The North-Eastern Weekly Gazette. — 1888-09-15 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

FAN TAN.  Fautan is a gambling game of Chinese invention, which is described by the late Dr. Wells Williams as so simple that it may be called childish. The keeper of the gaming table has before him a pile of bright thin copper coins or cash, from which he takes a double handful, and laying them on the table covers them with a bowl. The players lay their money on the remainder that will be left, one, two, three, or nothing, after the pile has been divided by four. The game is thus an extension of the old one "Odd or Even." A clerk records the bets, and the croupier with two long chopsticks proceeds to count the coin in fours in the presence of the players. Owing to the evil wrought by an epidemic of this game when it was invented the Chinese Government prohibited it under death penalties; but it is still played, especially at holiday seasons. The home, of fantan, however, is the Portuguese colony of Macao, where a large part of the revenue is derived from farming or soiling by auction the sole right to keep fantan gaming houses, and that colony is accordingly a notorious rendezvous for gamblers from many parts of South China, Hong Kong included. A recent writer in an Eastern newspaper describing Macao refers to a fauts.n gambling den as a shautsi lit by petroleum lamps, budy trimmed, and emitting dense volumes of nauseating smoke; a table, surrounded by a crowd of dilapidated, dirty Chinese, is presided over by a couple of obese Chinese bankers ,generally naked from the waist up; outside the circle of players is an evil-smelling and repulsive crowd of spectators, kept in order by a Portuguese of their own stamp; behind a railing erected over an aperture in the upper story, right over the gaming table and the reeking atmosphere, is , a group of ladies of Macao, flanked by Chinese dames cracking almonds and melon seeds, and redolent of cocoa-nut oil; hard by a Chinaman lies stretched on his back, opium pipe in hand; and at each turn in the game one hears a low screeching exclamation hiyah, from the motley crowd as a gambler shows extra good or ill luck. Needless to say, the chances are in favour of the banker; but, in addition, be is entitled to seven per cent, of all the winnings. Otherwise the game is said to be fair, but there are dark hints of two coins ingeniously stuck togethwr and easily separated when necessary, of a confederate inside the box which acts as a table who Mips up a coin through the neat into the pile. Of the ruin Inad crime produced by Macao and its fantan "shops" there is no doubt, for they are widespread. The Chinese who has lost his last cent, perhaps his home and wife and children, either becomes a pirate or takes a dose of opium and thus ends his woes. It is no unusual thing to see a suicide's body dangling from the branch of a tree in the town or its neighbourhood. Thieves and pirates, shopkeepers and Canton mandarins, ladies, boatwomen, and prostitutes, public functionaries of Macao, and wild young Englishmen from Hong Kong make their way to these squalid gambling dens, and generally find ruin there. Pirates rob and officials squeeze," and shopkeepers toil to pour their money into the fat bankers' laps. One hundred thousand pounds is the price paid by the croupier for the sole right to keep fantan shops for a year in Macao—a town where there is no trade, no industry, no, source of wealth, and which, even with its crowded Chinese quarters, would be a tenth-rate town in point of population in any country in the world.  CADBURY'S ABSOLUTELY PURE COCOA LS a refined concentration of the strelmth-sustaining tro=ples of the flesh-forming constituents of the nib. Delicious. nutricions, easily digested, and of great economy, a iiiipmny packet yielding fourteen large breakfast naps of perfect  ADit.