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If you want the old-time touch in mahjong, get a bone and bamboo mahjong set. That's the original way! In these sets, the tiles are made of bone and bamboo. The front side where the symbol is is bone and the back side of the tile is bamboo.

Originally the bone was cow bone. When the mahjong fever was running the hottest in the 1920's and 1930's, Chinese mahjong set makers ran out of cows. The tiles are made of cow shin bones, so one cow doesn't provide material for many tiles. Eventually the problem was solved by importing tons of cow bones from the slaughterhouses of Chicago.

These days the bone is either old-style cow bone or fish bone. Of course there are few fish with bones big enough to make mahjong tiles, so the bone is ground to a dust and compressed to make tiles. Bone tiles can be suprisingly white and bright, if the bone is bleached.

Then there's ivory, but that's really rare and expensive, and importing ivory is illegal in most countries these days. Since elephants are nice animals and poaching is a huge problem, I'd really recommend avoiding ivory.

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