Divine intervention
Just how strong is the inclination to gamble? In the West, pious folk would not call upon the Lord to work a miracle at the roulette wheel, but all Chinese think it a matter of course to seek divine guidance in games of chance.
When tachiale was at its peak, some temples gained a reputation for "revealing the right combination." No matter how remote and inaccessible the location, people would come from far and wide, at all hours of the night, to appeal to those temples' deities. And if the bettors really did hit the jackpot, they would hire a tour bus and a performance troupe and take the whole party up to the temple to make offerings, celebrate, and "thank the gods for their beneficence." The owner of a shop in Sanyi (a township in Miaoli renowned for sculpture) relates that popular demand for carvings was so great at the height of tachiale's popularity that all of Sanyi flourished.
It was not only deities that became objects of interest. It was said that the winning numbers would appear on strangely shaped rock formations, or that deceased family members would pass along numbers through the cracking of the family tombstones. There were even cases of witnesses to an auto accident crowding around to watch the direction of the flowing blood in the belief that it could provide some clue....
Hu Tai-li, a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology at the Academia Sinica, has looked into the relationship between religious belief and games of chance. She discovered that, although lotteries and numbers games exist in many other countries, in no cultures besides the Chinese have people developed the habit of appealing to otherworldly beings for assistance. For example, in Malaysia there is a game in which players must guess four letters, yet only the Chinese of that country resorted to seeking divine intervention. This seems to be a feature unique to Chinese punters.
In fact, the mixing of the worlds of men and of spirits for games of hazard existed in the Ching dynasty. They had one game, called huahui, which was just as popular as tachiale was in its heyday. A contemporary account, Ching Pailei Chao (Unofficial Historical Anecdotes from the Ching Dynasty), relates that the disease of gambling was so widespread that "gentry forgot their duties, farmers missed their seasons, and merchants lost their skills." The game became popular in the Huangyen area of Zhejiang in the Taokuang reign (1821-1851). The rules were as follows: First, the names of 34 famous people of old were written down. Then the game master would select one at random, and place it in a box. Then the players would bet which one it was, with the winner taking home 30 times the original wager. People could bet a few tens of dollars and take home hundreds. Because the wagers were small, and the winnings enormous, the game soon became a "movement of the entire people," sweeping across Shanghai, Guangdong, Fujian, and Taiwan. It eventually evolved into a game which required the correct guessing of 20 characters out of the Thousand Character Classic.
People of all classes and both sexes played huahui. There is a story of a woman in Chaozhou, in Fujian Province, who nearly bankrupted her family playing a 36-name version. For the whole year she always bet on the same name to come up, and lost every time. She took her last remaining money to the lottery operator and told him she wanted to place one sealed bet on each of the 36 names. Unfortunately, it turned out that she only brought 35 envelopes with her, so she had to leave one name uncovered. The operator arranged that the 36th name came up so the woman would lose everything. Yet when the sealed wagers were opened, she had the last laugh: All of the envelopes had their money riding on that 36th name!
During the Kuanghsu reign (1875-1908), the governor of Zhejiang and Fujian wrote a memorial to the throne. He said that the players' propensity to seek otherworldly assistance for gambling was leading to the mixing together of men and women, cheating and debauchery by the criminal element, and even murder and armed conflict, greatly harming social order.
Wherever there is competition, there will be gambling, and the bullfighting ring is no exception. (photo by Cheng Yuan-ching)