The Words We Shout at the Table
Everyone learns the calls before anything else: Chow. Pung. Kong. Nobody ever asks where the words come from. Turns out it depends entirely on which Chinese language taught you to play.
Pung and Kong are similar enough across the different versions and they don’t tell us much. Chow is where things get interesting.
| Meld | English | Mandarin | Cantonese (HK) | Hokkien (Taiwan) | Literal Translation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chow | Sequence of 3 | Chi | Soeng / Sheung | Chiah | chow – to eat Sheung – advance |
| Pung | Three of a kind | Peng | Pung | Phong | to bump/collide |
| Kong | Four of a kind | Gang | Gogng | Kong | bar/pole |
| Mahjong | Winning | Hu | Sik Wu | Hu | to complete |
The terminology used for a sequence differs between Mandarin and Cantonese Mahjong. In Cantonese, Sheung is the familiar call for a sequence. And that difference in terminology is one of those little clues that can tell you something about where a version of the game has traveled from.
So when you hear someone call Sheung at a table while playing what everyone calls “Taiwanese Mahjong,” that’s a pretty good reminder that this isn’t necessarily Taiwanese Mahjong straight from Taipei.
It’s Hong Kong talking. 🙂
And in our case, that makes sense: the version we play in Karachi traces its rules through the LRC in Hong Kong and then Dubai, rather than directly from Taiwan.
So next time someone calls Sheung at your Taiwanese Mahjong table, you can smile and think:
That’s HK talking, not Taipei. 🙂
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