» Origins Of Keno Lottery

Keno, a bingo-like or a lottery-like gambling game, is played nowadays at practically every casino. Keno was introduced in China by its head of state more than 2000 years ago. Still the origins of the game are really a bit of a mystery. There can be found several different opinions.
The generally accepted theory is that the game was invented during some war in China when the army needed money badly. The head of state had no money support of his subjects. Cheung had nothing else to do but to develop some new way of taking money out of the people. Cheung found an excellent solution to this problem: he created a very popular game - keno. The game was a success and it is cited as a major reason for the victory of Cheung's forces. The Great Wall was also built with the help of the money that gave keno! Later keno was known as the White Pigeon game as people of surrounding villages were informed of the winning numbers by carrier pigeons.
At first Chinese classic characters instead of numbers were printed on the keno boards. The total of 120 characters was used in the game but the number reduced to 80 in the long run.
Thousads of Chinese immigrants, who came to America to work in the mines in the mid 1800's, brought keno there. At the beginning keno was out of law. But it wasn't a real obstacle for the immigrants. It continued to use Chinese characters and thus obviously didn't enter popular mainstream American culture until it was modified to include the numerical system.