Weixing, or “surname guessing,” was a highly organized lottery practice in China wherein money was bet on the surnames of which candidates would pass the civil and military examinations. For centuries, up until 1905, the examination system was the primary means by which the Chinese state selected new officials from all over the empire and a way for commoners to climb the social ladder.

How was betting on the examinations possible and why did it matter? Opening with a weixing-related examination scandal in 1885, En Li reconstructs the inner mechanisms of weixing and other lottery games in the southern province of Guangdong. By placing the history of the lottery in a larger context, the author traces a series of institutional revenue innovations surrounding lottery regulation from the 1850s to the early 1900s, and depicts an expansive community created by the lottery with cultural and informational channels stretching among Guangdong, Southeast Asia, and North America. This book sheds light on a new reality that emerged during the final decades of China’s last imperial dynasty, with a nuanced understanding of competitions, strategic thinking by lottery players and public officials seeking to maximize revenues, and a global network of players.

Weixing, or “surname guessing,” was a highly organized lottery practice in China wherein money was bet on the surnames of which candidates would pass the civil and military examinations. For centuries, up until 1905, the examination system was the primary means by which the Chinese state selected new officials from all over the empire and a way for commoners to climb the social ladder.

How was betting on the examinations possible and why did it matter? Opening with a weixing-related examination scandal in 1885, En Li reconstructs the inner mechanisms of weixing and other lottery games in the southern province of Guangdong. By placing the history of the lottery in a larger context, the author traces a series of institutional revenue innovations surrounding lottery regulation from the 1850s to the early 1900s, and depicts an expansive community created by the lottery with cultural and informational channels stretching among Guangdong, Southeast Asia, and North America. This book sheds light on a new reality that emerged during the final decades of China’s last imperial dynasty, with a nuanced understanding of competitions, strategic thinking by lottery players and public officials seeking to maximize revenues, and a global network of players.

The nine essays in this volume reexamine the “hundred days” in 1898 and focus particularly on the aftermath of this reform movement. Their collective goal is to rethink the reforms not as a failed attempt at modernizing China but as a period in which many of the institutions that have since structured China began. Among the subjects covered are the reform movement, the reformers, newspapers, education, the urban environment, female literacy, the “new” woman, citizenship, and literature. All the contributors urge the view that modernity must be seen as a conceptual framework that shaped the Chinese experience of a global process, an experience through which new problems were raised and old problems rethought in creative, inventive, and contradictory ways.