The Lottery Built That: The British Museum, the Sydney Opera House, and One Myth Everyone Repeats
Long before income tax was normal, governments had another way of raising money from people who volunteered to hand it over: they sold lottery tickets. The receipts are still standing. A museum in Bloomsbury, an opera house on Sydney Harbour, a good deal of the colonial Ivy League and the first permanent English settlement in America were all paid for, wholly or partly, by selling tickets to the public. It is a genuinely strange lineage - and the single most repeated story in it, the one about the Great Wall of China, almost certainly never happened.
The Lottery as the Tax Nobody Had to Pay
To understand why half of Europe and North America paid for its landmarks with raffle tickets, you have to picture what was missing. There was no permanent income tax, bond markets were thin, and new levies were politically expensive. A lottery sidestepped all of it: it took money from people who handed it over willingly, and gave them hope instead of a receipt.
Economists still call it a voluntary tax - and that same logic sits inside the 'good causes' funding of modern lotteries. The only difference is that the results used to arrive as buildings, with a name and an address.
Four Things That Would Not Exist Without Tickets
Jamestown: a colony on the brink
The Virginia Company's settlement in America was failing and its investors were out of patience. King James I authorised the company to run a lottery to keep it afloat - the first state-sanctioned English lottery of its kind. It ran in various forms for nearly a decade until Parliament suspended it in 1621, by which point complaints about its social effects had outgrown its usefulness. Without the ticket money, the colony's finances would very likely have collapsed.
The British Museum: a bargain nobody wanted to pay for
Sir Hans Sloane died leaving his collection of some 71,000 objects to the nation for £20,000 - far below its worth, and still more than the Treasury cared to spend. Parliament's answer, written into the British Museum Act 1753, was a public lottery. It raised roughly £95,000 to buy the collection and house it, and the museum opened at Montagu House in 1759. Fittingly for this list, the draw itself was dogged by profiteering and ticket-touting: one of the world's great museums was founded on a lottery with a minor scandal attached.
The colonial colleges, and an army
Harvard, Yale, Princeton (then the College of New Jersey), Columbia (then King's College) and Dartmouth all turned to lotteries to fund buildings and endowments. Public lotteries were simply how colonial America paid for civic projects - roads, bridges, churches, schools. In 1776 the Continental Congress tried the same trick on a national scale to finance the Continental Army. That one underperformed badly and is generally counted a failure.
The Sydney Opera House: built without taxpayers
New South Wales wanted an opera house but had no appetite for funding one from the public purse. The state's answer was the Opera House Lottery, launched in 1957 with tickets at £5 - a serious sum at the time. It ran for the better part of two decades, which was just as well: the projected cost of around A£3.5 million ballooned to roughly A$102 million by the time the building opened in 1973. The lotteries covered essentially the whole bill.
The Sydney Lottery's Dark Chapter
The Opera House Lottery has a side that never appears in the anniversary brochures. In June 1960, Bazil Thorne won £100,000 in one of the draws. His name and address were published, as was standard practice then. Weeks later his eight-year-old son Graeme was abducted on his way to school; the boy was later found dead. The perpetrator was identified and convicted.
The case shook Australia and changed the rules for good: from then on, lottery winners there could stay anonymous. It is one of the few places where you can trace, directly, how a single crime rewrote a country's lottery law - and the reason Australia shows up in every comparison of winner anonymity today.
Staying anonymous after a win: the country guideAnd No: Keno Did Not Pay for the Great Wall
There is a story that turns up in nearly every article about lottery history: that a man named Cheung Leung invented keno during the Han dynasty more than 2,000 years ago to fund his army, and that the proceeds helped build the Great Wall of China. It is neat, it is old, and it does not survive scrutiny.
The problem is simple: there are no contemporary Chinese sources for it. The name 'Cheung Leung' appears almost exclusively in twentieth-century Western gambling literature, not in the Chinese record. Keno's documentable ancestor is the 'white pigeon ticket' (baige piao), attested in Guangdong in the nineteenth century - roughly two millennia after the supposed invention.
We flag this not out of pedantry but because it captures the pattern of the whole subject: the real cases - Jamestown, Bloomsbury, Sydney - are solidly documented through acts of parliament, statutes and construction accounts. The most spectacular story is the one with no paperwork behind it at all.
What Survives of It Today
The model hasn't disappeared, it has just become less visible. The lottery that paid for one specific building turned into the fixed slice for 'good causes' baked into almost every state-licensed lottery. Britain's National Lottery has distributed well over £40 billion to sport, the arts, heritage and community projects since 1994 - the same idea, minus the foundation stone.
Unclaimed prizes flow into that same pot, which gives the lineage a curious twist: a forgotten ticket in a jacket pocket ends up funding the same sort of project someone in the eighteenth century would have bought a ticket for on purpose.
Unclaimed prizes: where the money goesYour Own Ledger, Not World History
Museums and opera houses are the pretty side of the ledger. The other side is your own: run a fixed set of numbers through years of real draws - across every major lottery we cover - and see what it would actually have returned.
Disclaimer: This article summarizes publicly available historical sources on lottery-funded projects. Historical figures are contemporary amounts and are not adjusted for inflation. Lottery remains a game of chance. Play responsibly. LottoROI is not affiliated with any lottery operator.