Pakapoo
Chinese lottery game
Pakapoo (simplified Chinese: 白鸽票; traditional Chinese: 白鴿票; sometimes spelt pak-ah-pu or Pák Kòp Piú) is a Chinese lottery game popular in Oceania in the 19th century, including on the Victorian Goldfields.
A pakapoo ticket is bought, which contains rows of characters from the Thousand Character Classic, an ancient poem in which no two words are repeated. The master ticket is kept hidden and is marked by the organiser of the game. The player marks a number of characters on their ticket. The ticket closest to the master ticket wins.
A 1921 article in The Argus in Melbourne, Australia, described the game in detail:
"Pukka-poo" is a gambling game imported from San Francisco, and is based upon an attempt to select 10 winning numbers out of 100 possibles. If the selector gets five right, the player gets his or her shilling back; if six are right, the winnings are £7; if 10, £42. Otherwise the Chinese wins! The draws are called "races," and take place every hour. In some of the places devoted to "pukka-poo," dice, crown and anchor, and other gambling games are played.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7125429. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1921.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pakapoo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.