6 Bamboo

Did you know

• It wasn't always green. On the oldest surviving sets, from around 1872, two of its sticks are red; by the late 19th century all six were green.¹²
• 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.³

At the table

• It fits in three sequences, the most any tile can.
• It is suji to the 3 and 9: once an opponent has discarded and , a two-sided wait on the 6 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.⁴⁵³

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.⁴⁶

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 (Japanese) Japanese
4. Mahjong tiles, Wikipedia
5. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Chinese) Chinese
6. Mahjong, Wikipedia