The Swallow Tables

In the Northern Song dynasty, Huang Bosi designed the Yanji tu, a set of banquet tables. A Chinese account describes seven tables, two long, two medium and three small. They could be combined into dozens of layouts to suit the occasion. Huang arranged them into twenty forms with forty names.

Sources differ on the number of tables. English Wikipedia gives six, with a seventh perhaps added later. Chinese sources trace the idea of the tangram, qiqiaoban, seven pieces that form many figures, to these tables.

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