Keno and Its Wondderful History

Keno started its life as a lottery game way back in ancient China, at around 200 BC. During the Han dynasty. A city ruled by cheung leung was under siege and fighting off enemies in a long and drawn-out battle and funds were running low. The people, however, were no longer willing to pay more taxes to fund the war.

Therefore it fell upon the city's ruler, Cheung Leung, to think of a plan to increase their wartime fund without taking money off the people's taxes. Taking inspiration from the popular Chinese poem A Thousand Character Classic, Cheung Leung fashioned a game that required players to correctly guess a set of characters in order to win a prize.

The Thousand Character classic was actually a very popular Chinese poem that was traditionally used as a way to teach numbers to Chinese children. The characters in this poem were never repeated twice, and this was used as an effective tool to teach Chinese tots how to count.

Cheung Leunmg took 120 characters out of the poem and subdivided the characters into 8. People had to guess the contents of one whole subdivision correctly and those who were able to do so were often rewarded with ten taels, the form of Chinese currency during that time.

The game took off and soon people began to avidly play the game of the White Pigeon, as it was also called since white doves were used to relay messages of winning characters and names all throughout the Chinese countryside.

Chinese immigrants brought the game with them to America where they migrated to work in the railroads. The game became popular underground in San Francisco, where it was soon called the Chinese lottery. American players found it difficult to play with the game's traditional Chinese characters and so the game was modified and the characters were replaced with numbers during the 19th century.

When the state decided to legalize gambling, the legislature left out keno in this move. However, this did not deter keno players, who simply gave the game the name of 'race horse keno', with each number considered as the horse that one wanted to come out.

Finally the State decided to tax off track betting, effectively legalizing the game, and by then players decided to revert to the original name, and keno has been called keno ever since.

And that's the wonderful history of keno, the game who traveled around the world to become one of the most popular games today.