The game of keno, which has the features of Bingo and any lottery, is nowadays popular all over the world. This game originates from China where it was first introduced by Cheung Leung in 187 BC. Still the origins of the game are really a bit of a mystery. There exist several opinions.
According to one assumption the game was invented during a war in China in order to supply the army with money. 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. Finally, Cheung had the brilliant idea of creating a game that would appeal to the huge numbers of people under his command, while simultaneously generating a bit of cash to cover his expenses. Keno was so successful that it can be said to be the reason for Cheung's victory. The Great Wall was also built with the help of the money that gave keno! The game soon became known as the White Pigeon game, since carrier pigeons were used to inform surrounding towns and villages of the winning numbers.
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.
Keno appeared in the US in the 19th century as a lot of Chinese people came there to work on the railroads. 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.

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