Chinese Morse Code — 摩尔斯电码

How Chinese Morse Code Works — The CTC System

Standard International Morse Code has representations for the 26 Latin letters (A–Z), the 10 Arabic digits (0–9), and a small collection of punctuation marks and procedural signals. It was developed in the 1830s and 1840s for alphabetic languages, primarily English.

Chinese, by contrast, is a logographic writing system. Written Chinese uses thousands of individual characters (Hanzi), each representing a morpheme or syllable. There is no alphabet to break down into dots and dashes. Transmitting Chinese over a telegraph network that only understands dots and dashes requires an encoding scheme: a way to map each Chinese character to a sequence that Morse code can represent.

Common Chinese Phrases in Morse Code

• 你好 (nǐ hǎo — hello): 你 = 5553 (..... ..... ... ...) + 好 = 2170 (..--- .---- --... -----). Morse: ..... ..... ... ... / ..--- .---- --... -----
• 谢谢 (xiè xiè — thank you): 谢 = 7359 (--... ...-- ..... ----.). Sent twice: --... ...-- ..... ----. / --... ...-- ..... ----.
• 我爱你 (wǒ ài nǐ — I love you): 我 = 2053 + 爱 = 1947 + 你 = 5553. Morse: ..--- ----- ..... ...-- / .---- -.... ...-- --... / ..... ..... ... ...
• 中国 (zhōng guó — China): 中 = 0022 + 国 = 0948. Morse: ----- ----- ..--- ..--- / ----- ----. ...-- --...
• 朋友 (péng you — friend): 朋 = 4547 + 友 = 0706. Morse: ....- ....- ...-- --... / ----- --... ----- -....

History of Chinese Morse Code and the Telegraph in China

The challenge of sending Chinese over the telegraph emerged in the mid-19th century as European powers began laying submarine telegraph cables to East Asian ports. In 1871, the Great Northern Telegraph Company (a Danish firm) opened China's first commercial telegraph line connecting Shanghai and Hong Kong.

French astronomer and sinologist Septime Auguste Viguier, working for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, recognized that a practical Chinese telegraph required a standardized numerical codebook. In 1871, Viguier published the Dianbao Xinshu (电报新书, "New Book of Telegrams"), which assigned 4-digit numbers to several thousand common Chinese characters, organized by Kangxi radical and stroke count.

In 1881, Zheng Guanying, a prominent Qing dynasty reformer and director of the Shanghai Telegraph Bureau, refined Viguier's work into the Dianbao Xinbian (电报新编), which became the official codebook of the Imperial Chinese Telegraph Administration. This system — the Chinese Telegraph Code — remained the foundation of Chinese telecommunications for over a century.

Chinese Morse Code in the Early 20th Century

During the Republican era (1912–1949) and World War II, the Chinese Telegraph Code was vital for military and diplomatic communications. Both the Nationalist (KMT) and Communist forces operated extensive CW (Continuous Wave / Morse) radio networks. Highly trained telegraphers memorized thousands of CTC codes, allowing them to translate Hanzi to numbers and then to Morse at remarkable speeds — often 25 to 35 words per minute.

Commercial telegrams in China were billed per character (per 4-digit group), making telegraphy an expensive luxury for ordinary citizens. Senders adopted concise telegraphic phrasing — classical Chinese was preferred because its compact grammar expressed complex ideas in far fewer characters than vernacular Mandarin.

Chinese Amateur Radio and the CW Community

Today, the Chinese Radio Sports Association (CRSA, 中国无线电运动协会) represents amateur radio operators in the People's Republic of China. China is allocated the ITU callsign blocks BA–BT, BY, and BZ. Chinese ham radio operators are active on the HF CW bands, participating in major international contests such as the CQ World Wide CW and the IARU HF Championship.

When operating CW internationally, Chinese hams typically use standard English and ITU abbreviations (QTH, 73, UR RST, etc.). For domestic CW communications in Chinese, operators use either CTC 4-digit groups or Pinyin Morse — spelling out Pinyin transliterations using the standard Latin Morse alphabet.

Chinese Morse Code vs Standard International Morse

The key distinction between Chinese Morse and other non-Latin Morse systems (such as Arabic, Russian Cyrillic, or Japanese Wabun) is the level of encoding:

Alphabetic non-Latin scripts (Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic) map each native letter to an existing or dedicated Morse code sequence — for example, Cyrillic Б is -... (same as Latin B). Japanese Wabun code assigns a dedicated Morse sequence to each of the 46 Kana syllables. But Chinese Morse code does not encode characters directly: it encodes numbers that represent characters via an external codebook.

This means Chinese Morse code requires no new Morse symbols whatsoever — it uses only the standard ITU Morse digits 0–9. However, it requires a codebook for both encoding and decoding, and transmissions are four times longer than equivalent numeric data.

Learning Chinese Morse Code

Because Chinese Morse code uses only standard ITU digits, you do not need to learn new Morse characters if you already know International Morse Code. The 10 digits are among the easiest Morse characters to learn because of their systematic symmetry:

The real skill in historical Chinese telegraphy was memorising the 4-digit CTC codes for common characters. Professional telegraphers in China were expected to have several thousand codes committed to memory, enabling real-time translation without consulting the codebook. For more details on digit structure, review our Morse Code Numbers Guide, or explore other Asian Morse transmission systems such as Japanese Wabun Morse Code, Korean SKATS Morse Code, Thai Morse Code, and Hindi Devanagari Morse Code.