Фань-Тан: История китайской азартной игры

Gambling game long played in China
the gambling game played with small objects

Fan Tan, or fantan is a gambling game long played in China. It is a game of pure chance. The game is played by placing two handfuls of small objects on a board and guessing the remaining count when divided by four. After players have cast bets on values of 1 through 4, the dealer or croupier repeatedly removes four objects from the board until only one, two, three or four beans remain, determining the winner.

The game may have arisen during third and fourth centuries, during the period of the Northern and Southern dynasties. It then spread through southern China during the Qing dynasty. The name fantan dates back only to the mid nineteenth century. Before that time, fantan was known as , , , or It was prominent during the Late Qing and Republican period in Canton and the Pearl River Delta region. After 1850, fantan spread overseas as a side effect of the massive Cantonese emigration. As a rule, in places where a significant number of Cantonese migrants could be found, fantan was also present. Fan tan was very popular among Chinese migrants in America, as most of them were of Cantonese origin. Jacob Riis, in his famous book about the underbelly of New York, How the Other Half Lives (1890), wrote of entering a Chinatown fan tan parlor: "At the first foot fall of leather soles on the steps the hum of talk ceases, and the group of celestials, crouching over their game of fan tan, stop playing and watch the comer with ugly looks. Fan tan is their ruling passion." The large Chinatown in San Francisco was also home to dozens of fan tan houses in the 19th century. The city's former police commissioner Jesse B. Cook wrote that in 1889 Chinatown had 50 fan tan games, and that "in the 50 fan tan gambling houses the tables numbered from one to 24, according to the size of the room." California amended Section 330 of the California Penal Code in 1885, adding fan tan to its list of banned games; this coincided with the general rise of anti Chinese sentiment in the United States, as fan tan was considered a differentiating vice on par with opium use and the direct cause of property crime and violence. Raids on fan tan parlors were regularly featured in contemporary news articles, with police in some cases posing as Chinese to infiltrate the games. In San Jose, California, a typo in a local printed law led to charges being dismissed against several bettors. Despite its illegality, it was estimated that 100 fan tan parlors were operating in San Francisco's Chinatown around the turn of the 20th century.

The game is operated by two people: the "tán kún" or croupier, who stands by the table at position no. 1, and the "ho kún" (clerk or cashier), who stands to the left of the "tán kún". A variant substitutes dice instead of counting the objects by fours; the remainder after dividing the sum of the dice by four is used to determine the winning positions. Because the prizes are paid entirely out of the wagers, the game is relatively inexpensive to operate.