4 Characters

Did you know

• The reading suu comes from Chinese sì; everyday Japanese says shi or yon. Mahjong numbers are read the Chinese way.
• Four is often thought unlucky in Chinese, in Cantonese especially, because 四 sounds almost like 死, death.¹
• 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.²

At the table

• It fits in three sequences, the most any tile can.
• It is suji to the 1 and 7: once an opponent has discarded and , a two-sided wait on the 4 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.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.⁵⁶

Sources

1. Chinese numerology, Wikipedia
2. Japanese mahjong, Wikipedia
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
6. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Japanese) Japanese