Proto-mahjong › Chinese classical › Korean traditional
Korean traditional
104 tiles, no bamboo
Sources
The documents this entry rests on, as published. Each can be opened and checked; nothing in this part is anybody’s reading of them.
Sloper, Tom. "FAQ 2b: Identifying a Mah-Jongg Variant." Sloperama. canonical checked 2026-09-18
https://www.sloperama.com/mjfaq/mjfaq02b.html
chart’s note Tile counts, hand sizes, flower handling and scoring for roughly 50 named variants. Primary source for most leaf nodes in this chart.
Also cited on: Chinese archaic, Late Qing style, Chinese pre-classical, Chinese classical, Shanghai / Hong Kong new style, Hong Kong old style and 44 more · bibliography #1
Mahjong Wiki. "Korean Mahjong Rules." mahjong.wikidot.com. cross-check checked 2026-09-18
https://web.archive.org/web/20250114102109/http://mahjong.wikidot.com/rules:korean-overview
AI summary Infobox for the Korean game: 104 tiles, 13-tile hand, point-based scoring with a 2-point minimum and 80-point maximum, 32 hands. Not listed in the chart's own wiki table. The page has since been removed from the live wiki; the link is to the Wayback Machine capture of 14 January 2025.
Only cited here · bibliography #53
Wikipedia. "Mahjong." cross-check checked 2026-09-18
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong
AI summary The main article's regional-variations section, which describes most branches of this tree independently of the chart's own sources.
Also cited on: Proto-mahjong, Chinese classical, Hong Kong old style, Taiwanese style, Singapore style, Filipino style and 7 more · bibliography #54
Wikipedia. "Three-player mahjong." cross-check checked 2026-09-18
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-player_mahjong
AI summary The Korean and Japanese three-player game in detail: which tiles are removed, the prohibition on melding chows from a discard, and the sacred-discard rule.
Also cited on: Sanma · bibliography #56
Mahjong Wiki. "Family Tree and Timeline." mahjong.wikidot.com. supporting
chart’s note The decade-by-decade timeline and the branch structure this chart follows, including the caveat that each variant's evolution has been cross-cultural.
Also cited on: Chinese classical, Shanghai / Hong Kong new style, Nanyang variants, Mainland regionals · bibliography #7
Analysis
Written by an AI model from the sources above. It is a reading of them, not a source in its own right: every figure in it points back to a numbered source, and where the two disagree, the source is right.
Assessment
- Confidence
- placeholder no source establishes the descent at all; the parent link is a guess
- Evidence
- corroborated two or more independent sources agree on the facts that define this variant
Cross-comparison
What each source was read to say, set side by side. The numbers are the sources above.
| Source | Tiles | Hand | Flowers | Scoring | Payout |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | 104 (dots, craks, winds, dragons and 4 flowers) | 13, out on 14 | only 4 flowers | several regional systems, most commonly '1,5,10' and '1,3,6' | — |
| [2] | 104 | 13 | — | point-based; minimum 2 points, maximum 80 points | — |
| [3] | — | — | uses season tiles but calls them flowers | — | — |
- [1] Sloperama queries whether 104 applies only to the three-player game. Bamboo is absent from the listed suits, which is what the chart means by 'no bamboo'
- [2] length 32 hands, no dead wall
- [3] states that Korean mahjong does not allow melded, that is stolen, chows, and that Japanese mahjong is standardised in Japan and South Korea
- [4] sets out the Korean and Japanese three-player game: the north wind is removed, 2 to 8 of bamboo are removed, the four seasons are removed and the four flowers kept, with no jokers. That is a different reduction from the Korean 104-tile game, which drops bamboo entirely
Reading it
104 tiles and a 13-tile hand are confirmed by two sources, and Sloperama's suit list independently confirms bamboo's absence, which is the chart's distinguishing detail. Wikipedia adds two rules that mark the branch: season tiles used but called flowers, and no melded chows. Note that the Korean three-player game described by Wikipedia keeps bamboo 1 and 9, so it is a different reduction from this node's 104-tile game. None of this establishes the parent, which is why the chart draws the link dashed.
In the tree
Descends from Chinese classical, as the source chart draws it.
Caveat from the source chart
Drawn with a dashed connector in the source chart. No source establishes how the 104-tile Korean game descends from anything; the parent link is a placeholder.