3 Characters

Did you know

• San is one of only two mahjong numbers that sound like everyday Japanese; the other is kyuu, nine. The rest come from Chinese: ii, ryan, suu, uu, roo, chii, paa.
• In three-player mahjong (sanma) the 2 to 8 of characters are taken out of the set, so this tile only turns up in four-player games.¹

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

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.²³

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.⁴⁵

Sources

1. Japanese mahjong, Wikipedia
2. Mahjong tiles, Wikipedia
3. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Chinese) Chinese
4. 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
5. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Japanese) Japanese