With its exquisite photographs and richly informative text, this is simply the best, the most unique, and the most in-depth study of the ancient and popular Chinese puzzle game.

This first truly comprehensive and beautiful volume on one of the world’s most popular and intriguing puzzles is an authoritative, lavishly photographed history of tangrams, and also a masterful introduction to puzzle solving, with more than 2,000 all-time tangrams. This accurate history of the classic Chinese art form comes from a tangram museum owner and his research team, who discovered many treasures, such as the tangram sets used by Chinese mathematicians 2,200 years ago to test Pythagorean theorems. Photos show how to arrange tangram-shaped antique dinner tables for a variety of themes such as mountain ranges and celebration costumes. Among the puzzles for you to solve: Paradoxical Pairs that appear to be identical but differ in a hard-to-detect detail.