<p>For telegrams, the Chinese Commercial Code (中文電碼) was used.</p>

<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code" rel="noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code</a></p>

<p>Roughly, to send a telegram, someone needed to go to the post office, write down the text message, info of sender &amp; receiver - by hand, on a form.</p>

<p>Then, the worker would "translate" each Chinese character into 4 digits, according to the Chinese Commercial Code book, something like this:</p>

<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/7LCDY.jpg" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/7LCDY.jpg" alt="Three Way CCC book"></a></p>

<p>Then, the message was sent by morse code to the nearest post office to the receiver. The morse code was "translated" back to 4 digits, and looked up again in the Chinese Commercial Code book. Afterwards, the message was sent by a post office worker to the receiver by hand.</p>

<p>The CCC is still used today in Hong Kong: the residents' identity card shows their name in Chinese, English &amp; CCC.</p>

<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/Qrs9d.jpg" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/Qrs9d.jpg" alt="Page from the CCC"></a></p>

<p>Another service, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex" rel="noreferrer">telex</a>, which was widely used in the past, cannot handle Chinese characters. As I remember, we only sent Latin characters (A-Z) &amp; numbers (0-9).</p>

<p>It was in the pre-1980 timeframe.</p>

<p>The first computer (OK, personal computer) that could handle Chinese was the ETen Chinese system (倚天中文系統); it dates from about mid-1980.</p>

<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETen_Chinese_System" rel="noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETen_Chinese_System</a></p>

<p>Those were the days... :)</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T13:15:48.763Z
Just to be sure, was the CCC a HK only affair, or also used on the Mainland/Taiwan? Did you write in pinyin or just English when using the telex?
T Nierath
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T13:23:26.943Z
it's used in taiwan, hong kong, mainland and diasporas worldwide. we type in english. the terminal i used, in 1980s, is composed by a keyboard and monitor, and a leased line. if you know someone in aviation, or marine services, ships &  planes still used it nowadays.
水巷孑蠻
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T16:56:02.583Z
Out of curiosity, is 人 encoded as 0086?
Frenzy Li
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T17:06:36.417Z
@FrenzyLi looking it up on http://www.njstar.com/cms/chinese-commercial-telegraph-code-lookup, 人 is indeed 0086
muru
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-19T12:00:10.520Z
You mention Morse code. Are you sure it was Morse code? I think that by 1900 or so, most countries had replaced Morse code by the Baudot code or something similar for sending telegrams.
Michael Kay
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-19T12:05:54.020Z
no, not sure, the description is "roughly"
水巷孑蠻
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T13:08:38.723Z
2018-07-19T11:31:42.657Z
2018-07-19T11:31:42.657Z
水巷孑蠻
<p>No. We use characters directly. At least in mainland China.</p>

<p>However, characters are not mapped int morse code directly. Each character is first mapped into a four-digit decimal number. The numbers are then sent through telegram using morse code.</p>

<p>People have to look up a table (a book, actually) to map the characters into the numbers. Some experienced workers can even recite the whole book, which contains thousands of characters.</p>

<p>In early computers, that is a little different. The first Chinese encoding I remember is GB2312, what is standardized in 1980. It maps a Chinese character into a two-byte sequence. English letters use one byte and have the same value as in ASCII. The current standardized encoding GB18030 is compatible with GB2312, with a much larger character set, and some rare characters may use more than two bytes.</p>

<p>The encoding used in the computer is different from the code used in the telegram.</p>

<p>To input a character into a computer, pinyin was used, from the early days, until now. There are also some other character-shape based input methods, like Wubi(五笔), which was very popular in the early days, as pinyin has a lot of duplicates (a lot of different characters share the same pinyin). Nowadays, as we input with pinyin in words, phrases, even sentences, the duplicates is not a very big problem as the characters can be determined by its context.</p>

<p>In other Chinese speaking regions, things may be different. I do not know what it is like in other Chinese speaking regions.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T10:47:22.417Z
Was a standardized character set used and was it related to the later GB(K)? Do you also have knowledge of early computers?
T Nierath
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T11:16:22.840Z
I don't know if the character set used in telegram and GB are related. A quick search didn't give me the answer. But they should both contain the most common characters in Chinese, so I think they must overlap a lot.
fefe
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T11:17:59.237Z
The telegram code has 10,000 code points (from 0000 to 9999), most of them are characters. GB2312 contains 6763 Chinese characters.
fefe
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T11:21:41.103Z
Thanks again, I'm holding out for answers regarding pre-1980 computers. After all, not only encoding but also display of Chinese Characters was a highly demanding task for early machines.
T Nierath
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T11:30:43.013Z
Displaying is a font problem. You can map numbers into the shape of an English letter, then you can also map it into the shape of a Chinese character. But it is a much larger map, and I think it should be a big problem in the early days. Pre-1980 is before my time, the first computer I saw was in the 90s.
fefe
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T11:37:44.627Z
In theory, in reality it was also a memory problem in a world where 64K "ought to be enough". The Japanese solved Chinese Character display and input in the early 1980s, but only for high end machines, initially via custom hardware.
T Nierath
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-19T12:02:05.297Z
Again, you mention Morse code. Are you sure it was Morse code? I think that by 1900 or so, most countries had replaced Morse code by the Baudot code or something similar for sending telegrams.
Michael Kay
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-19T13:48:26.197Z
The only mentioned code in https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E7%94%B5%E7%A0%81 is morse code, but two versions are listed for numbers, and it said the "short version" is usually used for Chinese characters. I don't know about the Baudot code.
fefe
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T10:42:47.260Z
2018-07-18T11:08:22.237Z
2018-07-18T11:08:22.237Z
fefe
<p>Historically, 4 digit numeric code is used for telegram transmission for country that not using latin character, one just need the translation "dictionary" to find the meaning of the code. Error can be prevented by adding pad number to separate the code. This happen since the era of telegram . </p>

<p>Following is a telegram code "dictionary" used by Japan military that already decoded the Chiang Kai-shek KMT army telegram code during World war 2.  Even USA military know about such "open code", but USA never notify Chiang Kai-shek about the issue of leaking military secret,  because USA itself want to know KMT army movement.
<a href="https://i.sstatic.net/NdvmW.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/NdvmW.png" alt="historical"></a></p>

<p>Similar mapping concept is used by the first computer that display Chinese Character. The early version is mapping multiple computing bytes to form a character. In fact, the modern day Unicode mapping for international character is pretty similar. Even mapping is still used by various version of Unicode to ensure different unicode version(UTF8, UTF16, UTF32, etc) conversion accuracy. </p>

<p>Theoretically, unicode will solved the multilingual conversion and mapping issue. Current unicode working space is around 1.1 million character that suppose to cover all the language in the world.   </p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-09-19T09:18:40.767Z
I'd like to hear more, so I've just asked [Did Chiang Kai-shek often send military information using telegrams? Was any considered particularly “secret”?](https://history.stackexchange.com/q/48198/33008)
uhoh
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-09-20T08:07:33.547Z
@uhoh  IMHO, history SE or even plain search is much easier, because this 
 history, i.e.  even searching US WW2 document will help too.
mootmoot
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-12-14T10:42:05.600Z
"USA never notify Chiang Kai-shek about the issue of leaking military secret, because USA itself want to know KMT army movement" - Can you provide a source?
Flux
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-12-14T10:50:05.177Z
To know more, I've just asked: [Did the US manage to eavesdrop on KMT communications during World War 2?](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/55776/)
Flux
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-19T07:07:10.243Z
2018-07-19T09:05:36.733Z
2018-07-19T09:05:36.733Z
mootmoot
<p>The following link is a very interesting and informative article （in Chinese） written by 马伯庸 （a well-known contemporary writer）on the history and features of Chinese telegram coding and sending. <a href="https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/W5BfrWj9kGvCKnVqyUHtkg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">惜墨如金 中文电报的奥秘</a></p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-21T09:46:53.690Z
2018-07-21T09:46:53.690Z
Toosky Hierot
<p>To add to what others have said, the telegram practice was already widely used in Mainland China at least in the 1910s. Politicians at that time often sent a nationwide telegram (通电全国) when they made an announcement.</p>
<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/rZi7B.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/rZi7B.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a>
From this picture, you can clearly see how people translated the code into Chinese characters and wrote down each character alongside the corresponding code. (<a href="https://new.qq.com/omn/20190727/20190727A0SANQ00.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">source</a>; the bottom right corner is likely a watermark added by the author of the article)</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-07-31T00:17:32.333Z
2021-07-31T00:17:32.333Z
Betty
<p>I know about "Chinese Typewriters", the question here is how Chinese was represented in earlier information systems.</p>

<p>For example, Japanese Telegrams were always written in Katakana and many early video games, up to the early 1990s, almost completely relied on Kana for technical reasons.  It follows that early Chinese systems may also have relied on Pinyin or Bopomofo (in Taiwan).  Can sb. confirm this?</p>

<hr>

<p>(The following is not part of the question, but facts I discovered and want to share here although they don't amount to answers themselves.)</p>

<p><strong>Edit 1</strong></p>

<p>For what it's worth, this page <a href="https://classictech.wordpress.com/computer-companies/acer-groupmultitech-electronics-inc-sunnyvale-calif/" rel="noreferrer">https://classictech.wordpress.com/computer-companies/acer-groupmultitech-electronics-inc-sunnyvale-calif/</a> claims that the MPF-II-C from 1982 was the first microcomputer to be capable of handling Chinese characters.</p>

<p><strong>Edit 2</strong></p>

<p>A commenter linked to <a href="http://www.njstar.com/cms/chinese-commercial-telegraph-code-lookup" rel="noreferrer">http://www.njstar.com/cms/chinese-commercial-telegraph-code-lookup</a>, it contains the following valuable information regarding the CCC:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>There are total of 9297 Chinese Commercial Codes defined, of which 2593 codes represent different Chinese characters in Mainland and in Taiwan/Hong Kong. Codes below 7902 are caused by the fact of Mainland Chinese character simplification. Such as ccc:0948 --> 国 U+56FD (CN) / 國 U+570B (TW/HK). Due to un-coordinated extension of original codes, codes above 7902 can respresent totally different characters in Mainland and in Taiwan/Hong Kong. Such as ccc:9154 --> 舺 U+823A (CN) / 螵 U+87B5 (TW/HK) </p>
</blockquote>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T12:17:48.697Z
for a present day 4 or 5 digit character encoding system note 四角号码 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E5%9B%9B%E8%A7%92%E5%8F%B7%E7%A0%81 used for looking up characters, with different characters sharing the same code
user6065
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T15:36:05.110Z
search web for answer, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code
user6065
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-18T17:19:05.807Z
See also: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/search?q=chinese
TRiG
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-19T12:56:23.807Z
Loosely related: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/91900/what-are-the-absolute-minimal-requirement-for-containing-se-asian-charsets-for
RLH
<history>
Historical: How was Chinese written in telegrams and early computers?
# Historical: How was Chinese written in telegrams and early computers?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2018-07-18)

I know about "Chinese Typewriters", the question here is how Chinese was represented in earlier information systems.

For example, Japanese Telegrams were always written in Katakana and many early video games, up to the early 1990s, almost completely relied on Kana for technical reasons. It follows that early Chinese systems may also have relied on Pinyin or Bopomofo (in Taiwan). Can sb. confirm this?

---

(The following is not part of the question, but facts I discovered and want to share here although they don't amount to answers themselves.)

**Edit 1**

For what it's worth, this page <https://classictech.wordpress.com/computer-companies/acer-groupmultitech-electronics-inc-sunnyvale-calif/> claims that the MPF-II-C from 1982 was the first microcomputer to be capable of handling Chinese characters.

**Edit 2**

A commenter linked to <http://www.njstar.com/cms/chinese-commercial-telegraph-code-lookup>, it contains the following valuable information regarding the CCC:

> There are total of 9297 Chinese Commercial Codes defined, of which 2593 codes represent different Chinese characters in Mainland and in Taiwan/Hong Kong. Codes below 7902 are caused by the fact of Mainland Chinese character simplification. Such as ccc:0948 --> 国 U+56FD (CN) / 國 U+570B (TW/HK). Due to un-coordinated extension of original codes, codes above 7902 can respresent totally different characters in Mainland and in Taiwan/Hong Kong. Such as ccc:9154 --> 舺 U+823A (CN) / 螵 U+87B5 (TW/HK)

**Tags:** history

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: for a present day 4 or 5 digit character encoding system note 四角号码 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E5%9B%9B%E8%A7%92%E5%8F%B7%E7%A0%81 used for looking up characters, with different characters sharing the same code  
> **username_1**: search web for answer, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code  
> **username_2**: See also: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/search?q=chinese  
> **username_3**: Loosely related: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/91900/what-are-the-absolute-minimal-requirement-for-containing-se-asian-charsets-for  

---

## 5 answers

### Answer by username_4 on 2018-07-18. Score: 28

For telegrams, the Chinese Commercial Code (中文電碼) was used.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code>

Roughly, to send a telegram, someone needed to go to the post office, write down the text message, info of sender & receiver - by hand, on a form.

Then, the worker would "translate" each Chinese character into 4 digits, according to the Chinese Commercial Code book, something like this:

[![Three Way CCC book](https://i.sstatic.net/7LCDY.jpg)](https://i.sstatic.net/7LCDY.jpg)

Then, the message was sent by morse code to the nearest post office to the receiver. The morse code was "translated" back to 4 digits, and looked up again in the Chinese Commercial Code book. Afterwards, the message was sent by a post office worker to the receiver by hand.

The CCC is still used today in Hong Kong: the residents' identity card shows their name in Chinese, English & CCC.

[![Page from the CCC](https://i.sstatic.net/Qrs9d.jpg)](https://i.sstatic.net/Qrs9d.jpg)

Another service, the [telex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex), which was widely used in the past, cannot handle Chinese characters. As I remember, we only sent Latin characters (A-Z) & numbers (0-9).

It was in the pre-1980 timeframe.

The first computer (OK, personal computer) that could handle Chinese was the ETen Chinese system (倚天中文系統); it dates from about mid-1980.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETen_Chinese_System>

Those were the days... :)

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Just to be sure, was the CCC a HK only affair, or also used on the Mainland/Taiwan? Did you write in pinyin or just English when using the telex?  
> **username_4**: it's used in taiwan, hong kong, mainland and diasporas worldwide. we type in english. the terminal i used, in 1980s, is composed by a keyboard and monitor, and a leased line. if you know someone in aviation, or marine services, ships &  planes still used it nowadays.  
> **username_5**: Out of curiosity, is 人 encoded as 0086?  
> **username_6**: @FrenzyLi looking it up on http://www.njstar.com/cms/chinese-commercial-telegraph-code-lookup, 人 is indeed 0086  
> **username_7**: You mention Morse code. Are you sure it was Morse code? I think that by 1900 or so, most countries had replaced Morse code by the Baudot code or something similar for sending telegrams.  
> **username_4**: no, not sure, the description is "roughly"  

---

### Answer by username_8 on 2018-07-18. Score: 5

No. We use characters directly. At least in mainland China.

However, characters are not mapped int morse code directly. Each character is first mapped into a four-digit decimal number. The numbers are then sent through telegram using morse code.

People have to look up a table (a book, actually) to map the characters into the numbers. Some experienced workers can even recite the whole book, which contains thousands of characters.

In early computers, that is a little different. The first Chinese encoding I remember is GB2312, what is standardized in 1980. It maps a Chinese character into a two-byte sequence. English letters use one byte and have the same value as in ASCII. The current standardized encoding GB18030 is compatible with GB2312, with a much larger character set, and some rare characters may use more than two bytes.

The encoding used in the computer is different from the code used in the telegram.

To input a character into a computer, pinyin was used, from the early days, until now. There are also some other character-shape based input methods, like Wubi(五笔), which was very popular in the early days, as pinyin has a lot of duplicates (a lot of different characters share the same pinyin). Nowadays, as we input with pinyin in words, phrases, even sentences, the duplicates is not a very big problem as the characters can be determined by its context.

In other Chinese speaking regions, things may be different. I do not know what it is like in other Chinese speaking regions.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Was a standardized character set used and was it related to the later GB(K)? Do you also have knowledge of early computers?  
> **username_8**: I don't know if the character set used in telegram and GB are related. A quick search didn't give me the answer. But they should both contain the most common characters in Chinese, so I think they must overlap a lot.  
> **username_8**: The telegram code has 10,000 code points (from 0000 to 9999), most of them are characters. GB2312 contains 6763 Chinese characters.  
> **username_0**: Thanks again, I'm holding out for answers regarding pre-1980 computers. After all, not only encoding but also display of Chinese Characters was a highly demanding task for early machines.  
> **username_8**: Displaying is a font problem. You can map numbers into the shape of an English letter, then you can also map it into the shape of a Chinese character. But it is a much larger map, and I think it should be a big problem in the early days. Pre-1980 is before my time, the first computer I saw was in the 90s.  
> **username_0**: In theory, in reality it was also a memory problem in a world where 64K "ought to be enough". The Japanese solved Chinese Character display and input in the early 1980s, but only for high end machines, initially via custom hardware.  
> **username_7**: Again, you mention Morse code. Are you sure it was Morse code? I think that by 1900 or so, most countries had replaced Morse code by the Baudot code or something similar for sending telegrams.  
> **username_8**: The only mentioned code in https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E7%94%B5%E7%A0%81 is morse code, but two versions are listed for numbers, and it said the "short version" is usually used for Chinese characters. I don't know about the Baudot code.  

---

### Answer by username_9 on 2018-07-19. Score: 2

Historically, 4 digit numeric code is used for telegram transmission for country that not using latin character, one just need the translation "dictionary" to find the meaning of the code. Error can be prevented by adding pad number to separate the code. This happen since the era of telegram .

Following is a telegram code "dictionary" used by Japan military that already decoded the Chiang Kai-shek KMT army telegram code during World war 2. Even USA military know about such "open code", but USA never notify Chiang Kai-shek about the issue of leaking military secret, because USA itself want to know KMT army movement.
[![historical](https://i.sstatic.net/NdvmW.png)](https://i.sstatic.net/NdvmW.png)

Similar mapping concept is used by the first computer that display Chinese Character. The early version is mapping multiple computing bytes to form a character. In fact, the modern day Unicode mapping for international character is pretty similar. Even mapping is still used by various version of Unicode to ensure different unicode version(UTF8, UTF16, UTF32, etc) conversion accuracy.

Theoretically, unicode will solved the multilingual conversion and mapping issue. Current unicode working space is around 1.1 million character that suppose to cover all the language in the world.

> **Comments:**
> **username_10**: I'd like to hear more, so I've just asked [Did Chiang Kai-shek often send military information using telegrams? Was any considered particularly “secret”?](https://history.stackexchange.com/q/48198/33008)  
> **username_9**: @username_10  IMHO, history SE or even plain search is much easier, because this   history, i.e.  even searching US WW2 document will help too.  
> **username_11**: "USA never notify Chiang Kai-shek about the issue of leaking military secret, because USA itself want to know KMT army movement" - Can you provide a source?  
> **username_11**: To know more, I've just asked: [Did the US manage to eavesdrop on KMT communications during World War 2?](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/55776/)  

---

### Answer by username_12 on 2018-07-21. Score: 1

The following link is a very interesting and informative article （in Chinese） written by 马伯庸 （a well-known contemporary writer）on the history and features of Chinese telegram coding and sending. [惜墨如金 中文电报的奥秘](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/W5BfrWj9kGvCKnVqyUHtkg)


---

### Answer by username_13 on 2021-07-31. Score: 0

To add to what others have said, the telegram practice was already widely used in Mainland China at least in the 1910s. Politicians at that time often sent a nationwide telegram (通电全国) when they made an announcement.

[![enter image description here](https://i.sstatic.net/rZi7B.png)](https://i.sstatic.net/rZi7B.png)
From this picture, you can clearly see how people translated the code into Chinese characters and wrote down each character alongside the corresponding code. ([source](https://new.qq.com/omn/20190727/20190727A0SANQ00.html); the bottom right corner is likely a watermark added by the author of the article)


---

