According to an ancient scroll a man named Cheung Leung introduced Keno over 2000 years ago in China. Cheung's city was at war for many years and supplies for his army were running out. The citizens of his city refused to give any more money to the war effort, so Cheung Leung created a game of chance to produce revenue to provision his army.
The game was an instant success and the city was saved. The game spread throughout China and was used to help fund the building of the Great Wall. The game became known as the White Pigeon Game because carrier pigeons were used to send the results from the games in the big cities to the smaller villages. When Keno first originated about 200 years B.C. in China, characters were used in the body of the ticket rather than numbers 1 through 80 we know today. These characters are the first eighty of an ancient poem known as " The Thousand Character Classic ".
The Thousand Character Classic was used in China as a primer for teaching reading and writing to children. By putting one thousand characters into a more or less coherent rhymed form, learning was presumably made easier and more interesting. It is something of a very great achievement in that no character is repeated. This poem was so well known in China that its one thousand characters, arranged in order, were often used as a way of notation or counting from one to a thousand. The game which is similar to the keno played today was brought to the United States by Chinese immigrants who worked on the trans-continental railroad.
