Full Flush (清一色)

What is Full Flush?

Full Flush (清一色), also called Pure One Suit, is a 7-faan Hong Kong Mahjong winning hand consisting entirely of tiles from a single numbered suit — Bamboos, Characters, or Circles — with zero honor tiles. It is one of the highest-scoring non-limit hands in HK Mahjong and a common target when a player draws heavily in one suit.

How to score Full Flush

Every tile in the winning hand — all four melds and the pair — must come from one of the three numbered suits. No winds, no dragons, no flowers in the body of the hand. The chosen suit determines everything.

Because numbered suits range 1–9 with four of each tile, Full Flush has the structural flexibility to use any meld type: chows (sequences like 4–5–6), pungs (three identical), and kongs (four identical). Many Full Flush hands combine both, which is what distinguishes it from rarer all-pung variants.

Example hand

Faan value: 7

Full Flush is worth 7 faan, paying 48 base units — six times the payout of Mixed Flush at 3 faan. It replaces Mixed Flush rather than stacking with it, since both are mutually exclusive (you score the higher one).

Common combinations

Full Flush is the foundation of several high-faan stacks:

• Full Flush + All Triplets (對對胡) — 7 + 3 = 10 faan. All four melds are pungs in the chosen suit, with a pair. Pays 128 base units.
• Full Flush + Concealed Hand (門前清) — 7 + 1 = 8 faan, when no melds were claimed.
• Full Flush + Three Suits Pung (三色三同順) — does NOT stack; Three Suits Pung requires three suits, which contradicts Full Flush.
• Full Flush + Self-Pick (自摸) — 7 + 1 = 8 faan.

Full Flush is the structural prerequisite for Nine Gates (九蓮寶燈), the 15-faan limit hand that requires a specific 1-1-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-9-9 + any tile pattern in one suit. Every Nine Gates hand is also a Full Flush, but the reverse is rarely true.

Strategic note

Full Flush is high-risk, high-reward. Because the hand requires every tile to share a suit, players locked into Full Flush often discard tiles from the other two suits early — telegraphing the strategy and making opponents defensive. The 48-unit payout justifies the risk on a single win, but committing to Full Flush mid-round often forces a player to abandon other 3-faan options.