3 Bamboo

Did you know

• On 19th-century tiles the top stick drops down between the lower two, wedged in. The 20th century pulled it back up.¹²
• Cantonese players call it 底褲 or 三角褲, "triangle pants": briefs.³
• 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.⁴

At the table

• It fits in three sequences, the most any tile can.
• It is suji to the 6: once an opponent has discarded , a two-sided wait on the 3 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.⁵³⁴

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.⁵⁶

Sources

1. 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
2. 二 一九世紀の中国麻雀牌（プロト・マージャン）, p. 5: ウイルキンソン牌 (the Wilkinson set, Ningbo, c. 1890), Japan Playing Card Museum (日本かるた文化館) Japanese
3. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Chinese) Chinese
4. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Japanese) Japanese
5. Mahjong tiles, Wikipedia
6. Mahjong, Wikipedia