History
The word "keno" has French or Latin roots (Fr. quine "five winning numbers", L. quini "five each"), but by all accounts the game originated in China. A spurious legend has it that the invention of the game saved an ancient city in time of war, and its widespread popularity helped raise funds to build the Great Wall of China. In modern China, the idea of using lotteries to fund a public institution was not accepted before the late 19th century.
Chinese lottery is not documented before 1847 when the Portuguese Government of Macao decided to grant a licence to lottery operators. According to some, results of keno games in great cities were sent to outlying villages and hamlets by carrier pigeons, resulting in its Chinese name 白鸽票 báigē piào, literally “white dove ticket”, pronounced baak-gap-piu in Cantonese (which the Western spelling 'pak-ah-pu' / 'pakapoo' was based on).
The Chinese played the game using sheets printed with Chinese characters, often the first 80 characters of the Thousand Character Classic, from which the winning characters were selected. Eventually, Chinese immigrants introduced keno to the West when they sailed across the Pacific Ocean to help build the First Transcontinental Railroad in the 19th century, where the name was Westernized into boc hop bu and puck-apu. By 1866 it had already become a widely popular gambling game in Houston, Texas, under the name 'Keno'.
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