Heritage Holiday Ornament - The Three Honors

More Mah Jongg Ornaments

Three tiles that look the same on every table in the world, except that one of them is blank. The red, the green and the white — the three honors, the tiles English calls the dragons — carved into yellowed bone and fanned on the glass in the fine black line of an old engraving, printed on clear crystal. The white is left empty on purpose. That is how a Japanese set cuts it.

Mahjong crossed from China to Japan in the early 1900s and had parlors in Tokyo by the 1920s, but the Japanese did not leave the rules alone. After the war they rebuilt the game into something stricter and quicker, and they named it for its defining move: riichi, the moment a player with a ready hand lays a thousand-point stick on the table and declares it, locking the hand and doubling down. Riichi mahjong plays with 136 tiles and no flowers, pays bonuses on the dora indicator turned up from the dead wall, forbids a player from claiming a tile he has already passed up — furiten — and will not let a hand win at all unless it carries a yaku, a recognized pattern. The three honors are the sangenpai: haku, the white, cut blank; hatsu, the green; chun, the red. A set of all three is daisangen, Big Three Dragons, a limit hand worth the table. The game lives in the jansou, the parlors with the automatic tables and the all-night hanchan, in a professional league that plays on television, in comics and cartoons that have taught a generation the rules, and in more online tables than any other version of the game on earth.

A three-inch clear crystal ornament with a faceted edge, the engraving printed to the glass so the carved characters read like bone held up to the light. Vermilion chun on the left, jade hatsu in the middle, and the blank haku on the right with nothing on its face but the crackle of old ivory. Three tiles, two colors, one deliberate silence.

For the riichi player, the parlor regular who knows the dora before the dealer does, the one who learned the rules from a cartoon and then beat her father with them, the Japan lover, and anyone who has ever gone out on daisangen and not told anyone for a week. As with everything we make, profits support hunger relief.

3-inch (76 mm) round crystal glass ornament, faceted gem-cut edge, white-backed print for crisp contrast, red ribbon hanger, white or gold gift box chosen at checkout, free U.S. shipping.

The white tile is blank on purpose. A framed white is a Hong Kong set; an empty one is riichi.

More Heritage Ornaments