• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The puzzle had originated with the Chinese tradition of arranging tables of different shapes for banquets. One Chinese book, from the twelfth century, showed 76 banquet placements, many of which were made to look like objects, such as a fluttering flag, a range of mountains and flowers. At the turn of the nineteenth century a Chinese writer with the playful nickname Dim-Witted Recluse adapted this ceremonial choreography for finger-sized geometrical blocks and put the figures in a book, Pictures Using Seven Clever Pieces.

Tangram figures through the ages.

Originally called the Chinese Puzzle, the sets later gained the name ‘tangram’. The first book of tangram puzzles to be published outside China was printed in London in 1817. Immediately, the book started a fad. Between 1817 and 1818 dozens of tangram books came out in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Cartoonists of the day captured the craze by portraying men unwilling to go to bed with their wives, chefs unable to do the cooking and doctors refusing to attend patients because they were too busy rearranging triangles. The craze was more pronounced in France, perhaps because one of the books claimed that the puzzle was Napoleon’s favourite amusement during his exile on the South Atlantic island of St Helena. The former emperor was an early adopter since ships stopped off there on their way back from Asia.

I love the tangram. Men, women and animals magically come to life. By a slight repositioning of just one piece the personality of the figure changes entirely. With their angular and often grotesque contours, the figures are wonderfully suggestive. The French took this personification to an extreme by actually painting images within the silhouettes.

It is hard to believe how engrossing the puzzle is until you have tried it out. In fact, though it looks easy, solving tangram problems can be surprisingly difficult. The shapes can easily deceive, as when two similar-looking silhouettes have totally different underlying structures. The tangram can serve as a warning against complacency, reminding you that the essence of objects may not always be what you first see. Take a look at the following tangram figures. It looks as if a small triangle has been removed from the first to make the second. In fact, both figures use all the pieces and they are arranged in completely different ways.

In the mid nineteenth century, tangrams were embraced by schools, though they still remained an adult pastime. The German company Richter rebranded the tangram as the Kopfzerbrecher, or brain-buster, and, due to the product’s success, introduced more than a dozen similar rearrangement puzzles with different shapes cut into different pieces. During the First World War, Richter puzzles became a much-loved diversion for troops stuck in the trenches. Demand was so great that another 18 puzzles were launched. One of them was called the Schützengraben Geduldspiel – the trench patience game – which contained military shapes such as a Zeppelin, a revolver and a grenade. Some of the figures were devised by soldiers, who had sent the ideas in from the front.

First World War advert for Lott’s brick puzzles.

Before the war, Richter had licensed its puzzles to the Lott’s Brick Company in the UK. It was not only German soldiers who spent their days on the front solving tangram spin-offs; a few miles away in the Allied trenches, the British were doing exactly the same.

As each generation has created new figures, the tangram has never really gone out of fashion in almost 200 years. You can still buy the puzzle in toyshops and bookstores. The stock of published outlines is now more than 5900.

Despite the association of the tangram with puzzles of this kind, it was not the world’s first rearrangement puzzle. In ancient Greece the similar stomachion divided a square into 14 pieces. (Stomachi means ‘stomach’, and the name is thought to be a result of the bellyache that the puzzle induced, although not