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Why Morse Code Didn’t Work for Chinese — and the Genius Fix

Julesy

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Morse code and telegraphy posed significant problems for China in the 19th century, but eventually, as it happens with continued persistence, everything turned out A--OK in the end.

[Timeline]
[00:00] On a dark cloudness night
[01:26] Great Northern Telegraph Company (Denmark)
[02:38] Early Draft of Chinese Morse Code
[04:48] Birth of the Chinese Morse Code
[05:35] Problems of Chinese Morse Code
[08:35] Why China was SO Left Behind
[09:43] Growing Pains of Telegraphy Business
[10:31] Introducing a NEW Service of Telegrams
[11:23] Our Main Character Arrives (Wang Jingchun)
[14:50] Modern-day Telegraphy Use in China
[16:33] Easter Egg

【 For Further Reading (English)】

"Kingdom of Characters" by Jing Tsu (2022)
"The Chinese Typewriter" by Thomas Mullaney (2017)
"The Chinese Computer" by Thomas Mullaney (2024)

"Dot Dot Dot: What the Last Ever Telegrams From Hangzhou Say" (2025): https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1017061

"The grammar of the telegraph in the Late Qing: the design and application of Chinese telegraphic codebooks" (2018):
https://2024.sci-hub.ru/7373/37b40729...

About Danish Telegraphic Lines in China:
https://lynge.com/en/travel-geography...

【 For Further Reading (Chinese)】

Videos:
【技术史】晚清电报发展的崎岖历程: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Qu4...

Articles:
在杭州发出最后的电波，0375 6015:
https://36kr.com/p/3280888762491017

SAY HI!
Instagram: Instagram: julesytooshoes

20 Comments

@burbex 11 months ago

Can you make a video about Chinese braille?

@andyb9378 11 months ago

[10:31] XYL is not a random combination of letters — it's an acronym. Telegrapher's slang used "YL" to mean "young lady". XYL is telegrapher's slang for ex-young-lady.

@HaloInverse 10 months ago (edited)

...okay, less than a minute in, my first thought is: "How TF do you stealthily plant telegraph poles? In a foreign country that doesn't want them? They seem like they'd be very...visible."

@bipboop0110 11 months ago

Designing Chinese morse code might be hard, but imagine having to LEARN it...

@believingregardlessforever 10 months ago

Letters were the internet of the Victorian age. In Seventy Years a Showman, the author tells how his father was press-ganged (forced into the navy by travelling recruiters in the UK, literally kidnapped) in early 19th century, and when after a decade he was finally free and made his way home, he found his family had moved and nobody knew where, so he never saw them again. "Nowadays" writes the authoer "that could never happen with the penny post" which was the first public post where you bought a stamp and posted your letter or gave it to the postman. Before that, you had to pay someone to take your letter or give it to someone travelling that way to pass on to the next person travelling that way to leave at a pub near the address and hope the addressee walked into the pub and someone realised. Yes, really - source, history books and old novels.

@tomg1004 11 months ago (edited)

They could have optimized the chineese morse code by choosing to encode in alphabetic letters instead. For instance, three latin letters makes it possible to encode 25*25*25=15625 chineese characters. It also open up for frequency optimization by assigning more frequent charcters to faster letter combinations. The shortest would be EEE (di di di), which would be assigned to whichever is the most frequent character. Sure, learning a new alphabet as well as all it's morse codes would take more effort than just learning ten morse numbers. But I'm sure it would pay off in the long run.

@Codec44144 11 months ago

This must be related, or at-least analogous, to assigning Unicode character points for Chinese. Would love to see you cover computer character sets, especially Unicode! I love your research and presentation style, keep up the good work.

@StuartWoodwardJP 11 months ago

If you go to Cornwall, in the UK, you can to a museum where the first Atlantic cables came out of the sea and into a switch room. The museum is dedicated to the technology that allowed the signal that cross the sea and the changes it brought. As you mentioned, it was big change, like the introduction of the Internet. e.g. before the cable, a message being sent from England to India took weeks. Once undersea cables were laid it could received within in a day. Suddenly, the newspapers were filled with fresh news from that part of the world. It’s really worth visiting there.

@ornleifs 11 months ago

I'm studying Japanese and not Chinese but your channel is still so interesting to me and your videos are so well made.

@vonPeterhof 11 months ago

As someone who's been learning how to use the Cangjie input method I couldn't help but imagine a Cangjie-like logographic encoding system where each Latin letter is equated to a set of strokes or radicals and then each character is represented in an abbreviated form by only up to five alphabetic characters.

@EkriirkE 11 months ago

I was going to say it was very strange to use actual number codes for numbers and not repurpose shorter letter codes instead, but I am glad to see someone realised the whole alphabet can represent a base-26 code (or however many were utilised in that later 3-letter code)

@quadibloc2 11 months ago

Before four-digit codes, Escaryac de Lautre did try to directly represent Chinese characters as dots and dashes.

@SigurLeoNiilasRinnan 11 months ago

6:34 There are abbreviations for morse code numbers. 1 being "·–" instead of "·––––" makin it significally shorter. Also the code for "y" is longer than the unabbreviated code for "5".

@johnduggan4993 11 months ago

Korean used a similar system to encode the Chinese characters in use there, with some unique numbers for indigenous characters. They also had a simple system encoding Hangul (24 signs) that would map to simple letters in basic Morse code. Separately, for anyone wanting to study Korean through K-dramas, a good number of scripts have been published in Korea. There are also novelizations of popular dramas written in relatively simple language; I think the target audience must have been rather young. I am not, but I enjoyed reading the Iris novels a decade ago.

@ceramicsky14 11 months ago

I love your channel. So much history that isn’t talked about here in the west. Thank you for making these videos.

@dougmorton2713 11 months ago

Enjoy your channel a lot. Thanks!

@UTubeRangerBob 10 months ago

As an amateur radio operator, I found this very interesting. I went down the rabbit hole on the Submarine Telegraph cable, finding out about the equipment on each end, the keying rate limitation because of the cable capacitance, the construction of the cable itself, how the cable was stowed on the ship, etc. Also, the shorthand FB, 88, and XYL (and many more) are still used today in speech and code. In speech though, you would just say fine business, and 73 is used FAR more often than 88. ;)

The squabble over shorthand like REVERE was just greed. Even today we shorten many things while communicating as it saves time, effort, bandwidth, and back then, money. Amateur radio has their 'Q' codes as the police have their '10' codes to facilitate efficient comms. Texting and eMail have their lol, fwiw, tia, etc.

@Liethen 11 months ago

That number code for desk took 40 units to transfer. If they had instead made each Chinese word a 16 unit code they would have enough for 65,536 which is probably more than needed. If it were 14 units long then there would still be room for 16,384 words.

@GUISCHOL 11 months ago

Wonderful! You remind me of a documentary from China that aired on German television in the early 1980s, which showed how a telegram was sent in China. The method involved each character having a corresponding number. And if a rare character or number came up, the employee had to look it up in a thick manual to find out what it meant.
I was born in 1970, and those were just wonderful childhood memories about the culture of the Middle Kingdom. Thank you.
original:
Wunderbar! du erinnerst mich an eine Doku aus China im Anfang der 1980er Jahre im deutschen TV, wo gezeigt wurde, wie ein Telegramm in China verschickt wird, und das war diese Methode, wo jedes Zeichen eine Nummer hatte. Und wenn mal ein seltenes Zeichen kam bzw. eine seltene Nummer, so musste der Mitarbeiter nachschauen in einem dicken Handbuch, was es bedeutete.
Bin Jahrgang 1970, das waren gerade wunderbare Kindheitserinnerungen über die Kultur des Reichs der Mitte. Danke.