Data, records and curiosities
Lotteries have funded town walls, harbours, colonies, universities and an opera house. A sourced chronology — with the popular claims we could not verify left out.
Lotteries are older than most of the states that run them, and for most of that history they were not entertainment. They were public finance — a way to raise money from people who would not have paid a tax.
What follows is sourced. Where a widely repeated claim could not be verified, that is said explicitly rather than quietly repeated.
The oldest thread is not gambling but decision-making. From the Chinese Book of Songs, dated to the 2nd millennium BC, comes a reference to a game of chance as "the drawing of wood", which in context appears to describe the drawing of lots (Wikipedia).
Drawing lots to allocate land, office or duty appears across the ancient world. What distinguishes a lottery is the combination of a stake, a random draw and a prize — and that combination arrives much later.
The first recorded signs of a lottery are keno slips from the Chinese Han dynasty, dated between 205 and 187 BC.
The claim usually attached — that these lotteries financed the Great Wall of China — is repeated everywhere, including by Wikipedia, but is stated there in hedged form: they are "believed to have helped to finance major government projects like the Great Wall of China." We could not find a primary source establishing it. Treat it as a plausible tradition, not a fact.
Roman lotteries began as entertainment. At imperial dinner parties, guests received tickets guaranteeing a prize — the value varying, so the interest lay in what you got rather than whether you got anything.
The step that matters came under Augustus, who organised the first recorded lottery selling tickets, with the proceeds designated for repairs in the City of Rome. That is the model still in use two thousand years later: voluntary stakes, random prizes, revenue directed at public works.
The first recorded lotteries offering tickets for sale with prizes in the form of money were held in the Low Countries in the 15th century. Town records from Ghent, Utrecht and Bruges suggest the practice may be older still.
The best-documented instance is precise enough to quote. A record dated 9 May 1445 at L'Ecluse refers to raising funds to build walls and town fortifications, through a lottery of 4,304 tickets with total prize money of 1,737 florins — worth roughly US$170,000 in 2014 terms.
Note what it funded. Not a treasury, not a war chest: the town wall. Public infrastructure, financed by voluntary purchase, in 1445.
The first recorded Italian lottery was held in Milan on 9 January 1449, organised to finance a war.
But the game we actually play comes from Genoa. Genoese citizens bet on the names of Great Council members, who were drawn by chance — five out of ninety candidates, every six months. When people wanted to bet more often than twice a year, they began substituting numbers for the candidates' names.
That substitution is the birth of modern lotto. Every "choose k from N" game in the world — UK Lotto, SuperEnalotto, Powerball, Mega-Sena — descends from a Genoese election, and the combinatorial arithmetic behind it is set out in how lottery odds are calculated. The Italian word lotto is still the name of the game across most of the world.
The first recorded official English lottery was chartered by Queen Elizabeth I in 1566 and drawn in 1569.
On the date: this lottery is variously given as 1566, 1567 or 1569 depending on whether the source means the charter, the advertising campaign or the draw itself. The sourced pair is chartered 1566, drawn 1569. If you have seen "the English state lottery of 1567", that is a third date for the same event.
The ticket price is the detail worth pausing on. At three weeks of wages a ticket, this was a lottery for the wealthy — the inverse of the modern product, which is built on very large numbers of very small stakes. What those small stakes accumulate to over a lifetime is in the lifetime spend calculator.
King James I authorised a lottery in 1612 to benefit the Virginia Company's settlement at Jamestown. The English colonisation of America was, in part, lottery-funded.
Between 1744 and 1776, more than 200 lotteries were run in the colonies, financing roads, libraries, churches, colleges and bridges. Specifically:
A claim we dropped: Benjamin Franklin's 1747 Philadelphia lottery to buy cannon for the city's defence is widely cited. We could not verify it against a source meeting this site's standard, so it is not asserted here.
Nineteenth-century America ended its lottery era in scandal, and the villain has a name.
The Louisiana State Lottery Company was chartered on 11 August 1868 after bribing the state legislature. It became the only legal lottery in the United States, selling by post into every American home — earning it the nickname the Golden Octopus. In 1890 it bribed the legislature again, offering $500,000 a year for constitutional protection.
Congress responded in 1890 by banning the interstate transportation of lottery tickets and lottery advertisements, which accounted for roughly 90% of the company's revenue. The Supreme Court upheld the statute in 1892. The charter expired in December 1893; operations moved to Honduras and continued illegally until 1907, when federal agents shut down the Delaware printing press (Wikipedia).
Legal lotteries then largely vanished from the United States for most of a century. That prohibition instinct persists in the countries covered in where lotteries are banned, and the historical record shows what it was reacting to: not gambling as such, but capture of a monopoly by a bribed legislature.
While England's, France's and America's lotteries were repeatedly abolished and restarted, the Dutch Generaliteitsloterij was founded in 1726 and renamed the Nederlandse Staatsloterij in 1848. It is still drawing. See the world's oldest lottery — and Staatsloterij.
The most conspicuous single building financed by a lottery is the Sydney Opera House.
The New South Wales government ran the Opera House Lotteries to fund the project's escalating construction cost. Lottery 10 carried a first prize of £100,000 — roughly A$3.3 million in 2022 terms — and it was won on Wednesday 1 June 1960 by Bazil Thorne, holder of ticket number 3932.
At the time there was no expectation of winner privacy. The names, addresses and prize details of winners were published on the front pages of Sydney newspapers (Wikipedia).
That publication had consequences. The visibility of the Thorne family's sudden wealth drew the attention of the man who, five weeks later, kidnapped and killed their eight-year-old son Graeme. It is the starkest case in the historical record for winner anonymity, and it is why the arguments in anonymous vs public winners and which countries let you claim anonymously are not merely about press attention.
Reading the record end to end, the constants are striking:
The odds have got considerably longer, though. Genoa's five-from-ninety gives 43,949,268 combinations; today's Powerball runs at 1 in 292,201,338. See picturing one in 292 million.
Last verified: 2026-08-29