The Chinese Factory Town Betting on America’s Mahjong Boom
In an aging mahjong manufacturing hub, factories are redesigning tiles, expanding exports, and racing to meet a sudden wave of American demand.
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“We are looking for a factory that can produce acrylic mahjong tiles.”
Hua Fangyi repeated that pitch at nearly 30 factories in Taixing, a city in eastern China’s Jiangsu province known for manufacturing mahjong tiles. “Almost every factory refused,” she says.
After quitting her job to start an export business last October, Hua, 28, spotted a surge in overseas demand for American mahjong. Believing the opportunity might last only a few months, she planned to test the market with just a few dozen sets.
... Taixing’s factories were built for large runs of traditional Chinese mahjong, not the small batches of brightly colored acrylic tiles overseas buyers wanted. Some produced only conventional melamine sets; others required minimum orders far beyond what Hua could afford.
Then Hua found a factory with 20 American mahjong sets in stock. She bought the entire batch, and it sold out almost immediately.
Within months, she had built a company shipping more than 5,000 sets a month and generating roughly $400,000 in monthly sales. Across Taixing, factories that had once turned away from American mahjong were now chasing the same overseas buyers.
“Almost every factory is now making American mahjong,” Hua says.
The opportunity has also drawn a new generation of entrepreneurs to Taixing: former tech workers, salespeople, and export traders hoping to manufacture the tiles and build brands of their own.
Together, they are all betting on a boom whose limits remain unclear. For now, overseas orders have given Taixing’s mahjong industry fresh momentum, ...
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The game itself, however, has a long history in the U.S. The governing body for American mahjong, the National Mah Jongg League, was founded in 1937 with 32 members; it now has more than 350,000 members and publishes a new card of official hands and rules each year.
More recently, American brands such as Oh My Mahjong have helped recast mahjong tiles as colorful, premium lifestyle products, while influencers and social clubs have brought the game to younger players seeking in-person connection.
In April 2026, review platform Yelp reported that U.S. searches for mahjong clubs had jumped 4,467% between September 2024 and August 2025, compared with the previous 12 months. Oh My Mahjong’s sets now sell for $350 to $475, with most priced around $400 — versus the roughly 100 yuan ($15) many Chinese sets sell for in China on e-commerce platform Taobao.
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. A search for “mahjong” on Qichacha, a Chinese corporate database, returns nearly 180 businesses in Taixing, many of them small workshops specializing in a single stage of production.
The cluster grew from a household trade dating to the 1980s, when local families cut and polished tiles by hand from bamboo and ox bone. Over time, production split among specialized workshops handling tile blanks, engraving, polishing, printing, and packaging.
“If one family made money from it, the neighbors would learn too,” says Zhu Ronggen, whose father was among Taixing’s earliest mahjong makers. “One person taught another, and slowly the whole village started making mahjong.”
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“Chinese mahjong designs have barely changed for decades,” Zhu says. “American mahjong is completely different. A circle tile could be a football or a bunch of grapes. One grape stands for one dot, and nine grapes represent nine dots.”
American sets also include Arabic numerals and joker tiles, while familiar symbols are constantly reworked around seasonal themes and customers’ ideas. Summer collections feature seashells and aquatic plants; Christmas designs use Santa hats and trees.
And while traditional Chinese sets are usually molded from melamine in a narrow range of colors, American buyers prefer acrylic tiles with richer palettes, sometimes built from six or seven colored layers visible along the edge.
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Chinese players, he says, tend to value weight, legibility, and how the tiles feel in the hand. American buyers, by contrast, want sets distinctive enough to display and expressive enough to reflect their tastes.
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Inside Zhu’s factory, traditional Chinese mahjong and its American reinvention sit side by side. Dust-covered melamine slabs are stacked near the entrance, while baskets of brightly colored acrylic tiles and export cartons crowd the corridors beyond.
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“I used to make just 20 sets of American mahjong a year,” he says. “Now, I can turn out 200 sets a day.”
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Unlike traditional Chinese sets, which can be reproduced using fixed molds, each American order requires new adjustments to engraving, printing, and coloring.
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“People buy them the way they buy clothes,” Zhu says. “What’s fashionable this year may be completely different next year.”
To keep up, Zhu has invested another 1 million yuan ($148,000) in laser engravers, UV printers, and other equipment.
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This past March, five young entrepreneurs arrived in Taixing to start a mahjong business.
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... the five had experience in sales, technology, and international trade. None had ever made a mahjong tile.
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operates under the name SenJoy Mahjong. A former Alibaba employee, he saw American mahjong as a chance to sell a higher-value product overseas.
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“For us, building a brand starts with original design,” Li says. “We might become the first company in Taixing — and perhaps one of the first in China — to build a real mahjong brand instead of simply manufacturing for others.”
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Their bestseller uses a coral-reef theme.
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Today’s buyers, he says, remain a relatively small group with strong spending power. If American mahjong reaches a broader market, more manufacturers will follow, he says, adding: “Price wars are unavoidable.”
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Hua, one of the first Chinese traders to bet on American mahjong, has watched competitors multiply within months.
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“The profit margins were much higher in the beginning, but now they have dropped significantly,” she says. “I think this is probably an inevitable stage for any viral product.”
She, too, has started developing designs of her own.
Last month, she began experimenting with AI to create early concepts before working with freelance designers to refine them. Her first ideas included themes inspired by witches, tennis, flowers, and Christmas.