Keno may be one of the most popular casino games in America today, but the game actually started in ancient China. Accounts of how this game started all point to one ancient Chinese leader in the Han dynasty at around.
This game was the earliest game that resembled the keno we know and play today. Cheung Leung was leading his city through a long and drawn-out war against invaders and funds were low. Unfortunately, people were getting tired and disiilusioned by the war, and were adamant against paying more taxes to fund the city’s war. Therefore it fell upon Cheung Leung to devise a plan to add to the city’s coffers without taking the people’s money.
Taking inspiration from the ancient Chinese poem called The Thousand Character Classic, Cheung Leung formulated a lottery that required the players to guess the contents of one whole subdivision of characters that were taken from the poem.
The Thousand Character Classic was a very popular Chinese poem that was used to teach numbers to Chinese children, and it is still being read even today. Cheung Leung took 150 characters from the poem, which he included in the game and divided into 8 subdivisions. Who ever guessed the contents of one whole subdivision correctly won the game and was usually rewarded with ten taels, the form of Chinese currency during those times.
The game became so popular that soon people all over the countryside were playing it, and it became known as the game of the White Pigeon since white doves were used to relay the messages of winning combinations all over the Chinese countryside.
Keno came to America with the Chinese sailors and railroad workers and became a popular underground game in san known as the Chinese lottery, and the number of characters was reduced to 80. However not a lot of Americans were able to play the game using the traditional Chinese characters that they did not understand, so the characters were replaced with more player-friendly numbers in the late 19th century.
gambling was prohibited, but to get around this players changed the name of keno to ‘horse race keno’ to give the impression that this game was about horse racing, which was far from the truth. When the government decided to tax off-track betting, effectively legalizing keno, players of the game decided to change it back to its original name, and keno has been keno ever since!
