Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 13, 2025
Macao licenses twenty fan-tan places, and these run all day and all night, and are graded in their patrons from tourists and natives of fortune and position down to joints admitting 'rickshaw coolies, sailors, and harbor riffraff.
The streets were deserted as usual, here and there a policeman, hooded like a pilgrim, sauntered leisurely along, or the Chinese watchman with drum and clapper woke the echoes of the lonely ways warning thieves of his approach. The only illuminated houses were fan-tan houses and these presently became numerous; now and then music was heard but not of a very seductive kind.
Instead of playing for ten and one hundred dollars, as white men and women gamble up-town, the Chinese boys were huddling intently over dice boxes, or playing fan-tan with fevered zeal for ten cents. Instead of drinking absinthe, one or two sat smoking heavily, with the abstracted stare of the opium victim. In the midnight restaurants some drunken sailors sat tipsily, eating chop suey.
"I can see that Pedro is not friendly toward you Robert," she said; "I could hear him walking during all the night and am sure he is planning something to annoy you, I know his ways so well." "Don't worry, Priscilla, Dom Pedro was probably troubled over some loss at the fan-tan table; they say he won five hundred Mexicans last week and then lost that sum doubled."
The official bigwigs who administer Macao know that it is as necessary for the Chinaman to gamble as to have food and the colony accordingly legalizes fan-tan and semi-daily lotteries, supplies the requisite machinery for carrying on the games, and reaps a benefice for its enterprise that runs the community without further ado. That is all there is to Macao's fiscal policy.
To gamble is a Chinaman's second nature. Games of fan-tan and pie-gow are constantly in operation; and the police either tolerate or are powerless to stop them. Tong wars are of frequent occurrence, crime and its punishment being so mixed up that an outsider cannot unravel them.
Hong Kong, only forty miles across the estuary, bristles with commercial prosperity. The British government permits Hong Kongers to bet on horse-races, buy and sell stocks, and promote devious companies, but forbids fan-tan and lotteries. There is, consequently, a daily flow of men, women, and dollars between Hong Kong and Macao.
The soles of his felt shoes showed as he disappeared down the ladder that passed for cellar-steps. Down there, where daylight never came, a group of yellow, almond-eyed men were bending over a table playing fan-tan. Their very souls were in the game, every faculty of the mind bent on the issue and the stake. The one blouse that was indifferent to what went on was stretched on a mat in a corner.
Fan-tan as a fact is simplicity itself, being no more than the counting off into units of four several quarts of little metal discs called "cash," until there remain one, two, three or four discs. The result determines what bets, laid about a four-sided space on the table, win a single remaining "cash" makes the 1-side win, two the 2-side, and so on.
A Sunday-school of about two hundred children was just leaving as we entered, and their interested faces made me hopeful that this early influence might save them from the fan-tan attraction.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking