How Bingo developed into Keno

The game of bingo is derivative from lotto and Keno. Keno play is a close imitative of bingo. According to a very old scroll a man named Cheung Leung introduced Keno over 2000 years before in China. Cheung's city was at war for many years and provisions for his army were running out. The citizens of his city refused to confer any more money to the war effort, so Cheung Leung produced a game of chance (called Keno) for them to play to turn out revenue to provision his army.

The game of Keno was an immediate success and the city was saved. Everyone appreciated to play keno. The keno game increase throughout China and was used to help fund the housing of the Great Wall. The keno game developed into known as the White Pigeon Game to those who played keno because carrier pigeons were used to send the results from the keno games in the immense cities to the smaller villages. When Keno initial originated about 200 years B.C. in China, characters were utilized in the body of the ticket rather than numbers 1 through 80 we recognize today. These lettering are the first eighty of an early poem famous as “The Thousand Character Classic ".

The Thousand Character Classic was used in China as a introduction for teaching reading and writing to children. By putting one thousand characters into a more or less logical versed form, learning was most probably made easier and more interesting. It is something of a very great success in that no character is repeated. This poem was so fine known in China that its one thousand characters, arranged in order, were often used as a way of information or counting from one to a thousand. The bingo game which is similar to the keno played today was brought to the United States by Chinese settler who worked on the trans-continental railroad.