Playing Cards. A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front and back of each card has a finish to make handling easier. They are most commonly used for playing card games, and are also used to perform magic tricks, for cardistry, in card throwing, and for building card houses. Some types of cards such as tarot cards are also used for divination. Playing cards are typically palm-sized for convenient handling, and usually are sold together in a set as a deck of cards or pack of cards. Playing cards are available in a wide variety of styles, as decks may be custom-produced for casinos and magicians, made as promotional items, or intended as souvenirs, artistic works, educational tools, or branded accessories. Decks of cards or even single cards are also collected as a hobby or for monetary value. Different types of card decks can be found in different areas of the world, while the standard 52-card deck is known and used internationally, other types of cards such as Japanese hanafuda and Italian playing cards are well-known in their locales. Cards may also be produced for trading card sets or collectable card games, which can comprise hundreds if not thousands of unique cards. Playing cards were first invented in China during the Tang dynasty. Further information: Chinese playing cards Playing cards may have been invented during the Tang dynasty around the 9th century AD as a result of the usage of woodblock printing technology. The first possible reference to card games comes from a 9th-century text known as the Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang, written by Tang dynasty writer Su E. It describes Princess Tongchang, daughter of Emperor Yizong of Tang, playing the leaf game in 868 with members of the Wei clan, the family of the princess' husband. The first known book on the leaf game was called the Yezi Gexi and allegedly written by a Tang woman. It received commentary by writers of subsequent dynasties. The Song dynasty scholar Ouyang Xiu asserts that the leaf game existed at least since the mid-Tang dynasty and associated its invention with the development of printed sheets as a writing medium. However, Ouyang also claims that the leaves were pages of a book used in a board game played with dice, and that the rules of the game were lost by 1067. Other games revolving around alcoholic drinking involved using playing cards of a sort from the Tang dynasty onward. However, these cards did not contain suits or numbers. Instead, they were printed with instructions or forfeits for whomever drew them. The earliest dated instance of a game involving cards occurred on 17 July 1294 when Yan Sengzhu and Zheng Pig-Dog were caught playing cards and that wood blocks for printing them had been impounded, together with nine of the actual cards. William Henry Wilkinson suggests that the first cards may have been actual paper currency which doubled as both the tools of gaming and the stakes being played for, similar to trading card games. Using paper money was inconvenient and risky so they were substituted by play money known as money cards. One of the earliest games in which we know the rules is madiao, a trick-taking game, which dates to the Ming Dynasty. 15th-century scholar Lu Rong described it is as being played with 38 money cards divided into four suits: 9 in coins, 9 in strings of coins, 9 in myriads, and 11 in tens of myriads. The two latter suits had Water Margin characters instead of pips on them with Chinese characters to mark their rank and suit. The suit of coins is in reverse order with 9 of coins being the lowest going up to 1 of coins as the high card. Despite the wide variety of patterns, the suits show a uniformity of structure. Every suit contains twelve cards with the top two usually being the court cards of king and vizier and the bottom ten being pip cards. Half the suits use reverse ranking for their pip cards. There are many motifs for the suit pips but some include coins, clubs, jugs, and swords which resemble later Mamluk and Latin suits. Michael Dummett speculated that Mamluk cards may have descended from an earlier deck which consisted of 48 cards divided into four suits each with ten pip cards and two court cards. By the 11th century, playing cards were spreading throughout the Asian continent and later came into Egypt. The oldest surviving cards in the world are four fragments found in the Keir Collection and one in the Benaki Museum. They are dated to the 12th and 13th centuries.