Chinese telegraphy doesn't assign Morse codes to characters directly. Instead, each Hanzi is mapped to a four-digit number, and each number is sent in International Morse. The receiver looks up the four-digit code in a codebook to recover the original character.
This system encodes characters indirectly via numerical lookup; below are common examples and the digit Morse codes used to send them.
The Chinese Telegraph Code was developed in 1871 by Danish astronomer Hans Schjellerup and Chinese telegraph officials. It assigned a unique four-digit number to ~7,000 of the most common Chinese characters, allowing Hanzi to be telegraphed using only the standard 0-9 Morse digits.
Although fax, email, and internet have replaced telegraphic Hanzi transmission, the four-digit codes still appear in some legal documents (notably Hong Kong identity cards) and in academic studies of telegraph history.
Look up the four-digit Chinese Telegraph Code (CTC) for each character, then send each digit using International Morse (e.g., 中 = 0022 = ----- ----- ..--- ..---). The receiver looks up the digits in a CTC table to decode the original character.
No. Hanzi has tens of thousands of characters, far too many for a Morse pattern per character. The four-digit numerical code is the standard workaround.
Yes, in limited contexts: Hong Kong ID cards use CTC numbers as a person's standardized name code, and some legal forms in China and Taiwan still reference them. Operational telegraphy is essentially extinct.
Explore all Morse code variants → Morse Code Variants Around the World
