Where did the pie bar 10,000 in mahjong come from?

It is said that mahjong is the third largest contribution made by China to the world. This national treasure level of entertainment, because of its simplicity and ease of use, has become a folk game for young and old, really deserved to be the boss of the entertainment industry. Even in modern times, this form of entertainment has been brought into the Western world by the favor of Europe and the United States.

To trace the roots of mahjong, it is necessary to start from a kind of "leaf play" circulated in the Tang Dynasty. Legend has it that the game consists of dozens or even more than a hundred pieces of paper about three inches long and half an inch to an inch wide. Inside are numbers, Chinese characters, special characters and figures. It is played in much the same way as modern mahjong. Therefore, many mahjong enthusiasts believe that leaf play is probably the predecessor of mahjong.

In fact, they are all related to granary in one way or another. For example, the pattern of the "tube" is composed of a large circle over a small circle with a point in the center. Although this is a relatively abstract pattern, but as long as we associate a little, it is easy to understand mahjong in the "tube" is actually a top view of the grain silo. Because the ancient granary is made of bamboo mats surrounded by a cylindrical space, the grain will be stored in it, in order to prevent the rain, in the top of a conical mat cover. The word "tube" is an abstraction of this conical lid.

In the later promotion, because the "tube" pattern is too abstract, and the cake is very similar, so many regions and the tube is wrongly interpreted as a cake, slowly, and even "cake" to replace "tube Slowly, there is even a trend of "cake" replacing "tube". Another example is "strip". This is probably the more popular term, but it was originally called "Sok". For example, in Japanese mahjong terminology, "nijo" is also called "niso". In fact, the pattern of the "strip" also evolved from the shape of a grain silo. Only the silo is a top view and the bar is a side view. In ancient times, when grain guards made granaries out of scotch mats, it was necessary to build the granaries one by one, layer by layer. Such granaries, when viewed from the side, had wavy lines on their outer walls, so the pattern of the bars is an abstract drawing of the side of an ancient granary.

Besides "tube" and "bar", "Wan" mahjong was actually a reward given to grain guards by their superiors. The more sparrows an officer captures, the more reward he receives. The word "Zhong" means hitting the bird, so it is red; "Fa" means getting rich; "Bai Ban" means not catching the bird and returning empty-handed; the four directions of "East, West, South, North and South" are the same as the four directions of "East, West, South and North". East and West, South and North" four directions is to remind the bird of the food protection officer, the bird is very sensitive, pay attention to the wind direction, try to set up sets in the downwind of the bird to capture, otherwise it will return empty-handed.