Last Saturday I queued with dozens of Beijingers to buy a lottery ticket. I was counting on beginner's luck to become Ireland's first Chinese lotto millionaire.
For weeks I had wondered why huge numbers of people were lined up at certain times outside the Scitech Shopping Centre in central Beijing. When I asked a passerby what it was all about, he shouted: "Lottery, lottery".
I was never a great player of the Lotto at home but without thinking I joined the disorderly line. I was quickly reminded that queuing for anything in China is a free-for-all. He or she who shoves and pushes the hardest gets to the top the quickest.
It took me a half an hour to bully my way to the front and I found myself at the service of a rather busy lottery ticket seller, Ms Yang Man.
My (extremely) limited Chinese was proving a problem so I held up my hand and indicated I wanted five tickets. I was impressed that the ticket sales were computerised and opted for the quick pick. I could not believe it when Ms Yang said the charge was 10 RMB. The tickets had cost only 20p each!
Ms Yang had a little English and eventually, with impatient Beijingers waiting behind, she got the message across that the draw would be shown on local television that evening.
So that is how we came to be glued to the lottery show on Beijing TV last Saturday at 8.20 p.m. China's answer to Ronan Collins, TV star Wen Yan, did the honours. As you've probably guessed, I didn't win.
It seems a huge contradiction in a country which has banned other forms of gambling, but lottery fever is sweeping China at a remarkable rate.
From a slow beginning when the first lottery was introduced on a trial basis in a small town in Hebei province 13 years ago, the lottery industry is now regarded as the fastest-growing in China, employing thousands more people each week.
There are two lotteries operating in China - the Welfare Lottery, which was launched in 1987, and the Sports Lottery, inaugurated in 1994. Each lottery has two draws every week. Tickets cost 20p each and the top prize in each case is five million RMB, or £550,000, with several lower cash awards. Given that the average annual income in China is about £700, that's a lot of money.
Both lotteries are now played in two-thirds of the country's provinces. Between them they generated sales of $6 billion last year and that figure is expected to double by 2003.
The Sports Lottery was launched in Beijing only last May and has already topped every other part of the country in weekly sales. About 25 per cent of Beijing's population of 13 million has purchased at least one Sports Lottery ticket since its inception 10 months ago. It has created more than 3,000 jobs and 15 millionaires.
It is not just outside the Scitech Centre that there are weekly lotto queues. So intense has lotto fever become in Beijing and in other Chinese cities in the last six months that long queues outside thousands of lottery shops on the afternoon of a draw are commonplace. In some cases security men have been employed to ensure that tickets are not stolen.
According to my local friendly ticket seller, Ms Yang, Saturday afternoons are the worst. "The queue starts from early afternoon. All sorts of people come here - young and old, rich and poor. The poor people tend to spend more than the rich people. They dream of winning the top prize."
But the recent lotto craze has brought its problems. In Shanghai, mental health experts are treating a number of people for addiction to the two lotteries. Shanghai's 15 million people buy 43 million lottery tickets each month.
A survey of people in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou conducted by the China Economic Monitor Centre revealed recently that 50 per cent of citizens living in urban areas have bought lottery tickets. Of this figure 36.8 per cent have actually dreamt of buying a prize-winning ticket before making their purchase. Five per cent claim to be professional lottery players.
According to the law here, a minimum of 52 per cent of total lottery sales is returned to ticket buyers in the form of prizes. This means that more than $3 billion in lottery prizes were distributed to winners last year.
But sports and welfare organisations are proving the real winners: $10 million has been raised from the Beijing Sports Lottery since last May for new sporting facilities. And the proceeds from the Welfare Lottery helped establish 81,000 community projects across China in the last 13 years.
Last week, Beijing had its first outright winner of the top prize of five million yuan, approximately £550,000, in the city's Welfare Lottery. Mr Chen (40), a government office employee, was presented with the winning ticket at the Beijing Welfare Lottery Centre. He was given the royal treatment and chauffeured to the bank to deposit his new-found fortune.
It was only in the small print of the newspaper report that we learn it was Mr Chen's wife who bought the winning ticket while shopping at her local fruit market last week. But she didn't seem to figure in the celebrations.
Well, there's no fear when I win that I'll be passing my ticket on!