Red Dragon

Did you know

• In the oldest surviving sets, from around 1872, 中 is filed with the four winds, a fifth direction: the centre.²³
• 🀄 (U+1F004) is the only mahjong tile in Unicode that is also an emoji, so this is the tile your phone shows for mahjong.⁴
• In Chinese it is 紅中, red centre, and 紅劍, the red sword, for its long hanging stroke.⁵
• Dragon dora loop white, green, red, then back: the red dragon as the indicator makes the white dragon dora.

At the table

• Honors never make sequences. Red dragon can only be used in a pair, a triplet or a kan, so a lone one is often the first tile out of a hand.
• It is dora when is the dora indicator. Turned up as the indicator itself, it makes dora.

Yaku it can help

• Yakuhai a triplet is 1 han
• Shousangen two dragon triplets and a dragon pair
• Daisangen all three dragon triplets
• Honitsu one suit plus honors
• Tsuuiisou honors only
• Chanta a terminal or honor in every set
• Honroutou terminals and honors only
• Kokushi Musou one of the thirteen orphans

Where the dragons come from

The dragons came together late. The oldest surviving sets, brought from China around 1872, have 中 filed with the winds and eight blank tiles, but no 發. By around 1890, sets from Ningbo came in boxes marked 中發, the game's name at the time, which the British consular official Wilkinson, who bought them, glossed as "hit and go". Dragons is Babcock's English name from the 1920s; in Chinese they are 三元牌, the "three fundamental tiles".²³⁶

Nobody knows for sure what the three stand for. One reading is archery: 白 the white target, 發 loosing the arrow, 中 hitting it. Another sees life's three prizes: 發 wealth, 中 a marriage, 白 a spotless name. A Japanese folk reading sees a beauty: white skin, glossy black hair (in Japanese, midori no kurokami, "green-black hair"), red lips. Japanese players list them in that order, haku, hatsu, chun; Chinese says 中發白.¹⁵

They also gave Japanese mahjong a word: dora, the bonus tiles, is short for the English dragon.⁷

Sources

1. 【現代麻雀への道】41 三元牌の意味は？, Fukuchi Makoto, note Japanese
2. 二 一九世紀の中国麻雀牌（プロト・マージャン）, p. 2: グロバー牌 (the Glover sets, c. 1872), Japan Playing Card Museum (日本かるた文化館) Japanese
3. 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
4. Mahjong Tiles (Unicode block), Wikipedia
5. 麻雀牌, Wikipedia (Chinese) Chinese
6. Mahjong tiles, Wikipedia
7. ドラ (麻雀), Wikipedia (Japanese) Japanese