A NEW PUZZLE WITH AN OLD TANGRAM.

The Puzzle Museum was fortunate to find this delightful lacquered box with a Tangram motif on the lid dating from around 1819 when the Tangram craze was at its height.

The box is captioned in French "Casse-tete Chinois" which has been charmingly translated into English as "Chinese broken head".

The round box was empty so it was natural to look for a Tangram to put inside the box.

In our store we found the perfect puzzle: a hand painted ivory puzzle from the same period and without a box.

Sadly it appeared to be significantly too large and, as it was painted, we needed it to fit flat without stacking into the box.

Our box had a diameter of 3 inches and, after hours of puzzling, we discovered a solution with a surprisingly curious arrangement.

So long as the pieces are flat in the box it does not matter how they are arranged. Can you discover the best way to arrange the seven pieces of a tangram puzzle so that they will fit flat inside a circle?

We will put a spoiler to our solution lower down this page.

Spoiler below

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

This was our solution. Can you improve on it?