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Updated: September 13, 2025
A modest drinking bout which had its windup in a fan-tan house over in Kowloon, where O'Higgins tussled with varying fortune until five in the morning. When he was given the telegram he flew to the Praya, engaged the fast motor-boat he had previously bespoken against the need, and started for the Macao Passage, with the vague hope of speaking The Tigress.
But Lawson had nothing to do with these, with all the pompous, successful ones, who ignored him completely and were unaware of his existence. They were all superior to him, with the superiority that new-found money brings, and they looked down upon him as a cheap court runner, told off to round up the fan-tan playing Chinese. You see, Lawson was common he had sprung from nothing and was nothing.
On our passage through the town we went to look at a large gambling establishment; of course no one was playing so early in the morning, but in the evening it is always densely crowded, and is a great source of profit to the proprietor. I could not manage to make out exactly from the description what the game they play is like, but it was not fan-tan.
They raid some little joint where the Chinese boys are playing fan-tan for ten cents, when they do not raid up-town gambling hells where white men play for hundreds of dollars. If the police employed Chinese secret service, they could clean out every vice resort in a week. Except in the segregated district, which is white, there would not be any vice.
Incidentally he was the head of the syndicate which controlled and dispensed the loo, faro, fan-tan and other gambling privileges of Chinatown.
I broke off, and clutching the table with both hands, sat listening intently. From the room behind me, the opium-room, whose entrance was less than two paces from where we sat, came a sound of dragging and tapping! Slowly, cautiously, I began to turn my head; when a sudden outburst of simian chattering from the fan-tan players drowned that other sinister sound.
If not, the police had not a hope of getting him if he kept his head; for back in Chang Foo's proper, which would be quite closed off now, Chang Foo would be blandly submitting to arrest, offering himself as a sort of glorified sacrifice while the police confiscated opium and fan-tan layouts.
"If you send me away now, I'll cry. Really, truly cry, this time." "No, you won't! I mean I won't! I I'll do anything! I'll talk! I'll make conversation! How old are you? That's what the Chinese ask. I used to have a Chinese cook, but he lost all my shirt studs, playing fan-tan. Can you play fan-tan? Two can't play, though. They have funny cards in this country, like the Spanish.
They were playing some kind of roulette and another game which seemed wholly to absorb their interest. I ventured no more than a glance, then passed on with my companion. "Fan-tan!" he whispered in my ear.
But the foreigners considered it a vice, and he, Lawson, was appointed to run to earth Chinese fan-tan houses, in the Concession, and suppress them. Yet his own people, the foreigners, gambled freely and uproariously in their own establishments at the races, and at certain houses which they maintained for their pleasure.
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