2 Bamboo

Did you know

• Chinese players call it 雙節棍, the nunchaku.¹
• It is one of the five bamboo tiles painted with no red at all (2, 3, 4, 6 and 8), so it can go into ryuuiisou, the all-green yakuman.²
• Ryan comes from Chinese 兩 liǎng, the word Chinese uses when counting two of something, rather than 二 èr, the bare number.³

At the table

• It fits in two sequences, one fewer than the middle tiles.
• It is suji to the 5: once an opponent has discarded , a two-sided wait on the 2 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

• Tanyao simples only
• Chinitsu one suit only
• Chuuren Poutou the nine gates, all in one suit
• Ryuuiisou the green tiles only

Where the bamboo come from

The sticks aren't bamboo. They are strings of coins: 索 means rope, and copper cash were threaded through their square holes in strings of a hundred. The bumps along each stick are the coins on the string.⁴¹²

Joseph Park Babcock, whose 1920 Rules of Mah-Jongg are the earliest mahjong rules known in America, took the bumps for bamboo knots, and the English name stuck.⁴⁵

Sources

1. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Chinese) Chinese
2. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Japanese) Japanese
3. 麻雀の「イー、リャン、サン、スー」の「リャン」と漢字の「両」の話, Toyo Seiki blog Japanese
4. Mahjong tiles, Wikipedia
5. Mahjong, Wikipedia