Chinese Puzzles: Games for the Hands and Mind

In only a dozen years, Chinese-born collector Wei Zhang and her husband Peter Rasmussen have acquired a diverse and well-documented collection of 1200 antique Chinese puzzles, only a few of which are familiar to western collectors. The puzzles include tangram sets, wire puzzles, puzzle locks, puzzle rings and bracelets, sliding block puzzles, puzzling images of the four happiness boys, puzzle vessels, and more.Now a broad selection of these puzzles is presented in this beautifully illustrated 80-page book. The book is divided into ten sections, each focusing on a particular type of puzzle. Each section contains a short history of the puzzle (in English and Chinese), photographs of representative puzzles, and additional images of them in old Chinese prints, books and photographs. The oldest item included is from the Ming dynasty a brass paperweight made in the form of four boys sharing two heads. The chapters on puzzle locks and puzzle vessels demonstrate how these ingenious creations work.