Things You Never Knew: Keno's Ancient History

How many times have we already had to listen to origin tales, which were shrouded in doubt and uncertainties? Unfortunately Keno seems to have this uncertainty about its origin as well. But good news, there are indeed records of predecessors of Keno that have been played in ancient kingdoms.

One of these ancient places was in China, during the Han Dynasty around the year 2000 B.C. In this ancient dynasty there lived a chief with the name of Cheung Leung who was waging a war for several years already. The resources were slowly going out and his army was exhausted. As bad as everything already seemed for Cheung Leung, the worst part was still ahead; the citizen did not want to contribute any money into the warfare.

Emergency situations always light that spark and this also happened to Keno's ancient history, when Cheung Leung invented a lottery game. He called it the White Pigeon Game because the winning number was carried by a carrier pigeon. The White Pigeon Game was based on 120 Chinese characters and the winning prize would be money. But Leung wouldn't establish this predecessor of Keno without gaining something. In fact, most of the money actually went to Cheung Leung because the odds were as low as they are today. This is how he could finally finance his war.

You may now ask, how exactly did Keno become the game we play today? When Asian, especially Chinese people immigrated into the United States, they brought along their beloved White Pigeon Game which was renamed into Chinese Lottery. During that time, lotteries and all types of gambling were still illegal, but the Chinese couldn't care less and continued playing while eventually replacing the Chinese characters with numbers. The size was also reduced from 120 characters down to 80.

Eventually the Chinese community could was not allowed to play anymore and they had to find a way out of their lottery abstinence, so they simply changed the name into Race Horse Keno, since races were not yet illegal. But once racing became illegal, only the name Keno remained, and so it did until this very day.

But as the Keno game took shape and established itself in the United States, it was not readily accepted and liked. Keno had to literally work its way back up to former glory as it used to be in the Han Dynasty. Fortunately Keno is here to stay and to last, and with the boom of the online games, Keno will surely still write some more history of its own.