En Li’s Betting on the Civil Service Examinations is a multifaceted and wide-ranging study that narrates and analyzes the explosion in popularity of lottery games in southern China during the second half of the nineteenth century. Although it also covers other games like the white pigeon and flower lotteries (baigepiao, huahui), the book gives special attention to weixing, a betting game that pegged payouts to the results of the civil service examinations. It significantly contributes to the histories of gaming, the examinations, and diaspora, and it deepens our understanding of the social and cultural processes coalescing in Guangdong at the end of the nineteenth century. Showing that lottery games were a cultural and economic institution that connected southeastern China both to the Qing empire and to nineteenth-century Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and North America, Li argues that the socially diverse ranks of gamers and the commercial networks that served them constituted new forms of community, socially cohering through interest and participation in the lotteries.
The first chapter helpfully situates the nineteenth-century lotteries in the deeper history of gaming in China, tracing early cultural attitudes towards gaming through the evolution of games of strategy and chance in their many forms (dice, cards, tokens). Next, Li examines the organizational, transactional, and personal networks that comprised weixing, arguing that in the second half of the nineteenth century “the organization of lottery games created a community far beyond the limited number of elite participants in the exams. It did so by providing information and forging trust” (61). After considering the ways in which the examinations themselves were a lottery, the next chapter takes a deep dive into the “art of betting.” If the white pigeon lottery resembled Keno (of which it is a lineal ancestor), then weixing, in which players bet on surnames of examination winners, was more akin to horse racing or other forms of modern sports betting. Although bettors did not wager on specific competitors, Li shows that their strategies entailed detailed knowledge of the examination candidates and their potential. Could the lure of lottery winnings induce official collusion to fix the results? Inconveniently for weixing organizers and the chief examiners—both of whose endeavors depended on public perceptions of impartiality—that is exactly what happened in Guangdong in 1885, shortly after the cash-strapped provincial administration undertook the regulation of the weixing game to provide much-needed revenue.
The next several chapters look at the lottery from the perspective of the state, first examining government regulation from the 1860s to the mid-1880s, and then the 1885 betting scandal that tarnished both the examinations and the weixing lottery. Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909) was the governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi at the time, and Li closes this section with a closer look at his management of the crisis and the way it affected his approach to governing.
The book’s final chapter shifts gears to approach the lotteries from a transnational perspective, examining the gambling practices of Cantonese migrant laborers in Southeast Asia and North America. Here Li argues that “the lottery was not a traditional institution exported abroad but was born of geographic mobility that simultaneously grew within both Guangdong and its overseas communities” (215). Making contributions to several fields of history, she describes the gaming culture of the migrants themselves and the games that traveled with them. Li then contrasts the logic of lottery regulation in the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca, and Penang), Siam, Canada, and the United States. She shows that while the logic of colonial governance in the Straits Settlements, where lottery regulation provided revenue to the state and profits to the game’s operators, resulted in the creation of a revenue-farming system that paralleled the colonial state’s licensing of opium sales, in North America racist Exclusion-era discourse about Chinese migrants combined with public attitudes about gambling to result in the prohibition of all forms of the Chinese lottery. (As Li’s discussion shows, such strictures had a limited effect on the ability of migrants to engage in gaming.) In Siam, by contrast, where the state pursued policies far more friendly to Chinese migrants and in fact normalized their assimilation, the lottery grew from a game played by migrants to one that all levels of Thai society enjoyed. Regulatory patterns varied from country to country and over time, as states alternately adopted perspectives that derided the games as corrosive to public morality and perspectives that emphasized their revenue-generating potential.
Betting on the Civil Service Examinations makes several contributions to the field of modern Chinese history. Although the study is more about the lotteries than about the examinations per se, it nonetheless enriches the field of examination studies by showing another way in which examination culture permeated the lives of imperial subjects of all classes. Previous scholarship has documented the competitiveness of the late imperial examinations, which was demographically exacerbated by the inability of strict pass quotas to keep pace with population growth and complicated by the logistics of examination administration itself. Li’s analysis moves the comparison of examination success to winning the lottery from the metaphorical to the literal, showing the examinations’ imbrication of social, cultural, economic, and political factors from outside the confines of the examination hall; and the multiple ways in which gaming practices articulated and embodied the discourses of fate, agency, and chance that were central to late imperial popular culture.
The work’s chapters on Zhang Zhidong and the transnational contexts of lottery play and regulation resonate strongly with recent scholarship on the Chinese diaspora, which seeks to liberate that subject from the colonialist and nationalist discourses of cultural essentialism. Although Li emphasizes Zhang’s flexibility, situating him in long-running conversations about late Qing statecraft, her discussion of weixing regulation in Guangdong and abroad shows that the Qing state’s approach to the diaspora attended not just to Chinese mercantile elites in Southeast Asia, but also to the way colonial regimes tapped their economic resources. Li also points out an uncomfortable resonance with the North American experience: she shows that Qing official discourse portraying gambling culture as a ‘Cantonese’ problem resonated with its casting as a ‘Chinese’ ethnic trait by the dominant culture in North American white settler societies.
In a work as wide-ranging and provocative as this, there is always the danger of breadth at the cost of depth. But while for this reader some of its arguments might have been developed further, Li has done a remarkable job of placing a limited source base in conversation with many historical contexts and revealing links that have not been salient in other historiographies on late nineteenth-century China and its global connections. Betting on the Civil Service Examinations is a rich and valuable study that offers insights ranging far beyond the examination halls and lottery shops it treats.
