48 Fun Facts About Mahjong

A debunked legend, used to sell mahjong sets in the 1920s, credits which ancient Chinese philosopher with inventing the game?

Confucius. A 1922 American rulebook was subtitled 'Played by Confucius 2200 Years Ago', part of a sales pitch that gave a far younger game an ancient, courtly pedigree.

The faces of most traditional mahjong tiles, dovetailed onto bamboo backs, were carved from what?

Cow bone. It was cheap and plentiful, so ivory sets were always the rare luxury, and bone stayed the standard until plastics took over in the twentieth century.

How many tiles does each mahjong player hold in hand between turns?

13. A complete hand needs 14, so every player sits exactly one tile short until the winning tile arrives, either drawn or claimed from someone's discard.

What makes up a standard winning hand in mahjong?

Four melds and a pair. The dealer starts with all 14 tiles, so once in a blue moon the deal itself is already a winning hand, a fluke known as the heavenly hand.

What does mahjong's original Chinese name, still used in Cantonese, mean?

Sparrow. The clatter of shuffled tiles is said to sound like a flock of squabbling sparrows.

To which Western card game family is mahjong most often compared?

Rummy. Both games are won by drawing and discarding until the hand falls into sets and runs, and mahjong's wall of face-down tiles does the job of rummy's stock pile.

What are the three suits in mahjong?

Bamboos, dots and characters. Only these numbered tiles can be laid in a run, since the honour tiles carry no numbers and can only be matched.

What usually appears on mahjong's 1 of bamboo tile instead of a single bamboo stick?

A bird. Many sets show a peacock, but the earliest known tiles carry only a simple stylised mark there; the ornate bird arrived later.

Which Chinese character sits at the bottom of every tile in mahjong's characters suit?

Ten thousand (wan). Western buyers couldn't read it, which is why export sets gained numerals in the corners.

What are the two kinds of honours tiles in a mahjong set?

Winds and dragons. A set of your own seat's wind, or of the round's, scores extra, so the very same tile can be worth more to one player than to the next.

What colours are mahjong's three dragon tiles?

Red, green and white. 'Dragons' is a Western label: in Chinese the red tile reads 'centre', the green one 'get rich', and the white is simply a blank board.

Why did rival American makers of the 1920s sell their mahjong sets under names like 'Pung Chow'?

Mah-Jongg was a trademark. Joseph Babcock had coined that spelling for the sets he imported, so competitors invented names of their own, from 'Pe-Ling' to 'The Game of a Thousand Intelligences'.

In which Amy Tan novel is a woman asked to take her late mother's seat at a weekly mahjong game?

The Joy Luck Club. That is the name of the weekly game itself: the mother started the first club to cope with wartime China, then revived it as an immigrant in San Francisco.

What does a mahjong player do with a bonus tile picked from the wall?

Sets it aside and draws another. The replacement comes from the far end of the wall, and winning on that very tile earns a bonus of its own.

Mahjong's flower tiles show the 'Four Gentlemen' of Chinese art: orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum and which winter-flowering blossom?

Plum. It flowers in midwinter, often while snow is still on the branches, which is why Chinese painters made it their emblem of endurance.

Which wind position deals first in mahjong?

East. The other seats follow as South, West and North going anticlockwise round the table, which is the mirror image of a real compass.

In mahjong, what happens to the deal when the dealer wins the hand?

The same player deals again. A match is four rounds of at least four hands each, but every win by the dealer adds an extra hand, so a lucky streak can stretch the game for hours.

Which friendly gesture toward another player is taboo at the mahjong table?

Patting a shoulder. The touch is said to pass on bad luck and knock a player off a winning streak.

Which American game company took on Joseph Babcock's Mah-Jongg sets at the height of the 1920s craze?

Parker Brothers. It sold Babcock's sets as the craze peaked, and a decade later the same firm turned down Monopoly before changing its mind.

In mahjong, what is a pung?

Three identical tiles. Shout 'pung' and you may take the matching discard from any player, even out of turn, so the players sitting in between simply miss their go.

When two mahjong players claim one discard, one to finish a hand and one for a set, who gets it?

Whoever can win. A winning claim beats a claim for three or four of a kind, which in turn beats a claim for a run, so the humblest call succeeds only when nobody else wants the tile.

In mahjong, from whose discard may a chow normally be claimed?

Only from the person just before you. Any player may grab a discard for a more valuable set, but a chow, which scores nothing in many rule books, has to wait its turn.

What is 'robbing the kong' in mahjong?

Winning with a tile a rival adds to a set. The rival lays down a fourth matching tile to upgrade three of a kind, and the robber, who needs that very tile, takes it and the hand, with a scoring bonus on top.

In traditional mahjong scoring, what happens to the dealer's winnings and losses?

Both are doubled. The dealer collects twice as much for a win and pays out twice as much for a loss, which makes holding the deal the riskiest seat at the table.

Which rare mahjong hand holds a 1 and 9 of every suit plus one of each honour tile?

Thirteen orphans. It contains no sets at all, only loners and a single pair, yet it is a limit hand: whatever the stakes, it pays the table maximum.

In 2007, doctors in which city reviewed 23 reported cases of seizures triggered by mahjong?

Hong Kong. Even watching a game could bring on an attack, and the hospital team concluded that the best prevention, and cure, was to stay away from the table.

Mahjong is based on Chinese draw-and-discard card games played with what kind of deck?

Money-suited cards. Their suits counted coins, strings of coins and still larger sums, and all three live on in the tiles, redrawn but still recognisable.

Though often sold as ancient, mahjong's oldest surviving tile sets date only from which Chinese dynasty?

Qing. The oldest known sets were collected in the 1870s, and historians put the game's birth only a decade or two before that, in the last dynasty's final stretch.

During which period of Chinese history was mahjong banned outright?

The Cultural Revolution. From 1966 to 1976 the game was condemned as a symbol of capitalist corruption; an earlier government had merely restricted it to Chinese New Year.

Which outfitter, then a store for wealthy sportsmen, sold the first mahjong sets imported to America?

Abercrombie & Fitch. Better known then for elephant guns than for clothes, it saw its first shipment of sets sell out and became the hub of the craze.

Joseph Babcock, who brought mahjong to America in the 1920s, learned the game in China while working for which company?

Standard Oil. Posted to Suzhou as a civil engineer in 1912, Babcock later devised a simplified version of the game for Americans and tucked his own rulebook into the sets he exported.

During its 1920s heyday, mahjong briefly threatened to displace which card game as the fashionable pastime?

Bridge. The two crazes ran so close that one magazine covered both, and it was that magazine which gathered the experts who wrote America's first standard mahjong laws in 1924.

America's National Mah Jongg League was founded by a group of women in which city?

New York. By the 1930s almost every circle played by its own house rules, and the league was formed in 1937 to give American players one standard game.

How are the legal hands in American mahjong decided?

A new card is issued each year. Players buy the fresh list of winning hands from the National Mah Jongg League, which passes the proceeds on to charity.

Which place's style of mahjong is known for its larger, sixteen-tile hands?

Taiwan. Players hold sixteen tiles and go out on seventeen; Filipino mahjong adds a quirk of its own, counting every honour tile as a bonus flower instead of playing it in the hand.

Which country's mahjong adds four animal tiles to the set: a cat, a mouse, a cockerel and a centipede?

Singapore, along with neighbouring Malaysia. The animals come in pairs, cat with mouse and cockerel with centipede, and drawing both halves of a pair brings an instant payout.

What must a mahjong player do with a set made from a claimed discard?

Lay it face up. The price of grabbing a discard is information: everyone can now read part of your hand, and sets made this way usually score less than ones kept concealed.

In Japanese mahjong, what does a player announce by calling 'riichi'?

A hand one tile from winning. The caller puts up a 1,000-point stick as a bet and may no longer change the hand; if a rival wins first, the stake goes to them.

A standard mahjong set, bonus tiles included, contains how many tiles?

144. Players can check without counting: each builds a wall two tiles high and eighteen stacks long, and a set played without its bonus tiles comes up one stack short.

Where did the M.League, launched in 2018, turn mahjong into a televised team sport with uniformed professionals?

Japan. The league was founded to cut the game's old ties to gambling in smoke-filled parlours, presenting it instead as a sport that fans follow online.

What does the computer game mahjong solitaire borrow from real mahjong?

Its tiles, and nothing else. The puzzle was written for computers in the 1980s, and its huge success has left many people believing that clearing a stack of tiles is what mahjong is.

Which 1986 Activision game gave mahjong solitaire its other common name?

Shanghai. The title stuck to the whole genre, still often called Shanghai solitaire, and Microsoft answered with a Windows version named after another city, Taipei.

The first global mahjong tournament, in 2002, was held outside China in which city?

Tokyo. A home player, Mai Hatsune, became the first world champion, although the event was played under the official tournament rules China had published in 1998.

Which Chinese city hosted the World Mahjong Organization's first World Championship in 2007?

Chengdu. A Tsinghua University student, Li Li, took the title on home soil, and the championship then left Asia altogether: the next one was played in Utrecht.

Which dance gives its name to the ritual of passing unwanted tiles before a hand of American mahjong?

The Charleston. Everyone passes three unwanted tiles to the right, then across, then to the left, and may go round again in reverse; the one tile nobody may pass is a joker.

Holding all eight of which mahjong tiles wins the hand outright in some rules?

Flowers and seasons. There is only one copy of each, so the full eight is pure luck of the draw, which is why purists often leave these tiles in the box.

In which 2018 film does Rachel deliberately let her boyfriend's mother win a mahjong game?

Crazy Rich Asians. Rachel draws the tile she needs to win, hands it over instead, then shows her own tiles so the mother knows it was a choice; the scene sent a wave of new players looking for lessons.

Why was mahjong a harder game than chess or Go for artificial intelligence to master?

Rivals' tiles are hidden. Chess and Go show a machine the whole board, but a mahjong program must reason about tiles it cannot see, so the game held out until Microsoft's Suphx caught up with top human players in 2019.