1 Characters

Did you know

• One of the thirteen orphans: a 1 or 9 of each suit and every honor make kokushi musou.
• In three-player mahjong (sanma) every character tile except the 1 and the 9 is taken out. This is one of the two that stay.¹
• Because the suit is read both manzu and wanzu, you'll hear this tile called iiman as well as iiwan.²

At the table

• A terminal fits in only one sequence, so it is the hardest number tile to use and often the first to go.
• It is suji to the 4: once an opponent has discarded , a two-sided wait on the 1 would leave them furiten, which makes it a safer discard against them.
• It is dora when is the dora indicator. Turned up as the indicator itself, it makes dora.

Yaku it can help

• Chanta a terminal or honor in every set
• Junchan a terminal in every set
• Honroutou terminals and honors only
• Chinroutou terminals only
• Kokushi Musou one of the thirteen orphans
• Chinitsu one suit only
• Chuuren Poutou the nine gates, all in one suit

Where the characters come from

Mahjong's three suits are older than the game. They come from Chinese money-suited playing cards, whose suits were coins, strings of coins and myriads. A myriad is ten thousand coins, a hundred strings of a hundred, and that is what 萬 means: ten thousand.³⁴

So a character tile is a sum of money: 三萬 is thirty thousand. The oldest surviving sets, from the 1870s, write the short form 万, as the money cards did; Japanese sets use the full 萬. In Japan the suit is read both manzu and wanzu.⁵²

Sources

1. Japanese mahjong, Wikipedia
2. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Japanese) Japanese
3. Mahjong tiles, Wikipedia
4. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Chinese) Chinese
5. 二 一九世紀の中国麻雀牌（プロト・マージャン）, p. 3: 19th-century tile designs, Japan Playing Card Museum (日本かるた文化館) Japanese