firmly attested from Lu Rong (1436–94, late 15th c.); Ma Diao itself is codified in the late Ming (16th–17th c.). The 'c. 1600' date and the 17th–18th-c. European (Skokloster) collection reference are loosely sourced — treat the dating as approximate. See research/decks/madiao-money-cards.md.

Where the pictures come from: who holds this deck's pictures, how sharp they are and what their rights allow: Sources: Ma Diao.