A History Lesson on Keno, the Chinese Lottery
AS surprising at it may sound, keno actually started off as a fund raising gimmick thought up by an ancient Chinese ruler in the Han dynasty.
At around 200 B.C., an ancient Chinese city lay under siege from foreign invaders. The city's ruler, Cheung Leung, was leading his army against these attackers, but his army was dwindling and growing weary because of the long drawn-out war.
Supplies and funds were also running low, not a good sign for Cheung Leung and his men. TO top it of, the people, who were equally tired of the war, were now refusing to pay more taxes to support the war against the foreign attackers.
Faced with this dilemma, Cheung Leung had to think fast. He had to think of a plan to raise more money to pay his troops and get more supplies, and at the same time keep his people happy.
Enter the Thousand Character Poem. This popular Chinese poem penned by Zhou Xingsi was a popular learning tool used by the Chinese to teach their children how to read and count. It contained one thousand Chinese characters (hence, the Thousand Character Classic), arranged into two hundred and fifty phrases. Out of these symbols Cheung Leung took one hundred and twenty, and created subdivisions of eight which he used to create the game that intended to use to raise more funds for his army.
The rule of the game was simple. All the players had to do was make a correctly guess the contents of a subdivision and if he succeeds, he wins a prize, which was usually ten taels.
The game was hit. Soon people began to play it and it was called by the people as the game of the white pigeon, since white doves were used by operators to spread announcements of winning combinations and winning names all over the Chinese countryside. The game was able to give Cheung Leung the money he needed to continue his war, and later, to finish the Great Wall.
The game traveled to America brought by Chinese immigrants and Chinese who worked on the trans-Pacific railroad. It was particularly successful in San Francisco, where it became a popular underground lottery known as the Chinese Lottery.
Few Americans played the game at this time though because the game used Chinese symbols. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Chinese characters were finally replaced with numbers to make the game understandable to American players.
When Nevada state legislature excluded keno when it legalized most gambling forms, operators decided to rename the game horse race keno, because horse racing, unlike keno, was allowed by then. The name keno was just returned to the game when the state finally legalized off-track betting, effectively legalizing keno.