» Ancient Keno Lottery

The game of keno, which has the features of Bingo and any lottery, is nowadays popular all over the world. Keno appeared in China in 187 BC. Still the origins of the game are really a bit of a mystery. Several different versions exist.
One theory is that Cheung Leung of the Han Dynasty introduced the game when his city was at war for several years and was beginning to run out of money and supplies. The citizens refused to contribute additional funds to the fruitless cause of the war. So Cheung was left scratching his head as to how to generate the necessary finances to continue his brutal battles. After some considerations he created the game of keno, which immediately got very popular and thus profitable for the state. Thus Cheung's army was saved. It is also credited for providing resources and helping to fund the massive undertaking of building the Great Wall! Later keno was known as the White Pigeon game as people of surrounding villages were informed of the winning numbers by carrier pigeons.
In the past rather than having a board of just numbers on the original keno boards, they used classic Chinese characters. If at first the game included 120 characters, this number dropped to 80 in the course of time.
The game arrived in the US in the mid 1800's when thousands of Chinese immigrants came to work in the mines and on the railroad. Though the game was considered illegal, the new Chinese immigrants still played it. 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.