Chinese Telegraph Code
Chinese is not sent letter by letter in Morse. Each character has a four-digit number in a telegraph codebook, and the digits are sent in Morse. Type characters or four-digit codes to look them up in both codebooks.
Type characters to get their codes, or four-digit numbers to get the characters. The Morse follows the codebook you choose.
Where the two codebooks disagree
The Mainland codebook in Unicode's data covers 7,078 characters and the Taiwan codebook 9,024. Of the 4,572 characters in both, 418 have a different number in each. Some examples:
| Character | Mainland | Taiwan |
|---|---|---|
| 佣 | 0096 | 8049 |
| 佬 | 0097 | 9772 |
| 倮 | 0139 | 8077 |
| 伕 | 0183 | 9689 |
| 佰 | 0184 | 9688 |
| 働 | 0211 | 8047 |
| 偷 | 0262 | 8082 |
| 冼 | 0405 | 8112 |
| 剌 | 0469 | 8124 |
| 劘 | 0497 | 8127 |
| 廿 | 0579 | 1700 |
| 吴 | 0702 | 8160 |
| 吧 | 0721 | 9734 |
| 咖 | 0739 | 9735 |
| 响 | 0742 | 8207 |
| 咪 | 0743 | 9731 |
| 哪 | 0763 | 8199 |
| 唔 | 0767 | 8168 |
| 唇 | 0782 | 8201 |
| 啤 | 0802 | 9736 |
| 啡 | 0803 | 8208 |
| 嘛 | 0859 | 8204 |
| 嚎 | 0866 | 8195 |
| 圾 | 0969 | 8222 |
How the telegraph code works
A codebook lists thousands of characters, each with a four-digit number. The sender looks up each character and sends its four digits in ordinary International Morse; the receiver looks the numbers up again. 中 is 0022 in both books, so it is sent as −−−−− −−−−− ··−−− ··−−−.
Two codebooks
Mainland China and Taiwan use different codebooks. Most characters share a number, but not all, and each book also covers characters the other does not: the Mainland book includes simplified characters, the Taiwan book traditional ones. Always check which book the other side uses.
Zhuyin (Bopomofo) Morse
Taiwan's railway telegraph also had a code for the 37 Zhuyin phonetic symbols, called 國音電碼. Choose Zhuyin in the translator menu to use it. The table comes from Chinese Wikipedia and has no codes for tone marks. It is the only source we found, so it has not been checked against a second one.
Source
Codes come from the Unicode Unihan database (fields kMainlandTelegraph and kTaiwanTelegraph), the reference used by software worldwide.
Tables checked against their published sources on 25 September 2026.
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