Introduction:

CCC was used in the old days for transmitting Chinese text over Electronic Telegraphic/Cable. With the advance in computer communications, there is little need to use CCC/CTC for communicating in Chinese. But for non-Chinese speaking countries, there is still a need to identify a Chinese person's name without using Chinese Characters. CCC has been used by those countries in visa and immigration applications. We provided this lookup utility here for your convenience. The data for the lookup are extracted from the Unihan Database of www.unicode.org, with non-Hanzi telegraph codes supplied by Jaemin Chung. For more information on the history of CTC, please read Jim Reeds' CTC page.

Telegraph was introduced to China in 1871 by the Great Northern Telegraph Company, with a code book of 5454 Chinese characters. In the end of 1880s, the Qing Dynasty government published and used a new code book with about 6800 characters arranged in Kangxi Dictionary's radical order. A complete code book was compiled in 1911 by the ROC government with about 9800 characters (original code) and used until 1949 with minor changes. After 1949, Taiwan generally kept the original code assignments (0000-9763, 9801-9824, 9901-9931). It only added some characters such as additional Chinese characters at 9764-9798, punctuation marks at 9851-9862, and Latin letters at 9871-9896. On the other hand, since the establishment of the PRC, Mainland China made a lot of changes in 1952, 1958 and 1983 to the original code assignments due to the Chinese character simplification and the need for new characters and symbols. The result is that Taiwan and Mainland have their own respective versions of code with both similarities and differences.

For your convenience, we have created the Chinese Telegraphic Code Book for Mainland China and the Chinese Telegraphic Code Book for Taiwan

If you are unable to input or view Chinese, please use NJStar Communicator