Nobody is sure where or when Chinese dominoes came into existence, but they were reported by European travelers during the Renaissance and are still popular in Asian countries today. It is assumed that Chinese dominoes were the ancestor of Mah Jong.
Chinese dominoes are different from the usual set of Western dominoes in many ways.
About the only things they have in common are a relationship to dice, being made from a hard black material and having their spots drilled into the surface and then colored for visibility. This is because the games played with them use the tiles like playing cards to build melds or like dice to make totals rather than to build chains of tiles. They have to have a shape which allows several of them to be held at once, so most pieces are about one inch wide and about 2.5 inches long. The Pips Chinese dominoes have no dividing bar in the center to separate the two ends. The two ends are separated by either distance, clustering or colors.