A Chinese person from a dirt-poor province has won the country?s largest ever individual lottery prize ? $14 million, a newspaper said on the day before.

The unidentified buyer from the northwestern province of Gansu bought 20 identical ?Double Colour Ball? tickets issued by the China Welfare Lottery at a cost of 40 yuan ($5.40) on Tuesday, the Southern Metropolis Daily said.

The buyer chose the same seven sets of two-digit numbers on each, reaping a total of 102.7 million yuan ($14 million), the newspaper said.

The puritanical Communist Party abolished lotteries in China after taking power in 1949, denouncing it as an evil of decadent capitalists. But the country launched state-run lotteries in 1987 as market-oriented reforms loosened the hold on society.

Lottery-related crimes have been on the rise and underground lottery schemes have become rampant across the country in recent years, bankrupting many families.