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Chinese Immigration Poster


roddy

1604 views

This was snapped at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne. It's a poster opposing immigration by Chinese, dating from the 1860s.

Question for you is - what or who are fan tan and pak ah-pu. Both answers are easily found online, so try and have a guess (or use pre-existing knowledge should you have any) before looking them up and spoiling it for everyone else ;-)

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They are gambling games. Western novels set around that period often use the "fan tan parlour" as an example of a den of vice. For example, in the John Steinbeck novel "East of Eden", Cal Trask is arrested watching a fan tan game during a gambling crackdown.

One of the main characters in East of Eden is Chinese, and I really like the way he is portrayed.

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