About Chinese Lottery Gamblers

Chinese Gambler

From 1859 gambling was illegal in Otago. Police Commissioner T. K. Weldon instructed his men to carry out raids on Chinese gambling schools, but as his force was beset by internal scandals, lax discipline and retrenchment, such raids were desultory. Between 1879 and 1890, for example, there were only four raids on Chinese gamblers at Chainman’s Flat, near T uapeka. The Chinese themselves felt no legal or moral inhibitions about playing pakapoo or fantan. In census returns between 1874 and 1911 many Chinese felt free to describe their occupations as ''gambler'' or ''gambling house operator''. Participants considered that police should leave them alone. After a second raid at Chainman’s flat in 1877, one gambler complained that his countrymen were being picked on in deference to the European hotelkeepers with their coteries of poker-players. Me obliged leave this place as police too sharp. We play quietly and have small Illinois lottery.... All the same white fellows do what they like, no get fined £25. My countrymen never get drunk, never go bankrupt, never swindle public and never fight. Chinamen spend plenty money with [white] storekeepers, always pay up-white fellow get plenty tick [profit]. No good at all. After the third raid, Chinese players threatened to shoot one of the policemen. The raids ceased. This was one of the populer case in lottery background.

Chinese Policeman

Handful of Chinese were critical of their countrymen’s habits. In 1870 newly appointed interpreter John Aloo, attempting to win favor with his employer, the Otago Provincial Council, announced publicly that he was going to get rid of all the gambling houses then known to exist. Judging from their increasing numbers and prosperity after that date, his campaign would seem to have had little support. Wong Ngai, a Chinese constable, was directed to the Riverton-Round Hill area in the 1870S to catch miners without licenses, thieves and gamblers. The rationale for his appointment was that a Chinese policeman would be more effective, but the reverse was true. Wong Ngai quickly became known, as he was the only Chinese policeman, and runners kept the den-owners informed of his movements. When Cardrona’s Sergeant Cassells arrested two gambling-house operators, he secured convictions not because of the gambling itself, but because they had been caught on the Sabbath and one had attempted to bribe him.

The vast majority of Chinese earned little from the goldfields. Neither had they acculturated, nor as they moved to the cities, stuck had they stuck closely together in distinct ''Chinatowns''. In Dunedin they gravitated to a few streets near the Exchange where they mixed with the other significant no European ethnic group of the time, the Lebanese, many of whom were also inveterate lottery gamblers. Houses made of tin and sack, open sewers, malnourished children, half-starved dogs and the proliferation of brothels and opium and gambling dens led the Otago Daily Times, which surveyed the area in 1884, to call it ''The Devil’s Half Acre''. This unfortunate phrase reflected the perturbed Walker Street fantan players as ''gangsters''. John A. Lee was anguished when his eleven-year-old sister became a prostitute for the Chinese, having met one lover in a gambling den which operated near the heart of the city.