Chart of Chinese Character Encodings: Telegraph Code

This first chart illustrates the code used for sending Chinese characters in telegrams. Originally, the characters were only represented by four-digit groups. As numbers are more expensive to send in Morse than letters, a three-letter coding was later developed. And then a computer code, using two ASCII characters (usually with 128 added) to represent each Chinese character was directly derived from the telegraph code. However, that encoding is not much used with computers at the present time.

In this encoding, the characters are in the order traditionally used in Chinese dictionaries, by their radicals (that is, one of a set of 214 simple characters which, as a component of another more complex character usually indicates the general area of that character's meaning).

Since this page is in the Big5 encoding, any characters which do not have representations in that encoding will not appear.

Only the first few rows of the chart are shown on this page, to allow you to see part of the chart quickly: proceed to the complete chart for the entire chart.

And here's a chart of the first 200 characters organized by their decimal representation. This is not continued for all the characters on the main chart, but is here to illustrate how the chart partly shown above is organized.