5 Characters

Did you know

• Most sets write five as 伍, and they have since the 19th century: a set bought in Ningbo around 1890 already has it. A few don't; the set made for the 2012 World Mahjong Championship in Chongqing used the plain 五.¹²³
• In Mahjong Sushi one of the four is the red 5 of characters, worth an extra han.
• 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.⁴

At the table

• It fits in three sequences, the most any tile can.
• It is suji to the 2 and 8: once an opponent has discarded and , a two-sided wait on the 5 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.¹³

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. Mahjong tiles, Wikipedia
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. Japanese mahjong, Wikipedia
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