The doors of our museum and gift store are open from June 1 until Labor Day each year. On our web site, however, we are open to you all year round. In our gift store we sell a variety of books, clothing, porcelain, and toys. We will feature a couple of our more popular items here.

By far, our most popular items in our gift store are the Mai Wah T-shirts and sweatshirts. Our popular cotton T-shirts with our black logo on white, blue, gold, green, and rose are available for $17 each. These T-shirts have now been joined by our deluxe version with the logo on the front and the Mai Wah three-color dragon on the back for $19, available in blue, blue-green, white and rose color.

This same design in a sweatshirt comes in white or ash colors and is available in extra large (XL) size only for $37 each. All orders must include $3 for shipping and handling.

Let them know where you've been or where you plan to go by wearing our colors!

Through our own museum gift store and other selected stores, we sell this 24-page booklet that is illustrated with historic photographs and contains a bibliography of books, reports, and articles. The following is an excerpt from The Butte Chinese:

Tong-related violence in Butte indirectly gave birth to a common game that is now played in casinos and taverns throughout the country.

Chinese gamblers ran a lottery out of Butte’s Crown Bar that was just outside the boundaries of Butte’s Chinatown. The lottery was known as Pok Kop Piu, or the White Pigeon Ticket, and it was based on the first eighty characters of a book called the Ts'in Tsz' Man, or Thousand Character Classic. Tickets with eighty characters were printed in China and then imported by companies that ran the lotteries in Chinese communities throughout the country, including Butte.

Drawings were held once a day to select 20 of the 80 characters. They would sell numbers to players who gambled for cash prizes that they would correctly pick the numbers drawn. A player would dot his picks on a card and then hand them to the game manager with his wager. The game manager then rolled 80 strips of paper, each marked with a separate character, and placed them in a tin pan, mixed them and placed 20 of the pieces from the tin into a white china bowl. He repeated this procedure until four separate bowls each contained 20 characters.

A randomly picked player then selected one of the four bowls as the winner. The manager carefully unrolled the 20 winning characters and pasted them on a board. If a player bet on 10 characters, they had to have at least five matching characters to win. Those who guessed at least five winning characters received a prize of as much as $3,000 dollars, depending on their wager.

Jere "The Wise" Murphy was Butte's Chief of Police then and he had formed strong opinions about keeping the Chinese, especially Chinese gambling enterprises, from expanding into the larger community. Aside from his other duties maintaining order in a wide open mining city, Murphy had to contend with violence that had resulted in tong-related murders in Butte. The murders caused Jere Murphy to declare that the Butte police had formed a tong of their own and they meant business.

It was during this time that Murphy came to the owners of the Crown Bar to shut down the Chinese lottery. Two brothers, Frances and Joseph Lyden, were running the bar for their stepfather, Pete Naughton. The Lyden brothers asked Murphy if they could continue the lottery without the Chinese. When Murphy agreed, they took the game home and studied it until they figured out how to run it without the Chinese.

In 1935, when gambling was legalized in Nevada, Frances took the game south to Reno, Nevada. The Lydens made other changes to the game until it has transformed into the paper and electronic version of the game played around the country today -- Keno.

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To order anything from our gift store, simply print out this form above and send it with your
payment of a check or money order to Gift Store, Mai Wah Society, P.O. Box 404, Butte, MT 59703.