8 Characters

Did you know

• Eight is the lucky number in Chinese: 八 bā sounds like 發 fā, "to prosper", the same 發 that is on the green dragon.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 two sequences, one fewer than the middle tiles.
• It is suji to the 5: once an opponent has discarded , a two-sided wait on the 8 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