Reflections | The earliest Chinese lotteries, and how one operator was murdered over fraudulent tickets
Various forms of lottery have existed in China for centuries, as have attempts to ban them for reasons like the social problems they induce
I won the lottery! Before anyone thinks that I am going to stop working, the prize money was only a few hundred Singapore dollars.
I won a “starter prize” in the Singapore Pools game called 4D – “four digits” – where punters buy a ticket with four numbers in a sequence. The game is also popularly known as “10,000-number tickets”, referring to the 10,000 different permutations from 0000 to 9999.
I had gone past a betting shop and, seeing that it was not busy, walked in to buy a lottery ticket on a whim.
My initial investment of two Singapore dollars (US$1.50) made a profit of more than a hundred times, but I am sensible enough to know that this was a one-off fluke. Gambling is just not in my DNA.
Which brings us to the question that has always vexed me. Why is it that spending a few dollars on a lottery ticket is considered gambling by many, especially members of religious groups, but investing large sums of money in things like stocks is not?
