Canton Was The Headquarters Of The Gambling Confederacy Which Established The Lotteries Known As The Weising, But Its Ramifications Extended Throughout The Whole Of The Province Of Kwantung.

The Weising, or examination sweepstakes, were based on the principle of drawing the names of the successful candidates at the official examinations.

They appealed, therefore, to every poor villager, and every father of a family, as well as to the aspirants themselves. The subscribers to the Weising lists were numbered by hundreds of thousands. It became a matter of almost as much importance to draw a successful number or name in the lottery as to take the degree. The practice could not have been allowed to go on without introducing serious abuses into the system of public examination. The profits to the owners of the lottery were so enormous that they were able to pay not less than eight hundred thousand dollars as hush-money to the viceroy and the other high officials of Canton. In order to shield his own participation in the profits, the viceroy declared that he devoted this new source of revenue to the completion of the river defenses of Canton.

In 1874 the whole system was declared illegal, and severe penalties were passed against those aiding, or participating in any way in, the Weising Company. The local officers did not, however, enforce with any stringency these new laws, and the Weising fraternity enjoyed a further but brief period of increased activity under a different name. The fraud was soon detected, and in an edict of August 11, 1875, it was very rightly laid down that "the maintenance of the purity of government demands that it be not allowed under any pretext to be re-established," and for their apathy In the matter the Viceroy Yinghan and several of the highest officials in Canton were disgraced and stripped of their official rank.

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