Another very objectionable feature in Chinese life is the passion that everyone seems to have for gambling. (…) High and low, rich and poor, seem to have the gambling spirit in their very blood, and, like the craving in the opium smoker, that must be satisfied at all hazards, so the cards and the dice must be fingered to ally the passion that is burning within their hearts.Footnote 1
As the above extract demonstrates, one of the most common clichés concerning the Chinese is that they are a people of gamblers.Footnote 2 It is consequently surprising that so little scholarly research has been done on the subject of gambling in modern China. With the exception of a handful of more substantial accounts of gambling in China which have detailed the great variety of gambling games and their long history,Footnote 3 scholars have generally pursued the topic along two quite distinct lines.
One of these lines is exemplified by several fine pieces of scholarship (especially in Taiwan) devoted to gambling operators, with special reference to their relations with the authorities. These studies have stressed the political importance of gambling as a source of tax revenue in Late Qing and Republican China.Footnote 4 Another line of investigation, followed by scholars from mainland China, has been to explore gambling as a source of social disorder. Pre-communist society is described as being plagued by gambling, an indication, among other things, of its allegedly decadent nature. The main substance of such accounts is dramatic anecdotes gleaned from different times and places illustrating the ravages of different gambling games.Footnote 5 Gambling is also stigmatized for being connected with so-called superstitious practices, the rule of warlords, secret societies, and banditry. The purpose of this line of work is clearly both to justify and to celebrate the suppression of gambling achieved by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the early 1950s. Overall, the perspective which prevails in current research is still colored by the prejudiced negative view of gambling among Late Qing and Republican political and intellectual elites, who saw it as a threat to public morals, or at least a waste of time.Footnote 6
But, due to the prevalence of such a bias, a crucial aspect of the influence of gambling on society may be lost. Stories of family breakup due to one family member's passion for gambling are widely used to document the detrimental social impact of gambling, but if on the one hand gambling may break human ties in such a dramatic way, on the other it may also contribute, through the social contacts it generates, to bonds of friendship between fellow gamblers. If one considers the time devoted to gambling (at least implicitly) in a purely negative light as time not devoted to work, family life or “legitimate” entertainment, this may also lead us to overlook the importance it may have in the lives of its devotees. Moreover, prejudice against the common people who engaged in fantan and considering them as passive victims may detract from understanding what gaming actually meant to them. And, as we shall see, it sometimes meant a lot.
Undertaking the task of reevaluating the impact of gambling in this direction is realistic only for the Late Qing and Republican periods, a time of relative abundance and variety of sources. It also requires singling out one gambling game. Fantan 番攤 is specially relevant as this ill-famed gambling game (as yet remarkably absent from scholarly literature) was reputedly the most popular in a region which itself enjoyed the controversial reputation of being a particular hotbed of gambling: South China.
Traditional sources, almost exclusively produced by members of the elite classes, are strongly tainted with an anti-gambling stance. Typical of this posture are local gazetteers, administrative publications circulated during anti-gambling campaigns, and the social surveys conducted by the Canton municipality. To counter this bias, the current study makes use of a wide array of other sources. First, more than one hundred news items collected in particular from the daily Yuehuabao 越華報 shed light on the place of fantan in everyday life, while some editorials in the same journal provide an interesting glimpse of the overall attitude towards gambling. Also of notable interest are travelogues and fieldwork reports by Chinese and Japanese anthropologists. The local correspondent of a national anti-opium publication, Judu yuekan 拒毒月刊, turns out to have been very familiar with daily life in fantan houses. He is so informative and accurate about them that we cannot imagine he was not himself an experienced gambler. Items gathered from various well-known wenshiziliao 文史資料 series, despite their bias, also provide useful information. This is particularly true of a long account by one Wei Gong 衛恭, who had personal acquaintance with fantan as many members of his family (including himself) were gamblers and one of his uncles ran a fantan house where he worked for some time. Finally, these sources are supplemented by interviews with former Canton residentsFootnote 7 and the author's own fieldwork in the Macao casinos where fantan is still played.
FANTAN IN TIME AND SPACE
Like many gambling games in other cultures, fantan originally derived from divination practices. The process of the draw (explained below) has obvious similarities to milfoil divination.Footnote 8 According to most scholars, the origins of fantan are to be found in the Han dynasty.Footnote 9 A history of fantan before the mid-Qing period is almost impossible to write, due to the scarcity of the sources, but scholars have collected a handful of texts which testify to the long history of the game under different names: yanqian 掩錢 (literally meaning “covering coins”, an obvious reference to the first stage in the process of the draw), tanxi 攤戲, tanqian 攤錢, yiqian 意錢.Footnote 10
There is some controversy concerning the origin of the term fantan. According to some sources, its origin is related to the district of Panyu 番禺.Footnote 11 But the most convincing hypothesis is probably the simplest: the term originates (as was the case for its former appellation yanqian) from the way of playing fantan: “repeatedly (番) spreading out (攤)”. Therefore, the term fan 番 does not denote a foreign origin.
Although fantan had become by far the most standard way of referring to the game in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were other designations such as bao 寳.Footnote 12 Slightly different versions seem to have existed in some places.Footnote 13 In addition, fantan was sometimes referred to by certain rather obscure circumlocutions rendering it difficult to identify with certainty. In particular, fantan was very often associated with the pixiu 貔貅, a mythical beast supposedly able to absorb and retain wealth.Footnote 14 This point deserves further elaboration. Fantan was played in specifically and permanently dedicated places named tanguan 攤館, an obvious abbreviation of fantan guan 番攤館, a term which also sometimes occurs.Footnote 15Tanguan runners placed themselves under the protection of the pixiu. In the hope it would bring them good fortune, they posted sentences like “pixiu zuo zhen 貔貅坐鎮” on the walls of their establishments.Footnote 16 This is the reason why the popular expression “beating the pixiu” (da pixiu 打貔貅) that one finds very often in the daily press means to play fantan (the gambler was supposed to beat pixiu to extract money from the fantan house).Footnote 17 “Being bitten (or “swallowed”) by the pixiu” (bei pixiu shi 為貔貅噬, or bei pixiu tunqu 被貔貅吞去) means that one had unsuccessfully played fantan and lost all one's money.Footnote 18 Another metaphorical way to refer to playing fantan was “to assault the square city” (gongda sifang cheng 攻打四方城, sometimes sifang xu 四方墟), a humorous reference to the shape of the slab on which the bets were laid.Footnote 19
Fantan could be played by a single gambler as well as by dozens of gamblers. It was played on a very large table (see Figure 1). In front of the croupier there was a small pile of tokens (tanpi 攤皮), such as cash (old copper coins with a hole in the middle) or porcelain buttons, hidden beneath a brass cover, so that it was impossible for the gamblers to count them. In the middle of the table was a square slab of zinc. Each side of the square represented a number: 1, 2, 3 and 4. Gamblers chose one (or several) of the sides to place their stakes. When all the stakes had been laid down, the croupier uncovered the heap and slowly began to draw out four coins at a time with a bamboo stick. Ultimately, the heap was depleted until either one, two, three or four remained. If a player had guessed correctly, then he was a winner. The casino derived profit only from a percentage deducted from the gross earnings. During the first half of the twentieth century this percentage was 10 percent.Footnote 20 This was larger than the 7 percent two different sources mention as being de rigueur for the nineteenth century,Footnote 21 and larger also than the 5 percent deducted in present-day Macao casinos.
Figure 1. A fantan house (Gray, John Henry, China, a History of the Laws, Manners, and Customs of the People, London: Macmillan, 1878, p. 386)
If the basic principle of fantan – guessing a number out of four – was extremely simple, by using combinations of betting, the gamblers could enlarge the options at their disposal and also make the game less risky. There were five ways of betting:
• fan 番 (or gufan 孤番): the gambler bets on one number only. If the result of the draw corresponds to his guess, he can collect profits equivalent to three times his bet, but, as mentioned above, a charge of 10 percent for the house is deducted from the gross winnings. For example, if he bets four yuan, he will recover his stake plus 3 × 4 yuan = 12 (less 10% = 10.8 yuan). This way of betting was not a favorite of experienced gamblers.Footnote 22
• jiao 角: the player places stakes on two consecutive numbers (one and two, two and three, etc.). The name jiao is derived from the fact that the stake is placed on the corner between the numbers upon which one places one's bets. When one plays jiao, the odds are even. If either one of the two numbers wins, twice the amount of the stake is handed to the player (less of course the 10 percent to the house).
• nian 捻: the gambler makes one number the winner and one neutral. Should the neutral number come up, the stake returns to the gambler. When a neutral number comes up, it is called zouzhu 走注 or zoutouwei 走頭尾. The winning number pays only two to one, less the usual 10 percent to the house.
• zheng 正 (or zhengtou 正頭): the gambler backs one number (for which the odds are even) and makes the two adjacent numbers neutral, losing only if the opposite number should be the winner.
• shesanhong 射三紅: the gambler selects three numbers, which pay only three to one. Only if the fourth number comes out does he lose. Shesanhong was a favorite among heavy gamblers.Footnote 23
The precise geographical extent of fantan is a complex issue that would require a study in itself. Although the scarcity of references to it should incline us to remain cautious, the few texts which do mention fantan before the Qing period suggest that it was present all over China. For example, during the Tang dynasty, the poem “Kuizhou ge 夔洲歌” by the illustrious Du Fu 杜甫 referred to the presence of tanqian 攤錢 in the province of Sichuan. The subsequent history of the game is mostly obscure, but a growing number of later sources attest that fantan had acquired a distinctively “southern” character by the Late Qing period. It was undoubtedly prevalent all over Guangdong.Footnote 24Fantan was also common in Guangxi where a fantan monopoly existed in the mid-1910s.Footnote 25 According to a Late Qing source on the province of Fujian,Footnote 26 the game of fantan was to be found everywhere in the prefectures of Zhangzhou 漳州 and Quanzhou 泉州: “Quan Zhang liangjun ze daochu you zhi 泉漳兩郡則到處有之”. But in Fuzhou prefecture it was important only in Nantai 南台, a suburb located in the south of the city of Fuzhou: “Fuzhou wei Nantai wei sheng 福州惟南台為盛”. Interestingly, Zhangzhou and Quanzhou were located in the southern part of Fujian province, close to the influence of neighboring Guangdong. By contrast, Fuzhou, where the presence of fantan was much less conspicuous, was further north. As a consequence, the case of Fujian suggests that the presence of fantan decreased with distance from its base in Guangdong. Also noteworthy is the fact that in the relatively de-centered Guangdong city of Shantou, according to a 1934 article of the Judu yuekan, the majority of the fantan dens were not controlled by locals, but by people from Guangzhou.Footnote 27 In a similar fashion, the province of Yunnan had fantan in the city of Kunming and Mengzi, but in both cases the relevant casinos were managed by Cantonese and apparently the practice of fantan kept a distinctively “Cantonese touch”.Footnote 28 Also, in 1920s Shanghai, fantan appeared only in the districts where Cantonese immigrants congregated.Footnote 29 In the eyes of the Shanghainese travelers who wrote accounts of their travels in South China in the review Lüxing zazhi 旅行雜誌, fantan was seen as a somehow exotic game, distinctively Cantonese, and described at length.Footnote 30
Besides the places previously mentioned, so far, I have been unable to find any mention of fantan elsewhere in China during the late Qing and Republican periods. Nevertheless, not unexpectedly, due to the fact that most overseas Chinese originated from Guangdong and Fujian, fantan was prevalent among the overseas communities. Several sources testify that in the late nineteenth century, fantan was widely popular among Chinese immigrants in the USA.Footnote 31 According to the missionary periodical Friend of China, fantan was one of the two most popular gambling games among Chinese immigrants in Australia.Footnote 32
As a whole, in stark contrast with other gambling games, mah-jong in particular,Footnote 33 during the early twentieth century the extension of fantan was only regional, with Guangdong as its hotbed, and Canton its capital.
NOT A MARGINAL ACTIVITY
During the early twentieth century, fantan was deeply rooted in Guangdong everyday life. It was by no means an underground activity. Fantan was both safe and legal, and the game had considerable importance in economic as well as social terms.
Legality, Fairness and Security
According to witnesses, even though it was formally illegal, fantan was widely played in Guangdong during the nineteenth century.Footnote 34 Moreover, during the second half of the century, provincial authorities were in need of funds due to the inability of the traditional fiscal system to meet the huge demand caused by wars, rebellions and modernization politics. As a consequence, they had been collecting money from fantan as early as in the 1870s under the guise of different schemes such as the “40 percent contribution from the provincial civil and military organization” (wenwu yamen sicheng baoxiao 文武衙門四成報效).Footnote 35 Nevertheless, its de jure legalization by the governor general Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 happened only in 1900.Footnote 36 The year 1900 turned out to be a milestone, as during the first half of the twentieth century, fantan remained legal despite three short-lived attempts at enforcing a real prohibition (1911–1916, 1921–1922, 1936–1938).Footnote 37 Most of the time, fantan operations were farmed out to merchant syndicates. These syndicates were supposed to run fantan businesses in prescribed areas during defined periods of time to a fixed revenue quota. But in reality, they were also subject to forced contributions at different levels of administration down to the lowest, and to extortions by local toughs.Footnote 38
It would be an over-simplification just to contrast periods of prohibition and periods of legalization. First, in some instances, due to lack of effective control, prohibition remained nominal or was only enforced in the capital city proper.Footnote 39 Second, because of the century-long prejudice against gambling, the authorities were concerned with the stigma represented by fantan legalization for their legitimacy vis-à-vis both the central government and, during the warlord period, rival neighboring powers. Even if it was legalized, they still wanted fantan to be as discreet as possible: they named the taxes derived from it in a purposely obscure way, for example in 1901 when it was called ji bu jingfei 緝捕經費.Footnote 40 More importantly, they imposed restrictions on fantan gamblers: in Canton, fantan houses were prohibited in the city center between 1925 and 1936, and tolerated only in one suburb (Henan, located on the Southern side of the Pearl River).Footnote 41
Like other gambling games, fantan disappeared in the early 1950s, when the CCP conducted an effective nationwide campaign against the so-called social evils of gambling, drugs and prostitution.Footnote 42 It is today virtually absent from mainland China.
In Hong Kong, fantan had been banned since 1871 along with all forms of gambling except horse racing.Footnote 43 The ban was rather successful. This is why Shenzhen became an important spot for gambling: it was the first station on Chinese territory on the Hong Kong–Canton railway line. Especially on weekends, Hong Kong inhabitants came to patronize its casinos.Footnote 44 Macao, another destination for frustrated Hong Kong players, took a rather different attitude; fantan has been continuously legal there since July 1847, right until the present.Footnote 45 Still prohibited nowadays in mainland China as it is in Hong Kong, fantan is available in eight Macao casinos.Footnote 46
Aside from its overall legal status is the question of deception. Many articles published in newspapers and periodicals as well as some wenshiziliao deal at length with different ploys used by gambling houses to cheat patrons: false coins that could be divided into two pieces at will, or croupiers secretly adding or removing a coin to change the result of the draw to the house's advantage.Footnote 47 But in fact cheating was not so common. First, as Virgil Ho convincingly demonstrates, Cantonese gamblers of all kinds were alert to trickery, and disappointed betters by no means submitted to trickery quietly. It is therefore highly misleading to describe them as the helpless prey of swindlers.Footnote 48 Moreover, why should a gambling house run the risk of losing its reputation? With many other places for gamblers to patronize, any untoward incidents could lead to the immediate closure of the establishment. The tanguan could make money simply by profiting from the laws of probability. In such circumstances, it would have been absurd to risk destroying the confidence of the public, which could rightly be considered the most valuable asset of the house, when abiding by the rules was a much safer way to earn higher profits. Even if in some individual cases tanguan managers might have succumbed to the temptation of making easy money by cheating, it would have been irrational for the casinos to swindle.
On the contrary, the tanguan went out of their way to make it as clear as possible that there was no cheating. The counting of tanpi was done slowly with a long wooden stick, instead of using the hands, because it made it much more difficult to cheat. Similarly, the croupiers before and after any manipulation of cash or tanpi always presented both sides of their open hands to the public, again to show that there was no way of cheating.Footnote 49 All these factors may explain why fantan among the Cantonese population enjoyed the reputation of a gambling game in which, compared with others, cheating was especially difficult and rare.Footnote 50
If legality and trickery by proprietors was not an issue, another potential risk was security. There is no shortage of news items detailing attacks, brawls and robbery taking place in tanguan.Footnote 51 Among all the venues for socializing, tanguan had an obvious predisposition for poor security. The conspicuous presence of money laid on the table for betting was likely to attract thieves. But tanguan managers were alert to this potential risk for the customers. Guards (known as xunchang 巡場) and, during the most troubled times, soldiers posted at the entrance, were there for the sole purpose of protecting the gamblers against robbers and pickpockets.Footnote 52 As a whole, it seems tanguan were not especially dangerous places, and violence in tanguan may be regarded as a spillover of its presence in Canton society at large. The sources, when they characterize tanguan patrons, use expressions like “everyone, regardless of whether young or old, men or women” (wu fen laoshao nanfu 無分老少男婦).Footnote 53 Of course this may reflect a degree of rhetorical exaggeration, but several witnesses confirmed that they went to a tanguan in the company of an adult of their family when they were children.Footnote 54 The presence of children in tanguan is also testified by a traveler who entered several tanguan in the city of Shantou and mentioned the presence of children in their early teens (you shijisui xiaohai 有十幾歲小孩).Footnote 55 Also, the presence of women in tanguan, a rare sight in the late Qing, became relatively common during the 1930s, another important indication of the relative safety of these places.Footnote 56
The Social and Economic Impact of Fantan
Many clues suggest that fantan was widespread and one of if not the most popular gambling games in Guangdong during the early twentieth century. The anti-gambling discourse can of course be suspected of overstating the impact of fantan, but it is nevertheless noticeable that among the extremely wide spectrum of gambling games available, they clearly focused their attacks on fantan (“the worst of all gambling games”Footnote 57), which suggests that its impact was especially significant. When a local gazetteer in 1910 published a list of the various games in Canton, fantan appeared on top of the list.Footnote 58 When general prohibitions against gambling were published (for example in 1925 and 1936), fantan also appeared first in the relevant lists.Footnote 59 The same was true of lists of the gambling games included in Guangdong anti-gambling literature.Footnote 60
Further evidence for the wide popularity of the game may be found in technical terms related to fantan (such as shesanhong), which occur verbatim in Cantonese opera scripts like Maihua demei 賣花得美, as well as in news items in the daily press.Footnote 61 Also noteworthy is the fact that a high proportion of witnesses of the late Republican period (including women), when asked about fantan, were able to recall precisely how it was played.Footnote 62 The vernacular language current in Republican Canton reflected how expressions deriving from fantan passed into the common language, another obvious indication of the remarkable popularity of fantan. For example, the saying ying fantan gen wei 贏番攤跟尾 “the winner of fantan stakes has followers” was a reference to the unlucky gamblers who watch fortunate individuals and follow them out of the room to beg for a share of their gains.Footnote 63
As a whole, although it is impossible to quantify accurately the proportion of the population that played fantan more or less regularly, it seems safe to conclude that fantan was very popular. Another sign of its importance was the volume of fantan tax revenues collected by the authorities during the times when it was legal. The revenues it produced made up the bulk of gambling taxes overall: in 1909, proceeds from gambling taxes were 4.35 million taels of which no less than 2.95 million (67.8 percent) were fantan taxes. As such, fantan taxes represented a significant portion of the overall revenues of Guangdong province (37.27 million taels).Footnote 64 Under the Republic, the figures are even more impressive: between 1925 and 1931, the fantan taxes yielded 68 million yuan of revenue for the province of Guangdong (an average of about 10 million yuan a year). In comparison, the total fiscal revenue for the year 1928 was 59 million yuan.Footnote 65
Moreover, the economic impact of fantan was certainly not limited to taxation. It also provided a living for many people, be they fantan house runners or employees and their families. Running a fantan house was a labor-intensive activity. Only the small tanguan closed during the night, and they did so only between 1 and 7 a.m. According to a 1936 article, each of the Canton tanguan, with three teams of clerks running on 8-hour shifts, had twenty employees, not including the young servants who performed menial jobs (such as cleaning). The article ventured to say that more than 2,000 people in the city made their living directly and indirectly thanks to the fantan business.Footnote 66 According to a Japanese source dealing with the issue of unemployment in Guangdong, tens of thousands of former employees of those tanguan that had closed their doors due to the prohibition of gambling imposed in October 1936 suddenly swelled the ranks of the unemployed, another convincing indication as to the considerable importance of tanguan in the overall local economy.Footnote 67 Some shops located in the vicinities where fantan houses clustered also made a living derived from fantan, not only the pawnshops which profited from the presence of unlucky gamblers short of funds, but also peddlers, restaurants and tea houses.Footnote 68
Usually, when one raises the issue of the social and economic impact of fantan, as of other gambling games, what generally surfaces are tragedies caused by heavy gamblers sacrificing the interests of their family to their deadly passion for fantan. This is not a myth. For example, one newspaper story tells of a sixty-year-old woman living with her son, a coolie fond of gambling who forced her to beg in order to get more money for his passion. One day, she tried to commit suicide after her son gambled away all his salary in a tanguan the very day he had received it and sold the rice that had been purchased to feed the family.Footnote 69 Such stories testify to the potentially destructive nature of fantan. But in fact accounts of tragedies caused by fantan turn out to be rather rare in the press. In crime statistics such as the various social surveys published during the 1930s, it is impossible to distinguish the impact of fantan from that of other gambling games. Virgil Ho, in analyzing these sources, provides ample evidence that the destructive impact of gambling in Canton was limited. He concludes that it tended to be exaggerated in the anti-gambling literature as well as in the press for the sake of sensationalism.Footnote 70 As a whole, considering its obvious popularity, one gets the feeling that moderation prevailed among fantan players.
The success of fantan in South China must also be understood in terms of its competition with the wide choice of other gambling games. Due to the fact one's gain could not exceed three times the stake, a player of fantan could hardly expect to make a fortune, but the game had other specific appeals. In particular, fantan was accessible not only because it did not require skill, but also because the minimum amount for a bet was very low. Most importantly, fantan was played collectively, and the overall success of fantan had not only to do with the game itself, but also with the social context in which it took place, and especially the undoubted appeal of the fantan houses.
THE ALLURING FANTAN HOUSES
We have already mentioned that fantan players patronized tanguan, but one should underscore that fantan was actually played only in these places.Footnote 71 In Guangdong, there were tanguan in important, middle-sized cities and even in villages.Footnote 72 For example the village of Jiufenghuang 舊鳳凰 with 750 residents had one tanguan in the 1930s.Footnote 73
If we focus on the relatively well documented case of Canton, a city that probably had 600,000 inhabitants at the end of the nineteenth century and more than a million in the 1930s,Footnote 74 the estimated number of tanguan varied considerably. One often-quoted source mentioned 600 to 700 tanguan, most likely an exaggeration, in the last years of the Qing.Footnote 75 According to the Hong Kong Daily Press, there were about 300 tanguan in late 1905, and previous articles in the same publication gave figures of 259 in October 1909 and 368 in March 1911.Footnote 76 A missionary periodical claimed 400 tanguan in the late 1910s.Footnote 77 In contrast with these figures, an estimate of “about one hundred” appears in a 1910 local gazetteer (fangzhi 方志).Footnote 78 In the following two decades, the figures are much lower: according to a 1927 official report, the number of tanguan was only 37,Footnote 79 and in the mid-1930s, two different sources put their number at around 50.Footnote 80 Finally, the Portuguese Consul provided an estimate of 173 in early 1939, in the very different context of Japanese occupation.Footnote 81
Such a variation from 37 to 400 is puzzling and obviously presents a problem for analysis. We should by no way exclude the possibility of important variations in the number of fantan dens during the period under focus and in particular that the low figures of the 1920s and early 1930s were a reflection of reality: at that time, even if fantan was legal, it was nevertheless subject to considerable restrictions. In particular, as we have mentioned, between 1925 and 1936, the tanguan were forbidden outside the Henan suburb, located on the southern side of the Pearl River. Tanguan were also of very different sizes. Therefore, it is possible that the high figures in the 1900s and early 1910s may be due to the proliferation of tiny, low-standard tanguan: we are told that such places represented no fewer than 323 tanguan among the total of 368 previously mentioned for March 1911.Footnote 82 Therefore, even if figures of several hundred tanguan may suggest they made up a significant proportion of places of entertainment, the numbers are not necessary a reliable reflection of their importance. This fact will become more obvious by making clear the huge differences between the categories of tanguan.
A Tanguan for Everybody
It is possible to distinguish two standards of tanguan. This duality is reflected in the way they were named in Canton: low-standard tanguan were called qianpai 錢牌, as opposed to high-standard establishments, which employed the same suffix but used prefixes referring to precious metals (silver and gold): yinpai 銀牌 and jinpai 金牌.Footnote 83
The low-level tanguan accepted only small stakes, as small as one copper cash. In the most prestigious places, by contrast, a substantial minimum was required for each stake. Because the stakes could be high, for the sake of safety, it was forbidden to lay one's bets in cash on the table. As in modern casinos, the gamblers had to change their money into tokens issued by the house. Of course, when they finally left the premises, they could change these and any winnings back into cash.Footnote 84
Low-standard tanguan were crude and small, sometimes no more than huts made of straw and wood.Footnote 85 It seems their sole amenity was the four-foot high (1.2 meter) gaming table. For the common people, the appeal of these fantan houses also derived from the shortage of alternative cheap leisure places. Tea houses, also notably inexpensive (a few cash were sufficient for one cup of tea and the right to sit there), were the only alternative, as restaurants, brothels and opium houses all entailed much greater expense.Footnote 86 Theatres, cinemas, and even traditional Cantonese opera were costly venues for ordinary people.Footnote 87 In that sense, anti-fantan advocates were perfectly correct to single out the low cost required to enter the game as a decisive inducement for many people. As a whole, however, the sources do not provide much information about the characteristics of low-standard qianpai as their attention was largely drawn to the conspicuous deluxe yinpai.
Luxurious tanguan were also accessible to ordinary people. As in upscale opium houses,Footnote 88 the yinpai were characterized by their size and their multi-storied buildings, which made spatial segregation of customers inside the premises possible. They were built with two or three floors. They had only one gaming table, on the ground floor, around which ordinary people stood and staked their money. But it was also possible to watch the procedure through a large opening in the upper floors, sitting comfortably around a sturdy rail or leaning against it. The people in these balconies sent down their stakes in small reed baskets, lowered and raised on ropes by attendants, to the croupiers around the table.Footnote 89 In the case of a win, the gains were sent back to the lucky gambler in the same fashion. In this way it can be said that well-to-do customers patronized the same establishments as coolies but without having to rub shoulders with them.Footnote 90 The upper floors were beautifully furnished for the comfort and convenience of the patrons. When the authorities decided to close the Cantonese tanguan in September 1936, a Hong Kong reporter marveled at the elegant and precious furniture he saw being removed from the yinpai.Footnote 91 It was also possible to have a meal or a pipe of opium in a separate room, away from the room where fantan was played.Footnote 92 In many cases, snacks and alcoholic drinks were available.Footnote 93 More generally, everything was made to attract and please the patrons, and, exactly as in casinos nowadays, the golden rule was to ensure they felt comfortable, to make them stay as long as possible.
Tanguan Generate an ad hoc Conviviality
The way fantan was played conditioned the spatial and temporal organization of the tanguan, which in turn conditioned the interactions between the gamblers. The result was a very specific kind of conviviality which was a crucial part of the game's appeal.
Spatially, the whole fantan house was organized around the high gaming table, which was the focus of general attention. Gamblers stood around it, except for the side reserved for the croupiers (see Figure 1). There is no mention or representation of patrons seated around the table (as they would be in modern Macao casinos where fantan survives).Footnote 94 Played by crowds of people congregated around a single table, fantan produced a lively (renao 熱鬧) atmosphere. No patron felt enthusiasm for playing fantan at an empty table. To dispel this “empty table syndrome”, which was common during the first minutes following the opening of the tanguan in the morning, the tanguan had a trick called 圍攤 weitan.Footnote 95 In that situation, members of the staff joined the game to create the required “lively” atmosphere artificially, thereby inducing newcomers to join in. When a sufficient number of genuine players had joined the game, the staff members progressively withdrew. Modern-day players at Macao gaming tables likewise seek a “heated” atmosphere by congregating at crowded “hot” tables and ignoring empty ones offering the same game only a few steps away.Footnote 96
The temporality of the tanguan was based on the rhythm that characterized each draw: betting, counting, distributing gains and collecting the losses, and so on. The climax was the counting, more precisely the crucial time when a sufficient number of tanpi had been counted out so that it became possible for the observers to anticipate the final result.Footnote 97 The interval between draws was extremely short. Although there is no explicit evidence on this duration, it is likely that, as in Macao nowadays, a draw was available approximately every three minutes.
Certain characteristics of the game can also explain why fantan had the distinctive feature of generating not simply excitement, but also pleasurable feelings of empathy among the assembled gamblers. This was possible because the gamblers did not play against each other, as they did, for example, in mah-jong, cards and dice games. The gains were unaffected by how the other players had placed their bets. Another point is the fact that, as in other kinds of gambling,Footnote 98 the fantan devotees did not understand the game in terms of pure statistical probability. They did not consider the different draws independently from one another (a basic principle of the laws of probability), but as a connected sequence, thereby “narrativizing” the game – this is the reason why fantan houses provided a list of the results of draws over the previous few hours to their customers.Footnote 99 In particular, they believed that if the result of the draw was the same three consecutive times or more, this number was unlikely to come out in the next draw, or, conversely, that if one number did not come out for a long time, it was more likely to come up in the next draw. As they anticipated the results more or less in a similar way, the players had therefore often the same expectations concerning the upcoming draw.Footnote 100 During the excitement of the counting of the tanpi, playing fantan gave a strong feeling of “facing fate” collectively.
FANTAN AND PEOPLE'S FATE
Probably for many ordinary people, not only heavy gamblers, fantan was important also because it influenced how they perceived their own life and destiny.
In the late Qing period, the people often included the following phrase in their New Year greetings to friends: “May you alone win the Weixing lottery stakes (Weixing du de圍姓獨得)!”Footnote 101 The expectation of a gambler who bought a lottery ticket was not only excitement, but also the possibility of changing his or her fate by suddenly becoming rich. This dream was purchased at modest cost. By contrast, fantan did not provide the prospect of a great gain with a modest stake. Let us take the example of an initial bet of one yuan for a gain of 2,600 yuan. In the case of fantan, with an initial bet of one yuan, it would have required six successive wins when betting fan and keeping all one's money on the table (odds of 1 in 4,096). Intuitively, one had a much better perception of what odds of 1 in 4,096 meant when playing fantan than when buying a lottery ticket (in the latter case, there was only one draw, so it seemed “easier”).Footnote 102 In terms of pure probability, the chances are exactly the same, but people simply did not perceive it in the same way.
We must keep in mind that most players preferred ways of betting (typically shesanhong) that only created expectations of a small gain in comparison to the stake.Footnote 103 It seems obvious that with a limited amount of money, players could not and did not expect to change their lives by playing fantan. But this is not to say that fantan was never played to change one's life: in some cases fantan offered a riskier alternative of its own, which took the form of a double or quit: “A better life or no life at all.” In that case, the possibility of a better life was far from unrealistic. In the press, one can find a significant number of similar stories: somebody (often a shop clerk) having temporarily in hand a significant sum of money that did not belong to him headed to a fantan house to gamble it. Due to the specificity of the game of fantan, he had a reasonable chance to quickly double or triple the sum at his disposal. If he succeeded, he could then discreetly return the money he had borrowed and keep the remaining gain, which would ensure him a better life.Footnote 104 If he was unlucky and lost the money (the news items of course mention this outcome more frequently), he then committed suicide.Footnote 105
In considering such a situation, it is important to bear in mind that attitudes toward suicide are culturally determined. In the West it tends to be considered an abnormality, or at the very least not an acceptable and sensible alternative based on rational choice, as a result of the centuries-long influence of Christianity that considers suicide a deadly sin. If we set aside this prejudice, the behavior of these people was by no means absurd. Suicide should not necessarily be considered as the last resort for people driven out of their minds by despair because they had lost all their money and found themselves at an impasse. It could be in some cases an accepted alternative before the game took place.
Of course one could conjecture that certain people did not initially consider suicide an option and were actually induced to such action by superstition, for example the belief that, for some reason, it was a lucky day for them, or that they had a sudden decisive intuition. But generally, “superstitions” associated with fantan took the shape of well-considered risk-limiting “do not” prescriptions rather than recipes to guarantee a gain. One of the most frequent recommendations, for example, was to withdraw after an important series of successive wins.Footnote 106
This is not to say that in Guangdong society of that time there was no prevention against suicide. But for people perfectly aware of the risks they were taking, it seems likely that suicide could be a consciously accepted alternative in a rational choice rather than the fate of naïve and foolish people blinded by superstitious belief. Another very moving news story illustrates this point.
A man and a prostitute were deeply in love. He paid a fixed sum to the madam so that she would let the prostitute live with him. But the madam, aware of their mutual feelings, was afraid that they might run away together, and in order to avoid that risk, she decided to force him to buy the prostitute outright. Unfortunately, the lovers realized they had only half the required sum at their disposal. So they decided to try to double their capital by playing fantan. Fate turned against them and they lost the entire sum. They then rented a room in a hotel and committed suicide together by swallowing opium.Footnote 107 In this case, the sum of money that was risked did not belong to somebody else, but the couple considered their separation to be an unacceptable alternative, in much the same way as shop clerks had to face the consequences of having betrayed the confidence of their bosses by stealing the equivalent of several months or even years worth of pay.
Fantan, as we mentioned, originated from a divination practice before evolving into a form of gambling. But even in this way, it retained part of its primitive function, a way for ordinary people to test their fate. In most cases, it remained harmless, but as in some of the examples we have just seen, it could become a test in which the player's own life was at stake.
CONCLUSION
In the eyes of Late Qing and Republican South China administrative and political elites, who were eager to promote hard work and frugality, gambling was not only a total waste of time; it was also a corruption of public morals. But its suppression was also problematical for these elites because the taxation of gambling had become a vital source of income for the authorities. As scholarly research on gambling has so far been based on the traditional sources produced by these elites, it has, unsurprisingly, focused on gambling both as a social pathology and as a source of income.
All the findings in this article, which focuses on the highly popular game of fantan, indicate that, in this respect, popular culture was not deeply influenced by the elite anti-gambling stance. Tragedies caused by excessive fantan gambling existed but were not so frequent. Perhaps this negative side was counterbalanced by the fact it provided a living for many people. Indeed, fantan could never have had such economic importance if it had not been a widely accepted practice.
The most critical shortcoming of the conventional view of gambling is that it implicitly considers gamblers as passive victims, deceived by unscrupulous gambling operators. Yet playing fantan was a positive choice, and as simple a game as it may have been, it was clearly something enjoyable. Fantan houses (tanguan), found everywhere including the countryside, were widely patronized, including by women and children. People enjoyed frequenting them because they were not especially dangerous venues and had a lively (renao) atmosphere, with everyone shouting and loudly commenting on the process of the draw. But, more importantly, they generated a specific kind of conviviality, which derived not only from the excitement due to the money at stake but also from feelings of empathy among participants consequent upon the way they collectively anticipated the results of the draw.
By underestimating the role of fantan, one runs the risk of missing not only a socially significant activity, but also something that more than superficially influenced the way commoners perceived their own lives. A most convincing point is that fantan contributed to the personal expectations of many people even if they were not heavy gamblers.
It is likely the impact of fantan was not necessarily representative of other gambling games. On the economic and social side, it is possible that its impact was stronger than that of other games not only because it was the most popular, but also because fantan went on day and night throughout the year, whereas lottery draws (for example) occurred a maximum of four times daily. Only fantan could generate group conviviality as it alone was played in specifically dedicated tanguan. Nevertheless, a reconsideration of all kinds of gambling games at grassroots level, as well as reconstructing the perceptions of the players themselves, could offer significant revisions not only from the perspective of gambling scholarship, but also seminal insights for a more complete picture of people's daily life and mentalities.
