Sea Complete Vegetables

According to an ancient scroll, the history of Keno began when Cheung Leung introduced a game about 200 B.C. in China. Cheung's city was at war for several years and supplies for his army were failing. The people of his city refused to contribute any more to the war fund, so Cheung created a game of chance to produce revenue to provision his army. The game was an instant success and the city was saved. Spreading throughout China, the game 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 (winning numbers) from the games in the larger cities to small villages and hamlets.

Remaining basically the same, the game was brought to the United States by Chinese immigrants who labored on the railroad in the Old West.
When Keno originated about 200 years B.C. in China, characters were used in the body of the ticket rather than numbers 1 through 80. 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 the second 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 fanciful way of notation or counting from one to a thousand.

There are many legendary stories about the origin of the poem . One story relates that the celebrated penman Wang Hi-che wrote the thousand characters on a thousand separate pieces of paper. The Emperor Liang Wu Ti then directed Chou Hsing-szu to arrange them in rhymed sentences to convey a meaning. This task was accomplished in A SINGLE NIGHT, but such was the mental effort that the compilers hair and beard were turned completely WHITE before morning!

The Chinese language is so different in origin and structure from Western languages that it is usually impossible to make a meaningful literal translation. If ten Western scholars sat down to make a translation, you always would have ten different results, agreeing in a general sense but varying in choice of words and sentence construction.


The poem is read from TOP to BOTTOM and from RIGHT to LEFT .

10-20-30-40..... sky earth mysteries yellow
50-60-70-80..... universe infinite vast space
9-19-29-39..... sun moon full declining
49-59-69-79..... stars lunar arrange widely
8-18-28-38..... cold come heat go
48-58-68-78..... autumn harvest winter storage
7-17-27-37..... intercalary surplus complete year
47-57-67-77..... musical instrument harmonize nature
6-16-26-36..... cloud ascend cause rain
46-56-66-76..... dew frozen create frost
5-15-25-35..... gold make beautiful water
45-55-65-75..... jade from high mountain
4-14-24-34..... sword label high gate
44-54-64-74..... pearl called night shine
3-13-23-33..... fruit precious plum crab apple
43-53-63-73..... vegetables important mustard ginger
2-12-22-32..... sea salty river salt less
42-52-62-72..... scales submerge feathers soar
1-11-21-31..... dragon teacher fire emperor
41-51-61-71..... bird official human sovereign

While the use of these characters on a Keno ticket is merely to represent numbers, some Chinese people select the character marked for the word meaning. The words selected usually have a special meaning to them such as ; pronounced the same as their name, or an event that has happened to them, or a recent dream.